Mister Nifty » Web

NiftyMaps – Print Google Maps The Easy Way

Brian Fegter — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 04:21:58 +0000

NiftyMaps is a small application to help you easily generate branded Google Maps printouts.

NM was originally created for our church outreach visitation efforts. Typically, our admin staff would browse Google Maps and print off dozens and dozens of ugly Google Maps for the team. This was painstaking as it took many hours to complete this task. I built NiftyMaps to generate a large number of maps within minutes, formatted in a nicely branded template.

Features

Control your destiny with granular settings in the config file
Allow a list of approved recipients to receive lists of generated map links
Easily add your own branding
Beautifully simple branded map template
Google short URLs for easily sharing a map with a friend
Archive your generated maps via email.
Password protection for sending map lists via email.
Does not use a database! No high techyness required.

Screenshots

Requirements

Google Maps API Key (signup link included)
Google Services API Key (signup link included)
PHP5 or greater
Must have mail() enabled in PHP5 (no SMTP support yet)

Demo

Check out our demo here: NiftyMaps Demonstration

Installation

Upload the /maps folder to your web server
Open and configure /inc/config.php in a text editor (Notepad++)
Enjoy yourself!

Investment Cost

Nifty Maps is a one time investment of $10.00 including lifetime bug/update patches (posted on this page).

Purchase Now!

Other Stuff

This product has no official support forum and is sold as-is. No refunds will be afforded as this is a digital product. Please submit bug reports below in the comments. I will release patches on this page on a regular basis (on this page). For general inquiries, use the contact form above.

NiftyMaps – Print Google Maps The Easy Way is a post from: Mister Nifty

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Devs – It’s Okay To Have Fun

Brian Fegter — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 16:45:36 +0000

Recently, I was assigned a task for my job to create a jQuery script that deleted elements from a sortable list, and then gave the user the ability to undo the delete action. I thought I would have a little bit of fun with a doctrine I don’t subscribe to at all, but it worked for this application.

I created a hidden element to store unwanted list items:
.
Then I created a hidden element wrapper for the undo button that shows once the delete button is clicked:
.
Once the undo button is clicked, I set a Javascript variable to count the number of items in “purgatory” as follows: var lostSouls.
So, in a nutshell, when a user clicks delete, they send the unwanted list item (lostSoul) to purgatory. When they click undo, the user rescues the lostSoul from that dreaded holding cell.

The point of this silly story is that you don’t have to get bored with your job. There are plenty of other ways to keep the ‘fun’ in functional, especially with long boring code blocks. If you enjoy what you do, you never have to work a day in your life.

Devs – It’s Okay To Have Fun is a post from: Mister Nifty

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Wordcamp St. Louis – August 6, 2011

Brian Fegter — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 13:07:20 +0000

If you’re a WordPress freak like I am, don’t miss Wordcamp St. Louis this year. The company I work for is putting on this venue to help others learn and become more acquainted with WordPress. You will also be able to rub shoulders with influential WP guys and network with designers and developers. It’s a one-day event of awesomeness that goes from 8am to 5pm at Maryville University. If you register early, the cost is just $20.00. Late bloomers will have to pay $30.00. I will be there taking photos and helping out as a gopher here and there.

Go get your register on at 2011.stlouis.wordcamp.org

Wordcamp St. Louis – August 6, 2011 is a post from: Mister Nifty

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Build Your Own Server Tutorial

Brian Fegter — Fri, 20 May 2011 10:17:49 +0000

Several people have asked me how I moved Mister Nifty over to Rackspace Cloud Servers. It’s not as easy as a shared hosting environment because you have to build your own server. In the following screencasts, I will show you how easy it is to create a server, a database, and install WordPress in under 15 minutes. The tutorial does not include server security or DNS mapping for your domain, but it’s enough to get your feet wet with web servers.

The first thing you need to do is open an account with Rackspace Cloud Servers. A server running 512MB with 10GB of space will run you about $20-$25/month. You pay for the bandwidth you use. So, if you have a low traffic site, your costs will stay low.

Next, watch the following screencasts to setup your server:

In under 15 minutes you can have a full-blown WordPress site running on your brand new server!

To map your domains you will need to check out this tutorial about virtual hosts if you wish to use more than one domain on your server. You will also need to add your DNS to Rackspace by selecting your server and clicking the DNS tab. Your configuration should look something like this: http://d.pr/DC4x You will need to change out the IP for your own server IP. Finally, you will need to point the @ record of your domain’s DNS to the IP of your server. This can be done where you purchased your domain name.

Again, this tutorial is meant to be a beginners guide to building a server. There are many distributions of Linux. I’ve selected Ubuntu because it’s what I’m familiar with. If you have any questions or suggestions please place them in the comments below.

Build Your Own Server Tutorial is a post from: Mister Nifty

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Free WordPress Theme Options Panel

Brian Fegter — Tue, 10 May 2011 03:54:00 +0000

If you’re a WordPress developer or a shade tree coder looking to integrate options for your theme into the Worpdress administration panel, look no further. The company I work for just made our options framework available to the public for free under GPL2. This means you can download the framework, drop it in your theme, hook it in and start making some awesome options. Here’s some of the features we’ve built into the framework:

Image uploading
Typography Engine – works with Google Webfonts and font-face fonts
Layout Engine – register new layouts for your users to choose from
SEO – helps get your site get more visible
Style Engine – similar to the layout engine, but for changes only to color/images etc…
Multiple input types – text, textarea, dropdown selects, page dropdowns, category dropdowns, multiple selects, multiple text inputs (user can dynamically add more), checkboxes

This is just some of the awesomeness built right in. You can take it and make it your own with your own branding. You can always follow us online for updates as well when we release more awesome features. The next release will have automatic updating for a one-click solution to get the latest package.

If you have any questions drop me a line. I’ll help steer you in the right direction.

Get the Theme Framework here.

Free WordPress Theme Options Panel is a post from: Mister Nifty

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Media Temple Web Hosting Issues

Brian Fegter — Mon, 09 May 2011 14:17:19 +0000

——-Update for those who’ve read the article already———-

I have been contacted by several people saying this issue is my fault because my wp-config WordPress files are hard-coded with the MT database servers. When MT changes my DB settings, I have to change my config files. This is not true at all. I use the MT server variable which Media Temple controls. When they change this variable, it puts my sites back online.

————————————————————————-

First, I apologize for Mister Nifty being down erratically the past three weeks. The issue has arisen with my web host, Media Temple. MN gets a fair amount of traffic, but nothing substantial in comparison to other major tech blogs. We get 5,000-7,000 unique hits per month. I have several other sites that get minimal traffic on my shared hosting plan as well. I really don’t need anything more than a shared hosting plan for the traffic and data storage I use. I’ve had several other web hosts in the past with the same configuration and I never had issues with keeping my sites in a shared environment.

The past three weeks have been an absolute nightmare for me. The Saturday before Easter the director of an orphanage that I host called me frantically that their site was down and this was the day of their big launch fundraiser. We had setup a Paypal donation solution for donors to give. This was rendered useless because their site was down. We had to copy/paste a Paypal button link every time someone wanted to donate. That evening I contacted support and they ‘fixed’ the issue.

They said my sites were bursting (unusually large traffic to the databases) and they moved me to a dedicated database environment so my account didn’t affect others in the shared pool. I totally understand and I really didn’t mind them doing this. The only thing I had issue with is all of my sites run on WordPress, a database-driven platform. Once they migrated me to the dedicated environment, they failed to hook all the databases back up again leaving every last one of my sites with horrid database connection errors. I was pleased that the sites were up again on Saturday evening.

On Easter Sunday, I was at church preparing for our service and I start getting a barrage of text messages from churches freaking out that their sites were down and they couldn’t pull up their embedded streaming players. Since I was at church, I couldn’t take care of this issue until after service. I contacted support after holding for over an hour, they fixed the same exact issue as the night before. Needless to say, every site I had was down on Easter Sunday. Hundreds of people who view webcasts didn’t get to see the services on Easter Sunday of all days. This was just insult to injury as the issue had been ‘fixed’ the night previous.

Over the next two-three weeks, I’ve experienced this same iteration no less than ten times with MediaTemple. I’ve spent about 6-7 hours talking to techs and emailing support. I’ve talked with their Twitter support, fielded calls from senior techs and the issue still remains. I woke up to another automated email this morning telling me that they moved my databases again. I visited MN only to find a database error as Media Temple did not hook the databases back up again after they migrated.

You can imagine how frustrating this has been as I have to stop what I’m doing and call Media Temple or wait for ticket support to get back with me. I will say that their Twitter support is very quick and responsive. I’m pretty upset that the MT techs keep pointing the finger at me for taking up too many database resources and won’t look at their own issue of hooking databases back up when migrating a customer. Every single tech except a senior tech named TJ has pointed the finger at me and inferred that this was my fault. This can’t be my fault that the DB’s aren’t hooked up properly when I had nothing to do with the migration. I asked to speak to an executive but was denied by one tech who said it was impossible to connect me to someone of the executive level. I’m hoping someone from MT reads this and kicks this up to a supervisor’s supervisor’s supervisor’s supervisor’s executive supervisor.

Needless to say, I’ve lost trust with six people whose sites I host and they are finding other solutions because of MT’s persistent issues. It’s disheartening, but I have to move on. I’m switching hosts so that Mister Nifty can bring you all the goodness you enjoy on a consistent basis. I hope you will look elsewhere as Media Temple when shopping web hosting. If you have any good hosting suggestions for others, please post a comment below. Thanks for your patience and again I apologize for the downtime.

Media Temple Web Hosting Issues is a post from: Mister Nifty

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Protect your WiFi NOW!

Brian Fegter — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 14:44:48 +0000

I read this article today, and it was an adequate reminder to make sure my home WiFi was secured. An estimated 32% of Americans steal WiFi access from their neighbors. You might not think it’s a big deal to have an open network, but it is a huge liability for you. In the case of child pornography, someone could park in front of your house and download thousands of images and be on their way in mere moments, leaving you with the IP footprint of their activity. There are also hacker types that piggy back on free wifi to do their hacking the identity of someone else.

If you have an open router at your church or if you don’t have a content filter setup on the router level, the potential for something like this to happen is very likely. A couple of years ago, someone from our private school downloaded a bootleg movie. Two weeks later, our administrator received a letter from our ISP saying that we potentially could be sued by the movie house and our ISP contract dropped. The movie house then followed up with a royalty bill for several thousand dollars. Our network was secure, but we weren’t filtering properly. After this incident, we setup opendns.com to filter out all types of content and it took care of the problem.

There are two main steps to making your network safe:

Security – Setup a secure network password. I use a random password generator for my router. I also use MAC filtering to only allow computers I trust on my network. Also, make sure your router’s browser access password is changed from the default settings. I use a random password for this as well and store it on a hard copy in a secure location.
Filtering – It’s good to have a content filter on your local machine, but this has no effect on the rest of the computers on the network. I use OpenDNS because it integrates right into my router settings. This gives me control to block any sort of content I choose for everyone who is logged into my router.

If you don’t have either of these in place, please take a strong warning from me that you need to do it immediately! You potentially could be adding liability to your family, work place, or church. You can do this for free. If you have any questions, shoot me an email or leave a comment below.

Protect your WiFi NOW! is a post from: Mister Nifty

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Start Accepting Credit Cards NOW

Brian Fegter — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 23:17:45 +0000

I just found this awesome service that allows you to use your smart phone, iPod or iPad to accept credit cards. Several respected friends of mine use this and they are thrilled. Signup is free. There are no hidden fees or setup costs. Within a week after signing up you get a small swiper that plugs into your device and you’re ready to start accepting payments.

This is awesome for small churches who want to allow members and guests to give via CC. This is also a huge improvement on how churches deal with registration costs for conferences/camps for all ages.

Within two minutes, I was signed up after verifying some personal details (similar to online credit report) and on my way with the confirmation that my device was being sent to me this next week.

I’m looking forward to using it and letting you know how it works. If you have any experience, please post in the comments area.

Go to Square Up now

Start Accepting Credit Cards NOW is a post from: Mister Nifty

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Dear Church Leader, Please Stop -

Brian Fegter — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 11:43:31 +0000

- disclosing your entire email list in the TO: field on mass emails.

There are a few arguments that should sway you away from this awful practice:

It disenfranchises your audience. When I see I’m just one of 200 emails, I feel like a number and I automatically begin prejudging the email and the one who sent the email. The message is certainly lost or tainted before it can even be read. With the proper tools readily available at our fingertips (in all email programs), it is frankly unprofessional to send a mass email exposing your entire email list. It is tantamount to the practices of my grandmother’s forwarding group who sends me cute kitten photos and Maxine comics on a regular basis.
It exposes your audience to unwanted spam. All a reader needs to do is hit “Reply All” on your email, and he now has access to your audience. For church email lists, you have not only provided an email list, but more specifically, a targeted, demographic email list. This is extremely valuable to marketers. If one of your users is a marketer or the email falls into the hands of a marketer via hack or snoop, it’s pretty much guaranteed someone down the line is going to go after your audience with a product or pitch. The more people you add to the TO: field, the more you expose your audience to third party communication.I recently contacted a church leader who exposed more than 200 emails on his list announcing a larch church-oriented music event. I explained the nuances of allowing others to have access to his audience. No sooner had I sent the reply, a singer who was on the list replied to all with an advertisement of his latest album and how to purchase it. Case-in-point.
It is a liability to you and your organization. No one can please everyone all the time. No matter who you are, there is someone who is disgruntled with your organization and your leadership style. There is a reason the Bible says bitterness is a “root”. You can’t see it on the surface, therefore you can never trust that everyone in your 200+ email list has the best intentions for your organization. When you disclose your email list, you in effect, are giving a microphone to those who are disgruntled with you or your organization.This is a very real scenario not only in church and organization splits, but also when an every day layman looks to get maximum broadcast and collateral damage when airing their grievances.

The Fix

It’s very simple. Use the Blink Carbon Copy or BCC: field when sending to multiple recipients. Place your own email in the TO: field.

A Better Fix

Use MailChimp to send one email to one person on your list until everyone on your list receives the email instead of sending one email to hundreds. Mailchimp is free to use for up to 1000 contacts and 6,000 emails per month.

Using a mailing list services gives you several benefits.

Credibility with your audience by allowing them to opt in/out of your emails.
Track each email so you know if it’s been opened and read
Gain new members via web form on your site
Better subscriber management
More stable email platform for mass mails than Outlook or web-based email.

There is really no excuse to continue using Outlook for mass emails (over ten or twenty people) when MailChimp is free for the taking.

Go to MailChimp

Dear Church Leader, Please Stop - is a post from: Mister Nifty

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Create Browser-Specific Stylesheets

Brian Fegter — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 04:35:36 +0000

I love building websites, but I hate working with multiple, multiple, multiple browsers. Basically some elements of your web design display differently in different browsers and you need to target those specific browsers with a stylesheet that fixes the issues.

Lately, I’ve found that Google Chrome and Safari (webkit browsers) display some elements differently depending on what operating system you use. For example, a website I developed looked great on the PC Chrome browser, but when I viewed in the Mac Chrome browser, it had several issues. So, in order to fix this, I created a specific Mac Chrome stylesheet. These styles only load if a user is on a Mac and is viewing with Chrome.

Here’s how it works with PHP:

$os = 'Mac';
$browser = 'Chrome'; 

if(preg_match('/'.$os.'/', $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']) && preg_match('/'.$browser.'/', $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])):
        /* echo stylesheet link or do something else here*/
endif;

Here’s how it works with Javascript:

var browser=/Firefox/g;
var os=/Mac/g;

var test1=browser.test(navigator.userAgent);
var test2=os.test(navigator.userAgent);

if(test1 && test2){
      document.write('Link your stylesheet here or do something else');
}

// Place this code between the head tags.

You can target operation systems such as Windows, iPad, iPhone, iPod. You can also target browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, MSIE, Flock, Maxthon, Safari, Opera, etc…

This is a great way to welcome iPad visitors to your website and point them to your church app or tell Microsoft Explorer users that you hate their browser (j/k). Hate the browser, love the surfer right?

Create Browser-Specific Stylesheets is a post from: Mister Nifty