22nd June 2006
After installing WordPress, the first thing I was looking for was improving my personal WordPress experience with plugins – for extended functionality, usability, and pleasure of use 
.
Here I will present (and regularly update) the list of plugins I looked at and installed.
The first plugin I installed is WordPress Database Backup – we all know, how painful can the data loss be. Installation is easy (copy-activate), and on-demand database backup is immediately available in Manage -> Backup menu. Plugin automatically pre-selects all default database tables, and allows you to select any other tables you happen to have in your database – these can be, for example, tables of your WordPress plugins. I would recommend saving all the database tables, except if you know that there are tables not related to your blog (you can tell this usually by the table prefix – which is ‘wp_’ by default).
After you are done with the selection of plugins, you can choose to download the backup, email it, or to store it on the server in a backup folder (plugin handles the creation of the backup folder for you).
After pressing ‘Backup’, you will see a nice progress bar, and if you had chosen to download the backup, you will get gzipped backup file.
Updates on other useful plugins coming soon… stay tuned
Posted in WP PlugIns | No Comments »
21st June 2006
Approximately a month ago I endeavoured to use Python as my main shell-scripting language. At that moment, I was already aware of multiple benefits you get when you use Python for scripting:
- source-level cross-platform scripting: your script will run anywhere, where Python compiles; expanding this statement – your script will run anywhere, where there is a C compiler (needed to build Python itself)
- high-level language: you can iterate all the lines in a text file with as little as one ‘for’-statement, for example (see the actual example below)
- simple/minimalist syntax: no curly braces around blocks of statements, no semicolons after each and every line of code, etc. Python at a glance looks much more understandable, than, for example, Perl.
- the power of C in a language-interpreting system
- it is interpreted! This gives easyness of debugging: modify, execute, see the trouble – with no compile/link stages
- and, despite being interpreted, it is fast!
For the comparison (in speed, memory use, program size) with other computer programming languages, please see the “Computer Language Shootout Benchmarks”. Here I provide the link only to the comparison of Python with Perl and comparison of Python with PHP (which can also be used as shell-scripting language, albeit after some tinkering with settings and stuff)
Below is an example of the 2-minute script in Python, which counts the number of occurrences of some string in a file.
"""Read FILE and count number of occurences of SUBSTR."""
version = 0.01
import sys
def main():
from optparse import OptionParser
opts = OptionParser(usage="%prog [options] FILE SUBSTR",
version="%prog " + str(version),
description="Read FILE and count number of occurences of SUBSTR.")
opts.set_defaults(verbose=False,flush=False)
opts.add_option("-v", "--verbose", action="store_true", dest="verbose", help="Print every line containing substr [default: %default]")
opts.add_option("-f", "--flush", action="store_true", dest="flush", help="When verbose, flush every line [default: %default]")
(options, args) = opts.parse_args()
if len(args) != 2:
print "Two arguments required for correct processing"
opts.print_help()
sys.exit(2)
infile = args[0]
substr = args[1]
lines_count = 0
substr_count = 0
lines_substr_count = 0
if options.verbose and not options.flush:
msg = ""
f = open(infile, 'r')
for line in f:
lines_count += 1
found = line.count(substr)
substr_count += found
if found > 0:
lines_substr_count += 1
if options.verbose and not options.flush:
msg += str(found) + ": " + line
elif options.verbose and options.flush:
print (str(found) + ": " + line).replace("n","")
f.close()
if options.verbose and not options.flush:
print msg
print "Lines read from file: ", str(lines_count)
print "Lines with substring found: ", str(lines_substr_count)
print "Total substrings detected: ", str(substr_count)
return
if __name__ == "__main__": main()
Posted in Programming, Python | 4 Comments »
