WordPress Multiple Install IIS URL Rewriting Problems

Okay...  This has given me a gigantic headache (both figuratively and literally) all morning and thank goodness I've finally managed to hack a solution to it...  Technically it isn't a hack, but it sure smells like one.

We have an unusual situation where sales & marketing has its own WordPress installation at the root of our website and the support group has its own separate installation under /support.

The web server that we're currently using is an IIS 7 server, which means that WordPress is operating with no .htaccess files and using web.config.  Each base directory has a web.config.  Each WordPress is using its own Database and has its own database user.

So...  Problems arose when enabling permalinks (pretty ones) for the support site.  I couldn't figure out why going to any of the site pages was yielding a 404 error (emitted by WordPress' PHP.)

My hosting provider couldn't figure it out either - which really got me worried, so after slogging around endlessly, and reading about all the other people using multiple installs and having minor configuration issues, I really started to pull my hair out lol...  I then ran across an obscure post about a guy mentioning WordPress and ASP.NET configuration inheritance issues.  This led me to other posts about nested ASP.NET applications issues, which ultimately led me to the following magic:

<location path="." inheritInChildApplications="false">

Thanks to the wonderful person found at:

http://articles.runtings.co.uk/2010/04/solved-breaking-parent-webconfig.html

Basically, IF you have a WordPress installation in a sub-directory of your website that is hieararchically a child of another WordPress installation, and you're on an IIS web server, you need to edit the root WordPress installation's web.config file and surround it with the location element.

After doing that, my permalinks started working again just fine.  (Thank G-d...)

Visual Studio 2010 Web Publish over FTP

It seems like you can't use TLS or SSL to protect your FTP data when publishing from Visual Studio, but I just found out that you can.

There's no direct "FTPS" publishing mode, you simply select "FTP" and then make sure you use the correct protocol in the URL (i.e. "ftps://ftp.mysite.com/somefolder")

Many people probably knew that but I didn't...

Wide Fit Soccer Cleats (Boots) - Nike CTR360

I have wide, flattish, feet and love to play soccer - and this can be a problem when you're feet are size 12 1/2 to 13.

I've taken to wearing turf shoes the past two seasons because they're so much more comfortable than regular cleats - even Copas (which stretch well, but have a really narrow plate) are a problem as they are fine during the game but the next day my feet really hurt...

Luckily I was browsing Nike's website to see if they had any wide-fit boots now (almost nobody does) and lo and behold - they have a customizeable boot called the Trequartista III that comes in a wide fit.

Nike CTR360 Trequartista III FG iD (Wide) Men's Firm-Ground Soccer Cleat

You have to order direct from Nike's online store, and they're not cheap at $135, but you get to customize the studs, plate, upper, tongue, laces, et cetera - but most importantly they have 12 1/2 WIDE fit.

Thank God...  Sadly you have to wait 25 days while they make them and ship them to you though...

Mine will look like this:

Let's hope they fit well :).

BTW, the link to order is:

Nike Store - Nike CTR360 Trequartista III iD

SkyDrive is a pretty cool free app with a fair amount of free storage, but I really don't want to sync files by dumping them in the SkyDrive folder - so...

I tried simply making a soft link to the folders I wanted sync'd on my drives and it turns out that it works just fine.

mklink /D "C:\SkyDrive\MyFolder" "C:\SomeLocation\MyFolder"

You need to be running a command shell with Administrative privileges before you execute that.

The example above presumes that your SkyDrive folder doesn't already have a "MyFolder" link or folder in it, and when it runs, a soft symbolic link will be created in the SkyDrive folder that resolves to the actual folder location outside of the SkyDrive.

I currently share files between two PCs and an OSX box (yes, SkyDrive is on OSX too) this way before they qualify to be put into source control...

English subtitles in English soundtrack for foreign dialogue using Handbrake

I have backed up most of my video collection to a central server in my house, and I usually use AnyDVD HD and CloneDVDMobile together to do my rips; however, CloneDVDMobile has very limited support for subtitles (which I only noticed after going through dozens of my DVDs and doesn't support BluRay at all.

To get around these two issues I use Handbrake.  Using Handbrake to rip from BluRay is another topic; however, using it to effectively pull subtitles that are supposed to be shown in the English only soundtrack can be a pain, so since I've just re-figured this out again for probably the 3rd time - I'm posting it here so I can find it myself later...

Under subtitles, choose to Add and usually select the first English audio track (you may have to try others), then check 'forced only' and 'burn in' and usually you'll get the results you would get from simply playing the movie in your bluray/dvd player.

Unity3D 2D UI Click-Through Issues

I have message box and dialog box classes for use in Unity3D that need to act 'modally' (but not truly modal) at times, and one of the problems I've had was preventing the mouse-clicks/touches from hitting controls under the controls in the message/dialog boxes.

You'd think that the Unity3D system would already take care of this, but apparently there is some behind the scenes issue that is non-trivial to resolve (otherwise the Unity3D devs would have knocked this out a looooong time ago.)

Anyhow, I found a simple solution today that works for me (until I find it fails on iOS - fingers crossed that it doesn't!)

When my OnGUI call gets to my message/dialog box, the message/dialog box simple creates TWO full screen transparent GUI.Window objects.  The first one calls an empty method, the second one calls the method that draws the controls of the message/dialog box.

I'd tried this previously, but only created one GUI.Window - hoping (vainly) that having the window under the message/dialog box would prevent clicks from making it through.  Oddly enough, it sort of worked, it prevented clicks that were on the message/dialog box controls from going through, but you could still click anywhere on the rest of the screen and cause havoc...

Anywho - I'll have to test have badly this affects performance (it shouldn't really as the both windows entire areas have an alpha of 0.0.)

Sharing C# Source Code With A Unity3D Project

I ran into some issues recently trying to share some common networking and data classes between a client application, a middleware ASP.NET server, and a configuration/server management tool.  All three of them needed to be able to serialize/de-serialize the same XML data; however, Unity3D does not currently support (natively) the ability to reference source code files outside of its project directory structure.

The easy solution to this on Windows is to create a symbolic link, and it works nicely.

I'll be revisiting this problem when I go to build on OSX (I presume that I'll be messing with my samba conf) and there are ways you can trick your source control system into accomplishing this (but it's really hacky) - so this isn't a panacea for the issue.

Hopefully the Unity team will introduce its own linking system that handles this (if Mono doesn't already have it...)

Worst case I'll be writing some file synchronization scripts that trigger the Unity editor to copy from the common direct (which is problematic if I make changes in Unity - but hopefully I can avoid that.)

Sigh...