SODEVE » Internet

Goodbye Dynamic Widgets, Welcome Widget Logic

Hardono — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 05:42:34 +0000

About two or three months ago, I started using Dynamic Widgets to regulate how the *ehm* Google’s Ads is showing in the sidebar. This is due to Google’s policy on how many number of ads can be displayed in a page.

I was happy Dynamic Widgets user interface is really easy. You just need to declare your sidebar widgets as a dynamic instead of static. Then continued by define the rules that regulate when that particular widget is shown or hidden by clicking list of check-boxes describing the conditional logic.

Sadly, today I found out that the Dynamic Widget is broken. It didn’t recognize that the current page is a Tags archive page. The result is obvious, it disregard any logical conditions that I previously set and messed up my sidebar.

It is very likely that my recent upgrade to WordPress 3.3.1 is the primary cause. Since I don’t want to revert to previous WordPress version, I look out for replacement. Then I found out Widget Logic. If you are familiar with Boolean logic, Widget Logic is super effective. Instead of clicking check-boxes for configuration, you write your own logical condition. Widget Logic only evaluate those widgets that have something in their ‘Widget logic’ field. If their ‘Widget logic’ field is empty, the widget is simply treated as static widget.

As you can see, the logical condition is composed using WordPress’s functions. Here are the list of WP’s commonly-used functions that could help you:

is_front_page()
is_page()
is_single()
is_tag()
is_category()
is_archive()

For complete list of functions, you could refer to WordPress documentation.

And if you’re not familiar with Boolean logic, you could learn how to do it HERE.

Quick Example

!is_tag() && !is_page() && !is_single() && !is_category()
This widget will be shown if the current page:

is not a Tags page, and

is not a Page (not a Post), and

is not a Single post, and

is not a Category page

I hope it helps, cheers!

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Quickly Create Expandable/Collapsible Box in Blogger

Hardono — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 05:48:02 +0000

This is the follow up of my previous post.

If you’re using Blogspot/Blogger, you could follow the following steps to make the expandable/collapsible box available to you:

1. Modify Template

In your blogger main menu, click Template

Then click Edit HTML

Then click Proceed

An editor with the XML content will show up. Now we need to find and add the following text immediately AFTER it:

After that, we need to scroll down the editor and find and add the following text immediately BEFORE it:

2. Create Control DIV

This DIV is basically the area where user will click to expand/collapse your content DIV. You style the DIV anyway you like, or add whatever content inside the Control DIV as long as you follow this two rules:

the class attribute must contains “sdvExp”. E.g. class=”sdvExp”
it must have an ID. E.g. id=”XXXX”

Example of Control DIV


	Test Control DIV

3. Create Content DIV

This DIV is basically the box that will expand/collapse whenever user clicks the Control DIV. Content DIV only has one rule, its class property must contains “child-ID_OF_CONTROL_DIV” E.g. class=”child-XXXX”

Example of Content DIV


	Test Content DIV
	
		Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. In at commodo tortor.
		Donec condimentum rutrum dui,  vitae rutrum dolor malesuada a. Pellentesque
		habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas.
		Donec facilisis ligula eu risus cursus cursus. Curabitur nec bibendum nulla.
		Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos
		himenaeos.	Vivamus eu dolor et enim egestas pellentesque ac a sapien.
		Maecenas aliquam adipiscing fermentum. Quisque egestas dui sed lacus congue
		id sagittis urna mattis. Duis ut cursus libero. Pellentesque lorem neque,
		fermentum sed fermentum at, auctor et nisl. Nulla lobortis elit odio.
		Suspendisse laoreet volutpat adipiscing.

I hope it helps. If you found any difficulty in implementing this, you can always drop a comment. Cheers!

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How To Fight Spam In Your WordPress Blog

Hardono — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 18:35:08 +0000

As your blog become more visible to the search engines’ bot, it is also become more visible to the spammer-bots (spambots). A spambot is a program designed to ~~promote shady websites, sell dubious health products, sell counterfeit goods~~ annoy and slow down your database.

Usually, spambots is run in a botnet. Botnet is a network which consists of computers that are controlled by black-hat hackers. If suddenly your friends complained that you send them spammy messages from your email/instant Messenger, check your PC. Your PC may already become a botnet members.

Back to the topic of this post, this blog is used to be plagued by many spam comments/trackbacks. But with my recent configuration, I am confident that it will able to thwart most of the spam comments without causing too much of irritation to the good visitors of this blog.

If you think your WordPress blog is currently being targeted by spammers, you should try these two WordPress plugins will keep them at the bay:

1. Akismet

Akismet works by intercepting all submitted comments & trackback. It will submit the comments and trackbracks to their web service for test. If the result turns out positive, it will allow the comments/trackback. If negative, they will go to spam folder. I highly recommended you to use Akismet.

2. Spam Free WordPress

Although Akismet is good, it’s not enough. With Akismet, the comments/trackbacks are still be saved in the database anyway. So if you have many spambots posting comments to your blog, it could slow down your blog. Because of that, I recently deployed Spam Free WordPress. This plugin works by generating a unique password for each post. This way, a spambot can’t directly hit you with a FORM submit. Instead, it needs to download the whole page, parse the HTML, extract out the password, and finally submit the FORM.

So yes, this plugin has a weakness. But parsing a whole page is not economical to the spammers, so this plugin will deter most of the spammers. But if they somehow managed to submit the spammy comments/trackbacks, Akismet will be ready to catch them and throw these SOB to the spam folder.

Conclusion

Once you have these two plugins deployed in your blog, your blog will have two security layers to defend from spambots attacks. On the outer layer you have Spam Free WordPress plugin that requires the bot to read the post before posting. And there’s Akismet standing behind, ready to catch any comments/trackbacks that managed to bypass Spam Free WordPress.

Goodluck with your blog!

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Google Sets Is Reincarnated In Google Spreadsheet

Hardono — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:22:36 +0000

I’ve discussed about Google Sets in the past.

Say, you are looking for other words that associated with ‘denial, anger, ….etc’. You’ve read it somewhere, but you forget the URL. Thesaurus couldn’t help you. You totally don’t know that it is actually something called Stages of Grief

So what would you do?

Google Sets might be able to help you. Google Sets will return words related to the one you supplied. I submitted ‘valuair’, and interestingly Google Sets return almost all the names of airlines in South East Asia region.

I am now sad that I found out that Google Sets has been shutdown.

But I am happy to find that although the website of Google Sets is gone, its spirit is still linger around. You can found it working inside Google Spreadsheet. You can try this by typing one word in a cell. Then press Control button, and drag the corner of that cell down.

I hope it’s useful to you, Cheers!

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Download Data Terbaru Sertifikasi Guru 2012

Hardono — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 17:14:20 +0000

Setelah melakukan pengecekan data, rupanya PusBangProDik telah mengupdate data mereka.

Sebetulnya saya ingin download semua data yang baru dan mengupdate semua blog post yang sudah ada, tapi kok kayaknya bakal makan waktu yang banyak ya . Maka saya memutuskan untuk membuat program yang bisa langsung dipakai di website ini, itung-itung sambil belajar Flex Programming.

Untuk bisa menjalankan program ini, Flash Player (minimal ver 10.2) diperlukan. Langkah untuk mengunduh data cukup singkat:

Pilih Propinsi
Pilih Kabupaten
Tekan Download button
Tunggu sampai download selesai, kemudian tekan Save As button
Pop-up window akan keluar, sekarang pilih lokasi untuk menyimpan file, dan tekan Save button

To view this page ensure that Adobe Flash Player version 10.2.0 or greater is installed.

Download Sertifikasi Guru Departement Agama [klik disini]

Semoga bisa membantu bapak/ibu guru sekalian

UPDATE

~~My apology Apparently Adobe Flash cannot download HTML file from other domain. That’s why the Flash form above doesn’t work. Let me find another way to download the latest Sertifikasi 2012 data.~~

I did a work around, by creating a cached proxy, here at sodeve.net. The proxy basically is a simple PHP’s curl method call. The cache will be refreshed daily.

UPDATE 23 Nov 2011

I just realized that my proxy didn’t set the expired header for the content retrieved. Thus, you may NOT get the latest data. So if you have ever dowloaded data from here, you NEED to clear your browser’s cache.

UPDATE 27 Dec 2011

Memperbaiki bug dimana halaman terakhir tidak diikutkan.
Memperlihatkan jumlah Kuota

PENTING: Untuk memastikan anda mendapatkan data terbaru, anda perlu membersihkan cache browser anda.

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Google Webmaster Tools Now Sends Messages to Your Gmail Account

Hardono — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:43:04 +0000

Today, I just found out a new enhancement to Google Webmaster Tools. It is now allows you to receive the news, messages or alerts regarding your website to your Gmail account.

Of course you need to have your website/blog/forum registered to Google Webmaster Tools before you can receive any messages Yes, I’ll wear my ‘Thank You Captain Obvious T-Shirt’ now

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Download Daftar Bakal Calon Peserta Sertifikasi Guru 2012 [Versi Komplit]

Hardono — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 06:48:02 +0000

Last night, my wife’s cousin visited our house asking for help with the problem that she has. Apparently she’s trying to find out the list of teachers selected for Teacher’s Certification for the year 2012. She wants to know whether anyone from her school is selected.

Apparently finding this information is quite though. After scrutinizing Indonesia’s Education Ministry’s website, we discovered this Informasi Peserta Sertifikasi website.

Unfortunately, this website is not user-friendly. We can only search by NUPTK (Unique Number for Teachers and Education Staffs). The other method is listing down all records based on Province & District.

From bad to worse, when I said listing all records based on Province and District, it means you need to click page per page. Because it only shows 20 records in a page. So imagine if your district has thousands plus teachers selected. It means now you need to go through more than 50 pages, if you’re one of the unlucky people listed in the last pages.

Yes, it is using AJAX. But I think they’re not doing it correctly. Instead of giving the data in JSON format, its back-end server decided to give a formatted HTML.

As a result, it is almost impossible to find out whether someone from SMK Al Ikhsani, Podoroto, Jombang selected for Teacher’s Certification 2012. Who has the time to skim through 76 pages (Jombang has more than 1500 teachers selected).

Luckily, I know some kungfu . So I write a simple program using C# to automate downloading the records for Jombang district. While doing that, I realize that not only us would have trouble finding data using that lousy user interface, Everyone does!

So I modify my program again, this time it will download all the records, and properly arrange them in zipped archives based on the Province & District.

There you go I hope this will help you all.

UPDATE: Terpaksa saya translate ke bahasa Inggris karena ternyata Adsense ndak suka ama artikel berbahasa Indonesia Mohon dimaklumi.

Warning

I can’t guarantee the validity of these files. But I can assure you that I did not modify the records. For any invalid data, you could raise your voice to your local Education Ministry officials .

Downloads

PENTING:Untuk memperoleh tampilan data yang menarik, anda harus mengekstrak isi file .zip terlebih dahulu sebelum membuka file .html.

Update

Untuk mengunduh data sertifikasi guru 2012 terbaru, saya persilahkan mengunjungi: Download Data Terbaru Sertifikasi Guru 2012

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Download Daftar Bakal Calon Peserta Sertifikasi Guru 2012 Propinsi SUMATERA UTARA

Hardono — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 06:33:41 +0000

These are the list of teachers selected for certification for the year 2012 for North Sumatra province:

Update

Untuk mengunduh data sertifikasi guru 2012 terbaru, saya persilahkan mengunjungi: Download Data Terbaru Sertifikasi Guru 2012

I hope it helps, cheers!

Warning

I can’t guarantee the validity of these files. But I can assure you that I did not modify the records. For any invalid data, you could raise your voice to your local Education Ministry officials .

Downloads

PENTING:Untuk memperoleh tampilan data yang menarik, anda harus mengekstrak isi file .zip terlebih dahulu sebelum membuka file .html.

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Download Daftar Bakal Calon Peserta Sertifikasi Guru 2012 Propinsi SUMATERA SELATAN

Hardono — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 06:32:29 +0000

These are the list of teachers selected for certification for the year 2012 for South Sumatera province:

Update

Untuk mengunduh data sertifikasi guru 2012 terbaru, saya persilahkan mengunjungi: Download Data Terbaru Sertifikasi Guru 2012

I hope it helps, cheers!

Warning

I can’t guarantee the validity of these files. But I can assure you that I did not modify the records. For any invalid data, you could raise your voice to your local Education Ministry officials .

Downloads

PENTING:Untuk memperoleh tampilan data yang menarik, anda harus mengekstrak isi file .zip terlebih dahulu sebelum membuka file .html.

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Download Daftar Bakal Calon Peserta Sertifikasi Guru 2012 Propinsi SUMATERA BARAT

Hardono — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 06:31:14 +0000

These are the list of teachers selected for certification for the year 2012 for West Sumatera province:

Update

Untuk mengunduh data sertifikasi guru 2012 terbaru, saya persilahkan mengunjungi: Download Data Terbaru Sertifikasi Guru 2012

I hope it helps, cheers!

Warning

I can’t guarantee the validity of these files. But I can assure you that I did not modify the records. For any invalid data, you could raise your voice to your local Education Ministry officials .

Downloads

PENTING:Untuk memperoleh tampilan data yang menarik, anda harus mengekstrak isi file .zip terlebih dahulu sebelum membuka file .html.