A few weeks back, I was able to attend the Saturday evening showing of The Addams Family Musical at the Shubert Theater in the theater district. It was truly the last minute decision. Christy had let me know about the show and that she and some other friends would be in attendance, but I had not actually bought the ticket until a couple days prior to the show. Despite that, I still managed to get a pretty decent seat in the first row of the balcony.

The story was not an altogether unfamiliar plot for the family. Family member falls in love. That person and/or his/her family meets the rest of the Addams family and comedy ensues. In this instance, Wednesday Addams is in love with a boy. This was a little odd at first because Wednesday should have been much younger than portrayed. For the purposes of the plot, she is much older than in the traditional stories, yet Pugsley, her younger brother, is about where he needed to be. This caused a much larger than normal age gap between the two characters. Though, it didn’t really matter much as the story progressed. Most of this was told in the first few minutes of the show so that the rest of the production could focus around the boy’s parents meeting Gomez, Morticia and the rest of the clan.

Fester and Gomez, more or less, stole the show. The two actors had their parts down to a tee. Wednesday was quite cute as expected and I really couldn’t tell if Pugsley was actually being played by a boy or a girl. The sets felt pretty average, but very much in style with the rest of the production. There was one point where Pugsley was being put to bed by Morticia and as the bed shifted off stage, a tail came out of the back followed by an arm and leg coming out the side and finally a head popped out from under the foot of the bed to reveal a giant lizard type creature that was hiding underneath the bed. It was a happy surprise.

One thing I found a little strange were the seemingly forced inclusion of a couple location specific jokes including Gomez immitating Morticia’s mother as though she had a Boston accent saying “wicked pissah”. There were also a few liberal jokes that probably wouldn’t fly in more conservative portions of the country.

All things considered, I had a fun time and enjoyed the show.

I’ve been pretty depressed lately.

I also recently remembered I had a personal blog that noone looks at (Google Analytics told me).

I guess that means I’m going to make an attempt to update it more often to remind myself that my life isn’t as boring and directionless as it feels.

This video pretty much speaks for itself. A coworker took the week off before his 50th birthday. We made effective use of our time and foil during the week.

As one might surmise by the badge above, I attended WordCamp Boston this year. It was held right down the street at Boston University. I had only found out that a WordCamp was being held in Boston about a week and a half beforehand. When I saw where it would be, I leaped at the opportunity. Registration was only US$40, which is incredibly reasonable for a technical conference.

Read on to hear more about some of the panels I attended.

The best session overall was the double session with two of the WordPress core developers. It wasn’t technical at all, but it was just a great forum on where WordPress is currently and where they would like it to be somewhere down the road. They were also taking questions and looking for feedback. I asked if there were any plans on improving the migration and management of WordPress w/ Multisite and I got a very interesting answer. Apparently they had a one button upgrade process ready to go, but the more they looked at Multisite and saw what people were doing with it and what problems they were encountering, they decided to make the upgrade more difficult as a barrier to entry. If you could upgrade to Multisite then you at least had enough knowledge to be able to troubleshoot some of the issues that may arise from the upgrade. I could not disagree with him, as the management of Multisite is still pretty klunky and not as intuitive as it really needs to be. It did make me consider writing a plugin to migrate a WordPress site to a Multisite though.

The best technical panel that I attended was wholly owned by K. Adam White and his talk on Stepping into Custom Post Types. I had only recently realized that pages, posts, revisions and attachments were all stored they same way just with different custom post types. Sitting in on this panel made me realize just how much you could do by creating your own custom post types. It was a fantastic presentation with great real world examples. It was a shock to most when K. Adam said that this was the first time he had given this presentation. I’ve already adapted custom post types into two different plugin projects that I am working on, one of which is with Ben from DeadpoolBugle.com.

I went to three different marketing and SEO sessions in a row Saturday afternoon. While they had some fantastic information that was really relevant and useful, part of me felt like I had watched a very similar panel three times in a row. In retrospect, I would have liked to have attended the session on CSS3 instead of one of these marketing sessions.

I handed out many business cards and met quite a few, very nice people doing some very interesting things with their little space on the internet. It makes me hopeful that I can have an impact on the industry somewhere along the way. I’ll definitely be attending WordCamp Boston next year. Maybe one of these years I’ll even run a session.

High Definition is an understatement of what this camera is capable of achieving. It has taken nearly six months to get this camera, but I expect the results to be well worth it. I charged it up last night and hope to experiment with some of the myriad features some night this week. I combed through the accessories and was pleased with the cable options, remote, etc. It even has a stylus. I have no idea for what, but I’ll figure that out soon. I equate the lens hood to the spoiler and racing stripes that it didn’t necessarily need, but make it look so much cooler. Needless to say my level of excitement is as high as the definition.

Here’s what I have:

• Domain name pointed to the DNS servers of my host
• CPanel to manage my hosting
• WordPress 3.1.1
• Multisite has been activated with subfolders

Thats essentially it. The settings that were not really well documented involved CPanel, Multisite using subfolders, and certain aspects of the domain mapping plugin’s installation.

Continue reading for the helpful parts.

I will assume that anyone reading this has the same setup I mentioned above already existing. So those are the requirements and I will be moving forward from there.

I’ve divided this tutorial into three sections:

• CPanel
• Plugin Installation
• Plugin Configuration

CPanel
The first thing we want to do is go into CPanel.
There are just two things we need to do in here; park the domain and verify a DNS entry.

To park the domain do the following:
Manage My Domains > Parked Domains
Click the link to add a new parked domain and you should see something similar to the below

Just go ahead and add your domain. Thats pretty much all there is to parking the domain.

Next we need to verify that there is a DNS entry pointing to our server’s IP address. In CPanel, navigate to the following:
Manage My Domains > DNS Zone Files > Select your domain in the drop down > Click ‘View/Edit Zone File’
You should see the following entry in the listing. If you do not, add it replacing the XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX with the IP address of your server.

Once you have verified both of those changes, you are all set with CPanel and can move on to your WordPress setup.

Installing the Domain Mapping Plugin
The Domain Mapping plugin is the secret sauce that makes all this work. Unfortunately, its not a straight forward installation like most other plugins.

This caused a lot of confusion for me. This plugin needs to be installed in the mu-plugins folder. The confusing thing to me was that I thought the mu-plugins directory was an older folder from the WPMU days before Multisite was integrated into the main WordPress code branch. Since it was not autogenerated in folder structure, I assumed that this was an outdated reference that really meant the wp-content/plugins directory.

Fun fact: The MU in mu-plugins does not stand for Multi User. It stands for Must Use.

Any plugin installed in this directory is automatically activated for the whole network. Also, it will ignore any subfolders and their contents. It will only read php plugin files in the folder’s root. The file can then call a file within a subfolder, if needed. You can imagine my frustration when I finally found that footnote listed once in the codex.

So here is how to install the plugin:

/* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */

/** Absolute path to the WordPress directory. */
if ( !defined('ABSPATH') )
	define('ABSPATH', dirname(__FILE__) . '/');

// for domain mapping plugin
define( 'SUNRISE', 'on' );

/** Sets up WordPress vars and included files. */
require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-settings.php');

Now that you have placed the folder in the appropriate place, moved the two files and updated the wp-config.php file, you are now ready to start configuring the plugin and mapping.

Configuring the Domain Mapping

When you login using your super admin account and navigate to the plugin screen, you should see something like the following.

So far, so good?

Go to Settings > Domain Mapping

You should see something like the following:

Simply enter the IP address of your hosting server in the appropriate box. In the example above, I filled it in with XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX.

As for the checkboxes I found what worked best was to check:

• Permanent Redirect – essentially redirects all traffic to your new domain name, even if they try to naviage to your original blog url (site.com/blog). This helps make your traffic more consistent for analysis and search engines
• User domain mapping page – allows for the admins of each individual blog to setup a domain mapping for that specific blog. If you are running a large network (like WordPress.com), this is pretty much a must. If its a small network and you are running all of the blogs, then its a personal preference

Next, you will go into the blog you want your domain to point.
Dashboard > Sites > Go to the Dashboard of the appropriate blog > Tools > Domain Mapping

Here, you just need to add the domain name in the text box, check the box for Primary domain and click Add.

Thats it!

Once you make the change, it may take a bit for things to propagate, so if you get kicked out of your blog and can’t access it, wait an hour or two. It wasn’t working for me and I gave up in frustration and went to bed. The next morning it was working without issue. If you need to get back into your blog, enter the main site as the super admin. If you think you have done something wrong with the setup, go to Settings > Domains and remove the mapping for your blog.

This method works with both subfolders and subdomains. It was once the case that it only worked with subdomains, but that is no longer true.

I hope to changing the theme of this blog soon so I can take better advantage of the screen real estate. We are no longer living in a 800×600 world anymore.

This wasn’t as straight-forward as I expected it to be, or I should say, there weren’t any examples that were as straight-forward as I was hoping there would be. The best tutorial I found was located here. The problem with this tutorial was that it didn’t spell it out clearly enough for me. It was doing a few different things in the example and I just wanted a very simple meta-box without any functionality to start. My functionality was guaranteed to not match the functionality of the one in the example.

I really find it helpful when developers write up challenges they have faced and how they resolved them on their blogs. I wanted to give back by writing this up in a similar fashion for others to benefit.

In its most basic form, here is the code for the meta-box from the plug-in.


******
/*
Plugin Name: Test Meta-Box
Plugin URI: ??
Description: Show a new meta-box in the edit post admin page
Author: Bradley Jacobs
Version: 0.1
*/

function post_meta_boxes() {
echo("TEXT IN BOX");
}
******


Once you’ve gotten that box to appear, you can start adding functionality to it.
Perhaps more on that another time.

As I paged through today’s Metro newspaper, I came across this amusing entry in the letter’s section. My blurry cam made it a little hard to make out though. Here is the text:

Read Tolkien, puzzlesmith
Re: “CROSSWORD: 9/23″:
I take issue with your 43D
clue “Folklore dwarfs”
(TROLLS). It’s just not
right; dwarves and trolls
are generally different
sizes and races. I appreci-
ate precision in cross-
word clues, and this just
seemed like sloppy clue-
ing to me. I enjoy the puz-
zles.