Posted by gmendoza on December 13, 2009 under Tech Tips | 
The following outlines the process of dynamically adding a blockquote message at the top of any post you have flagged as being “outdated”. Over time, your posts can become outdated or even completely inaccurate, especially if you’re running a tech blog, since software constantly changes. This will help warn readers that there may be issues with the post in it’s current condition.
I did some digging around and couldn’t find an official plugin that took care of this. I did however stumble across a blog post by Trey Piepmeier that helped me understand a fairly straight forward method of doing it yourself. I typically don’t like to rehash work someone has already discussed, but I figured it would help to give a little more detail for those interested. Depending on your PHP and WordPress theme modification skills, you can change this however you like.
PLEASE MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR THEME BEFORE CHANGING ANYTHING.
You can place the following PHP “if” condition just BELOW the code referencing your post title and ABOVE the code referencing your post content. The get_post_meta() function assigns the $status variable with the value of a custom field you will later define as “outdated”. If it matches, then a blockquote message will be printed, otherwise it will be skipped and the post will continue as normal.
<?php $status = get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), 'status', true); if ($status == 'outdated') : ?>
<blockquote>
<p align="center"><font color="red"><strong>
WARNING! THIS POST HAS BEEN MARKED AS OUTDATED!
</strong></font></p>
<p align="center"><strong>
Enter some useful message here about the article being old.
</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<?php endif; ?>Depending on your theme, this can typically be done in your themes index.php and single.php files, but you should also update any other you use to publish posts from.
Then, all you need to do is edit any of your outdated posts and add a custom field with the name of “status” and a value of “outdated” without any quotes and your work is complete.
An example of what this might look like on your blog is shown below.
Please feel free to leave comments, suggestions or concerns. A great deal of help on figuring this out was also provided in the #WordPress IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. If you find yourself in a pickle, there’s always someone there willing to help you out.
Posted by gmendoza on December 9, 2009 under Tech Tips |
If you’re running the Gnome desktop environment and would like to have GnuPG context menu options in Nautilus to encrypt, decrypt, and digitally sign files, simply install the Seahorse plugins package available in your favorite Linux distribution repositories. If using Debian or Ubuntu, it’s as easy as an apt-get install.
sudo apt-get install seahorse-plugins
After installing the package, go to System -> Preferences -> Encryption and Keyrings, select a default key to use and decide whether you want to include your own key by default when encrypting files. This is sometimes a good idea if you ever want to open a file you encrypted to someone else. Below are some screenshots of the Seahorse preferences.
Here are some screen shots of the context menu options that appear when you right click on files in Nautilus.
When you choose to encrypt a file, you can select as many public keys as you’d like. Here’s an example of the dialogue.
Using PGP has never been easier. There are still some improvements to the UI I would like to see completed, but overall the most important features are there.
Posted by gmendoza on December 1, 2009 under Tech Tips |
When adding third party software repositories to your APT sources list, you can easily download a referenced PGP key to your APT keyring using the advanced options of the apt-key utility.
For example, if you are adding a third party repository that references the PGP key ID of 6E80C6B7, the following will work as long as the key has been uploaded to a keyserver.
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 6E80C6B7
gpg: requesting key 6E80C6B7 from hkp server keyserver.ubuntu.com
gpg: key 6E80C6B7: public key "Launchpad PPA for Banshee Team" imported
gpg: no ultimately trusted keys found
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg: imported: 1 (RSA: 1)
Typically, instructions on adding repositories give readers a two or three step process that involves apt-key reading a key from a text file or piped from a wget command. The above just cuts all that nonsense out.
The apt-key man page is a bit bare, but there are a few other options you might find interesting that are only mentioned in the commands help output.
apt-key
Usage: apt-key [command] [arguments]
Manage apt's list of trusted keys
apt-key add - add the key contained in ('-' for stdin)
apt-key del - remove the key
apt-key export - output the key
apt-key exportall - output all trusted keys
apt-key update - update keys using the keyring package
apt-key net-update - update keys using the network
apt-key list - list keys
apt-key finger - list fingerprints
apt-key adv - pass advanced options to gpg (download key)
