Archive for the ‘WordPress’ Category
PayPal integration
In general, PayPal seems to work well once you get it set up. But sometimes the smallest things interfere with that setup. It took nearly and hour and a half, and 3 PayPal support technicians to figure out why a Paypal payment page was forcing the customer to create a PayPal account, instead of allowing either a credit card payment or a PayPal account. It turns out that the PayPal account name (an email address) had been entered with the first letter capitalized, but I had been using all lower case. Also, the email address in question, had not been verified (although it had been used back and forth with PayPal).
Once those two corrections were made, the payment system worked just fine.
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WordPress error 500 and 1&1
If an internal server error 500 or an http error occurs when attempting to upload images to a WordPress site hosted by 1&1, add the following to the .htaccess file:
AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
Thanks to design for unity for the idea.
Strange characters in FeedBurner
This is a problem that I have seen in a number of feeds and e-newsletters that I receive: the “” instead of extra space and “’” instead of slanted quote. I believe it has something to do with character set encoding (UTF and the like), but I have not found a clear answer.
Here is an example. A WordPress post that has a text line that appears on the web site like:
I received the html-formatted email from Feedburner as follows:
When I look at the html source, I see:
The code is in a <p> with a couple of <div> tags – nothing unusual. The document type is XHTML 1.0 Transitional, and the meta tags are:
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” dir=”ltr” lang=”en-US”>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″ />
<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=EmulateIE7″ />
The obvious work-around that suggests itelf:
- avoid having 2 spaces in a row after a period between sentences
- replace slanted quotes (left and right) with straight quotes
- replace slanted apostrophes with straight apostrophes
If the article is being composed on Word (for example) this means that the auto-format option to “replace straight quotes with smart quotes” should be disabled. In fact most of the auto-format options should be disabled, but that’s a question for another post.
In the meantime, I will investigate this issue to see if there is a better solution.