I dont know for what reason Etisalat blocked Firefox download once again. I had the same experience before and blogged it my old space now again :-(.

You reach we block Etisalat….!!!!

There is a simple way to push your rewrite rules to wordpress using a simple filter. To do this you need use rewrite_rules_array filter. Before starting with that let me explain the basic rewrite structure of wordpress 2.0 and above.

# BEGIN WordPress
< IfModule mod_rewrite.c >
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
< /IfModule >
# END WordPress

The rules above are the default rules in wordpress when you enable permalink option. The rules checks if the incoming request URI is a physical files or a physical directory. If both the conditions are false it directs the control to index.php. So that ends there. If you type any random url on permalink enabled wordpress blog you will get a 404 error page. This is because wordpress tries to decode the incoming url with series of rules and detects if the request is of some pattern. And if there is a pattern match it loads the needed stuff else it load a 404 page.

Basically the default pattern is generated based on what you set on permalink option page. And it has standard pattern rules for loading page, rss, author, category etc etc… The next thing you need to do it is to insert your pattern into wordpress rules array. This is achieved with the help of rewrite_rules_array filter. I will show how you can load your rewrite rules into wordpress.

function insertMyRewriteRules($rules){
$newrules = array();
$newrules['redirect/url/(.+)$']=’index.php?is_page_redirect=1&redirect_url=$matches[1]‘;
return $newrules+$rules;
}
add_filter(’rewrite_rules_array’,'insertMyRewriteRules’);

Using the above function I have added a pattern /redirect/url/(anything) to rewrite rules. If request URI has this pattern then it will pass two variables namely is_page_redirect and redirect_url to index.php. Variable redirect_url will hold the pattern match of string followed after /redirect/url/ in the request uri.
Example if I requested a url imthi.com/redirect/url/http://www.example.com/ redirect_url will hold ‘http://www.example.com’. Now pattern is matched and parsed into index.php as query variables. Now the next is to tell url query parser to use these variables. To do so you have apply a filter query_vars.

function insertMyRewriteQueryVars($vars){
array_push($vars, ‘is_page_redirect’, ‘redirect_url’);
return $vars;
}
add_filter(’query_vars‘,’insertMyRewriteQueryVars’);

The above function will add the two variables into the query vars and by which you instruct wordpress not to loose if these variables found in the request query. Okay that is done and the variables are retained. Next step is tell the query parser to use this. That is done with the help of action parse_query.

function insertMyRewriteParseQuery($query){
if(!empty($query->query_vars['is_page_redirect'])){
header(”location:”.$query->query_vars['redirect_url']);
exit();
}
}
add_action(’parse_query’,'insertMyRewriteParseQuery’);

The above fuction will check if there is variable is named is_page_redirect in query vars. If present it redirects to location present in variable redirect_url. :-D.. Lets wrap this up and make it a plugin which will apply redirect to comment author website urls.

Download comment url redirect plugin. Dont be surprised it is really simple..

Found a cool and free rss reader ‘pRSSreader‘ for my imate pda. It is really simple and it is loaded with good features and all you need for reading rss.

Some of the features….

Small - It is very small application. It takes about 500 KB of your PDA memory.

Formats - It can handle many versions of feeds: RSS 0.90, 0.91, 0.92 and 2.0, RDF 1.0 and Atom 0.3.

Site Manager - Site manager allows you to subscribe to sites you want to read. You can group your feeds into folders and you can set up feed options such as displaying on the Today screen, caching options, etc.

Items - It can mark feed items with three states: new, unread and read. Those states are preserved between starts of pRSSreader. You can sort the feed items or you can hide already read items.

Sequential reading - Once you start reading, you can read from the start to the end without getting back to the main window to switch between items or even feeds.

Customizable - It is quite customizable. You can set up appearance of reading dialog, change font sizes, enable clear type, set the location of cache or an external browser for viewing the whole messages and many more.

Caching - It have quite powerful caching abilities, it can cache images included within feeds, enclosures and it can also cache online pages for offline browsing.

Cache Manager - Use Cache Manager for maintaining your cached content. You can delete whole cache as well as single files (from 1.3.0).

Import/Export - You can import your OPML file from the Internet or from your local file system as well. pRSSreader can also export your OPML file.

Updates - You can update your feeds manually or you can also let pRSSreader to update your feeds automatically. Then they will be updated periodically (you can select the update interval).

Today screen - It has integration with Today screen. It can simply display the number of new/unread items or can cycle feed names or even items from a feed. The plugin is compatible with Pocket Breeze.

Summary View - The summary view shows you the number of new/unread/total items in your feeds. You can also use it to switch between your feeds very quickly.

Keywords - You can enter a list of keywords and pRSSreader will show you feed items that includes those keywords (from 1.3.0).

Proxy Support - It supports HTTP, SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 proxy servers (from 1.3.0).

HTTP Authentication - pRSSreader can access HTTP pages protected with Basic or Digest authentication (from 1.3.0).

Localizations - It is localized into Czech, Dutch, French and Spanish language (from 1.3.0).

HTML Optimizer - You can use HTML optimizer (such as Skweezer) to get online content optimized for PDA screens. You can also define custom rules to get online content prepared for PDAs by a content provider (from 1.3.2).

Google is updating its PageRank index :-). I have noticed a jump in my web page from 3 to 4 ;-). If anyone interested in checking whether your PageRank is increasing use this website.

http://livepr.raketforskning.com/

In that website they say Google has turned off live PageRank and it is returning 0 for all pages queried. After reading that I check my old code on PageRank in php. And it was returning zero :-(. So Google is up to something this time or they don’t other people to misguide or misuse people in the name of live PageRank etc etc…

Wordpress filters does the magic of data manipulation. Once you understand the power of filters in wordpress you can do lot of magic. This is very much helpful for developers who write plugins for wordpress. It is not necessary that you can use only wordpress default filters. If you want you can create your own filters.

What does this filter do? Filters basically passes a value to series of functions and returns the value. To understand the full concept of filters in wordpress you need know two functions basically

1. add_filter($tag, $function_to_add, $priority = 10, $accepted_args = 1)
2. apply_filters($tag, $string)

add_filter - Adds a function to a filter. The added function will be executed while a filter is applied.

• Param tag - This is a normal string text using this you can group number functions for a particular filter
• Param function_to_add - This is the function to be called when a filter is being executed
• Param priority - If you want to change the sequence of execution or the order of execution you can do by changing this param
• Param accepted_args - This mention no of arguments for the filter function.

apply_filters - Executes a filters and it returns a value.

• Param tag - This is a normal string text using this you can group number functions for a particular filterParam
• Param string - A values that is passed for the function.

function filter_function1($inval){
return strtolower($inval);
}
function filter_function2($inval){
return ucwords($inval);
}
add_filter('format_name','filter_function1');
add_filter('format_name','filter_function2');

$name = 'IMTHiaz rAFIQ';
$name = apply_filters('format_name',$name);
print $name;

That would print name as Imthiaz Rafiq. Here I have used a simple example. Wordpress uses this for everything. So if you want to control any data in wordpress you can do it with the help of filters ;-).

Check this site out for all filters and actions in wordpress..

Untill Next time ….!!!