Jue's Blog (tag:hacks)

UPDATE 3/8/2010: There is actually now a “Refresh POP” feature in Google Labs, which mostly removes the need for this hack. But check it out anyway, if you want to see some potentially useful tricks with Gmail/cron.

I love Gmail. It is simple, and I can do things with it that would usually take 10 to 10,000 times longer on anything else–Thunderbird, Outlook, other webmail systems, passenger pigeons, and corporate groupware (in order of decreasing efficiency).

I love Gmail so much that I use it to send, receive, and organize emails for 5 different addresses. Gmail makes this easy to set up. However, due to workplace policies, the simplest method–forwarding my work email straight to Gmail–isn’t allowed. Not to be deterred (but mostly because I’d rather die than use Novell Groupwise) I searched for workarounds to let me use Gmail anyway.

The result, as you can see, is an esoteric hack that probably nobody else will ever need in its exact, complete form. But until someone invents a time machine to transport all of the world’s corporate IT departments out of the 90’s, you might find some of these tricks useful. (more…)

This is a technical description of a programming trick with the blogging engine Wordpress (which runs this blog). I know the useless blather you usually read–or, more accurately, ignore–here has nothing to do with programming, but bear with me for one post, because I think people searching on Google might find this trick useful.

UPDATE 9/26/09: This hack doesn’t actually work, because the login cookies need to be set to two different directories–your blog url and your Wordpress installation folder–in order for all parts of your blog to work. I’ll post a fix once I figure out a way around this. It won’t be pretty though, since Wordpress 2.8 hasn’t been set up to directly deal with this issue yet.

So Wordpress has a cool feature / semi-intentional built-in hack that allows you to install the Wordpress scripts in one folder (e.g. jueseph.com/blog), but have your blog URL be something different (e.g. jueseph.com). This is helpful for people who want to have a nice short URL for the blog, but don’t want to have to have all those ‘wp-’ scripts cluttering up their root directory on the webserver.

Unfortunately, this trick has a fatal flaw, which I noticed today when I was implementing it for a a friend’s new blog: Wordpress no longer recognizes that you are logged in, even if you are! (more…)