Blog of Peter Lambert

Included in this set-up of WP is a javascript thing that allows the selection of regions of the text, which is convenient when you want to reference a certain passage in a blog post. I had noticed that the functionality was not actually working on my web page, so I dug into the problem. I learned a bit about javascript and a bit about Wordpress. Here are the things I had to change to get it to work:

In the single-post file, which is where the javascript thing is active, there were actually two <span>tags with the same ID, so I got rid of one of them. The big problem with the code was that this <span> tag ID must match the ID called for in the selection-magic script, and for some reason the script was not being updated to match the ID on the page. I reasoned that there is no reason that the ID should be unique for each page (it was being assigned a "shash-#" to match the post ID), it just has to be unique within the page. So I switched it to a static ID string, "sm-area", which solved the problem.

In trying to figure out why this was not working, I compared my script to the one on a page with a working version, and noticed that they included the word "selection-" in the generated address, so I added that too. I also did some minor edits to the javascript.

Next Step: I will review the standard files, and if appropriate, make a vpatch to include these changes into the tree as found on Btcbase.org.

In order to control access to parts of a website one can use a .htaccess file to restrict the IP addresses which are allowed to view files in a folder. I have two computers which I generally use to access the admin functions of my website, so I wanted to set up the .htaccess file so that either computer could log into the WP-Admin functionality. After looking through various online suggestions, I figured I should be able to do something like this to allow either IP address:

Order Deny,Allow
Deny from All
Allow from xx.xx.xx.xx
Allow from yy.yy.yy.yy

But when I put this in my .htaccess file, when I tried to load the website I just got an error saying that Apache was misconfigured. If you see anything wrong with the code above, I would love to hear why it does not work, since every site I looked at seemed to suggest this should work for what I am trying to do.

The setting that I have been using, and has been working, is like this:

Require IP xx.xx.xx.xx

But when I use this, each time I switch computers I have to ssh into the host and manually alter three different .htaccess files to use the correct IP address before I can log into WP-Admin, which is annoyingly tedious. So I did some more digging and came up with some more technical documentation, where I found the option to use this form:

<RequireAny>
Require IP xx.xx.xx.xx
Require IP yy.yy.yy.yy
</RequireAny>

Which lets either computer access the folder.

From time to time I have found it useful to have a way to view my IP address. In the past I would go to Google, and type "what is my IP" in the search box. I have chosen to rely less on Google, and so I have added a simple page to this website that shows that information. The page is located at peterl.xyz/showip.php, I am also putting a link section in the sidebar, and I am including this link there.