File Transfer Protocol is a set of rules by which files can be transferred between computers. An FTP client such as filezilla is used to upload and download files from remote servers. I use FTP to upload files onto my website host’s webserver. I was on the lookout for a free FTP program. I had heard a lot about this program and so I decided to try it out.
This is my second theme for the serendipity blog engine. Its got a shiny banner graphic and comes in three colours.
Changing colours
By default the theme is in blue but you can change it to red or green as well. The first step is to enable smarty templating for the categories plugin using the "configure plugins" option in serendipity administration. If you don’t do this the xml feed icon for categories will not appear correctly. If you have s9y 1.1 you can easily change the theme’s colours using the "manage styles" option in the administrator interface. A few other options are also available for users of this version of s9y.
Update 30 July : I have fixed a number of bugs in the latest release of this theme including entry preview in firefox and other modern browsers.
You can download the theme here.
I visited Lahore and Murree on vacation recently. My sister took some pictures of the shahi qila or fort of Lahore and the mosque built inside it.
The size of the shahi Qila cannot be truly appreciated in these pictures. It is truly massive with the minarets towering high. Compare the minaret in the picture above with the houses in the background to get an idea of its height.
The mosque’s domes are huge and imposing. Inside the mosque there are large open spaces underneath the domes. Indeed these magnificient buildings say a lot about the glory days of Lahore.
After some unfortunate delays I have finally moved my blog/website to my own domain – abdussamad.com :). It feels great to have my very own domain and be able to post anything I bloody well feel like!
One thing I learned during this move is that, in practice, sqlite databases are less portable than mySQL ones! This is because few webhosts support sqlite databases. Most webhosts still run php 4 and they do not bother to install the sqlite extension. I think the reason they do not upgrade to php 5 is that it may require them to upgrade their legacy linux installations as well. On the other hand, almost all *nix hosts support mySQL. So I had to migrate s9y from a sqlite database to mysql. Despite
my best efforts I couldn’t do this migration via SQL dumps. Instead I had to import my entries using RSS. However, I took the opportunity to upgrade to the latest stable version of s9y – 1.0 🙂
The other day I came across this website that was promoting a wordpress plugin that displays the hijri date in blog entries. I thought this was a fantastic idea and I should try and implement this on my site. As a Muslim I think I ought use the hijri calendar system. I also thought it would be easy to implement this given the wide choice of open source software available on the net. I didn’t think I could program the actual gregorian to hijri conversion myself. I just wanted a php script that I could modify. Unfortunately the code provided on that site was not upto the mark. It kept outputting incorrect dates. And despite my initial optimism it took lots and lots of googling before I came across a useable script. In this post I describe how I modified this script and integrated it with serendipity to achieve the effect you see above (at least at the time of writing). I also provide links to the neccessary code so you can implement this same effect on your blog! Continue reading