WordPress custom columns: I can see clearly now March 17th 2011

See at a glance what’s missing in WordPress admin lists

Searching through your WordPress media library for items without “alt” text, caption or description can be time consuming and is error prone, especially if you’ve more than a few images to check. A quick scan could easily reveal what information is missing; if only these three columns were available. Well, as you’ll see, it’s easy to add them with two minor additions to your WordPress theme’s functions.php file.

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Gmail attachments: Big game hunting June 21st 2010

Tracking down and deleting large attachments with IMAPsize

This was becoming an issue as I keep a local backup of my Gmail account using IMAP Backup. And while you can find attachments in Gmail using search modifiers has:attachment and filename:zip, you can’t search or sort on attachment size.

The solution: the IMAPsize freeware Windows IMAP utility found via this blog post from Amit Agarwal. IMAPsize’s speciality is searching your Gmail account for folders (Gmail labels) and messages based on attachment size.

I quickly found and deleted my large attachments using IMAPsize. Backup problem solved. Recommended.

WordPress 3.0: Ahead of the game June 20th 2010

WordPress core development outruns my theme and plugins

One of my hosting accounts limits PHP memory, so for these blogs I need to deactivate all plugins before running the automatic update. My other hosting service has enough PHP RAM to not have to do this, which is nice.

All my blogs have now been running WordPress 3.0 in production for a few days and so far I’ve not met any problems with the core product.

One minor issue has been with the CSS minification in the W3 Total Cache plugin. I’m using the latest development version of W3TC but it has an issue with CSS so I’ve disabled minification until I’ve time to look into this further.

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Mainframe nostalgia: COBOL ON COGS June 4th 2010

You just have to love the demo’s simulated phosphor burn-in

You’ve heard of Ruby on Rails, but what about all those COBOL developers? Well, we can goto COBOL ON COGS and reminisce. Pay attention as the screens change to bring back fond memories of the massive, built like a battleship, IBM 3270 green-screen terminals. A very nice touch!

WordPress plugins: Redirection by John Godley June 3rd 2010

Easily manage 301 redirections and 404 not-found errors

If you’re changing your WordPress site or blog structure and moving posts and pages around, then John Godley’s Redirection plugin makes it easy to add 301 redirects to the new canonical definitions. It also catches 404 errors, with an easy way to add redirects for incorrect URLs, common typos etc.

Andrew-Biss.com: My personal blog on business and technical innovation May 2nd 2007

Andrew Biss loves helping people innovate

Hi, I’m Andrew Biss. I post on business and technical innovation here on my personal blog Andrew-Biss.com. In the software industry since 1980, I’ve held senior development, marketing and strategy positions at independent software vendors (ISVs) in the UK, US, France and Germany.

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