Blog of Auzigog – Jeremy Blanchard

Easy Website on Your University of Oregon Web Space

February 1st, 2009

32 comments

Wordpress on Your University of Oregon Web Space

NOTE: shell.uoregon.edu is now sftp.uoregon.edu

Ever wanted to have your own webpage at http://uoregon.edu/~YourDuckID? Ever wanted to setup a clean-looking, easy-to-maintain website for a student group your are associated with? Well now the whole process is a snap! Every University of Oregon student is given space to set up their own website.

It’s a fairly complex process to set up all the necessary tools (PHP and MySQL) manually, so I wrote a program to do it for you (mostly) automatically! All you need to do is login to your uoregon.edu account and follow a couple simple instructions.

Creating a MediaWiki API Instance Outside Installation Directory

January 11th, 2009

9 comments

I’m in the process of writing mediawiki2wordpress—a plugin to allow WordPress to access and display content from a MediaWiki installation. I spent a bit of the evening figuring out how to get MediaWiki to let me trick it into thinking I was making a standard request.

The method I explain here gives you access to the MediaWiki API class as opposed to the standard MediaWiki rendering class. Most of this code came from MediaWiki’s api.php which you can find in MediaWiki 1.13.

Here’s what the API output will look like for the Foobar page on Wikipedia (in XML).

I spent quite a bit of time poking around in the MediaWiki /includes directory and trying different hack-ish methods before this page that had exactly what I needed! It did need updating, but I was happy to oblige. I even had this whole post written up using a sloppier approach before finding the FauxRequest class that I explain below.
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Featured, Guides, Photography, Programming, Wordpress api, code, guide, mediawiki, plugin, Wordpress

My Experience with Installing WordPress

May 14th, 2007

8 comments

I was pleasantly surprised with how easy it was to install a WordPress blog to my server. I use GoDaddy for hosting. The only problem I encountered during the installation was when I wanted to change my permalink structure.

The problem arose when I switched from “ugly permalinks” (http://example.com/?p=N) to “pretty permalinks” (http://example.com/year/month/day/post-name). I already had a .htaccess file in my root directory, but when switching permalink stuctures, WordPress attempts to write it’s own .htaccess file. Since mine was already in place, it failed and I started getting 404 errors on every pages except the home page.