valerio.net

When I first started blogging I was really interested in having LaTeX equation support. After all, software development hasn’t always been my vocation – I did go to school for electrical engineering and have had my fair share of math classes

2 years ago getting LaTeX working within WordPress was incredibly difficult. It required installing ImageMagick, dvips, and a myriad of other tools on your hosting server. I asked Hostgator support if this was possible, only to be told an emphatic ‘no’ – the Linux VMs used to host my website were significantly sandboxed and this was not possible, so I gave up.

Fast forward to today – not only has WordPress made significant advances in update functionality – it is now trivial to add new plugins. What used to take hours on an SSH commandline now is possible with only a few clicks.

Here are the steps to follow:

1. Log into the admin console and click on the Plugins tab.
2. Click on Add New
   
3. Search for ‘latex’
4. Find “WP Latex” in the list and click on ‘Install Now’:
   
5. Go to the Plugins tab, find ‘WP LaTeX’, and click ‘Active’

Now it’s just a matter of composing a blog post with equations embedded between tags.

I like using Windows Live Writer for composing blog post, and this works perfectly. All that I need to do is create a new paragraph, enter the equation text in LaTeX, and then center align it (screenshot of WLW):

Here’s the rendered equation:

Very cool.

I try not to "meta-blog", but I recently discovered some neat tools that have really helped me out a lot.

The CopySourceAsHTML plugin for Visual Studio is pretty amazing.  This is certainly useful outside of blogging (e.g. writing documentation, etc) but really shines when wanting to post a code snippet to your blog.  It copies your source code exactly as it appears on the screen in Visual Studio.  Slick.  This free plugin has been updated for Visual Studio 2008 from its original (Visual Studio 2005) version.  Thanks to Colin Coller and J.T. Leigh & Associates for this awesome piece of code.

I’ve also started using Windows Live Writer now that it has full support for the WordPress 2.5+ XMLRPC functionality.  While the WordPress editor is pretty slick, it sometimes suffers from being clunky simply because it’s a web interface.  Having a program on my local machine that lets me copy/paste things (code, images, etc) easily, save drafts, and publish when I’m ready is really helpful.

Hope that helps!

I just ran across this great post about how to configure WordPress to publish your RSS feed through Feedburner.

There is even a WordPress Plugin to configure your Feedburner URL.

Pretty sweet.

I just encountered a strange error when trying to upload an image to WordPress (2.5). It just said “HTTP Error” and “An error occurred in the upload. Please try again later.”. I stumbled upon this blog post that shows how to fix it by turning off mod_security for async-upload.php in your .htaccess file.

    
    SecFilterEngine Off
    SecFilterScanPOST Off
    

Hope someone finds this helpful.

I’ve been wanting to get some webhosting for a long time. I wanted to set up a blog, and perhaps a forum or photo gallery. Who knows, even a content-management system like Joomla might be in order.

I looked around for a decent hosting provider with good reviews. There are a few good website hosting review sites out there that I found useful in making my decision:

• Hostjury – http://hostjury.com/reviews/
• Web Hosting Top – http://www.web-hosting-top.com/

Eventually after reading some comments and seeing how satisfied folks wer, as well as considering the space/bandwidth per dollar ratio (I am not rich, after all), I settled on Hostgator.

The “Baby Croc” shared hosting account matched what I wanted. A lot of space, a lot of bandwidth, for not a lot of money. I even found a 20%-off coupon code (“spring”) online, making the deal even better.

Overall, my experience has been pretty good. I’d give Hostgator an 8 out of 10. They had my shared account set up about half an hour after I ordered it. At the time, my DNS name hadn’t propagated yet, so I logged into the web-based control panel (cPanel) using the server’s IP address.

Good things:

• Hostgator has fast server setup
• The tech support is reasonably fast. I needed to submit 2 help tickets and had an answer within 1-2 hours of submitting a ticket. Just make sure that after you submit your ticket, don’t go in and modify it since that will restart it a the bottom of the queue.
• They allow SSH access (but you need to submit a ticket to request it)

Not-so-good things:

• I’m not a huge fan of cPanel, but it’s ok and gets the job done, (I guess).
• SSH only works half of the time.

The account comes with the ability to have “unlimited” addon domains hosted from your account, which is nice. The only annoying thing is the file structure that cPanel enforces. All of my files are located in /home/username/public_html, however the addon domain files are located in /home/username/public_html/addondomain/;. Very strange. It really makes it hard to keep things separated.

Another thing that kinda worried me was the stipulation in the Terms of Service that you have less than 50,000 files. At first glance, that doesn’t seem like a lot, but a medium-sized Gallery installation might take up 20,000 files (including all PHP pages, pictures, and auto-generated thumbnails.) Some techs in the forums essentially stated that wasn’t a hard-and-fast rule, but there as a guideline to be able to terminate users who abuse their diskspace by creating and removing thousands of temporary files, thereby corrupting the shared disk.

Overall, the price of the account more than makes up for the shortcomings related to the hosting structure and silly cPanel. I’m a happy Hostgator customer.