Texting from Email to Phone

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How to Send a Text Message from Email

[Phone Screenshot] There may come a time when you find that you need to send a text message, but your mobile phone is not available. Perhaps you left it at home, misplaced it, forgot to recharge the battery, or you exceeded their plan’s allotted number of texts. Fortunately, if you have access to email and the internet, there is an easy way you can still send a text message

To send a text message from any email client, address the email to the phone number at the SMS gateway for the mobile phone carrier. An SMS gateway is a dedicated server that transforms and transmits message traffic from the internet to a mobile network and provides a way to send a text message with or without using a mobile phone. Emails sent through an SMS Gateway are received as text messages on a phone**. The format for recipient’s email address is made up of the telephone number as username and the phone provider’s mobile SMS gateway address as the domain, i.e. phoneNumber@SMSgateway.com.
***Note: a few phones may see the SMS text as email.

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Seamless WassUp Upgrading

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Precautionary Steps for a Seamless WassUp Upgrade

WassUp Screenshot
In the newest WassUp WordPress plugin update (v.1.8.1), there is a precautionary notice about upgrading. This notice says that you should not upgrade if your site is busy. That is, you should check the number of current visitors online before upgrading and, if there are more than one regular visitors or multiple spiders online, don’t upgrade!!

WassUp is different from most plugins because once it is enabled it starts working and never stops until it is disabled, deactivated or your site goes down. Every visitor click, every spider hit, every search, and every feed request triggers WassUp to write data into it’s tables. The more popular your site is, the more data WassUp has to write in order to track visitors browsing your site.

An upgrade during a busy time for your site increases the odds that WassUp will be interrupted in the middle of a write operation. That kind of interruption can cause file corruption or can leave a permanent lock on WassUp tables. If that were to happen, WassUp would stop all new recordings until the lock is cleared or until ‘wp_wassup’ table is repaired. Note that this only affects WassUp, not WordPress itself, so your site would remain functioning.

If your site is always busy or you just can’t wait to upgrade, I recommend that you temporarily “disable recording” in WassUp >> Wassup-Options, [Statistics Recording] Tab, or put your site into “maintenance mode” prior to doing the upgrade. If you do this, always remember that you will have to manually re-enable recording or undo maintenance mode page when you have done upgrading.

For a seamless upgrade every time, always check the plugin’s “Installation” instructions at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wassup/installation/ for any new installation/upgrade procedures that could affect your copy of WassUp.

WassUp Works Well with WP Widget Cache

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WassUp users looking for ways to speed up their site or blog should try WP Widget Cache plugin.

WP Widget Cache plays nicely with Wassup because it caches only the widgets on a page and does not affect other code in the document. It caches sidebar and footer widgets and allows you to customize cache settings for each widget individually. According to the author, you can achieve up 70% improvement in your site’s performance with this plugin. After installing it on my own blog and setting a cache timeout of 24 hours (86400 seconds) on all static widgets, I saw a impressive improvement in load speed, myself. Continue reading →

CTRL+Z Undo: The Keyboard Shortcut You Can't Do Without

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There is one keyboard shortcut that everyone should know about: the universal UNDO keyboard sequence: CTRL+Z (Command+Z on the Mac).

CTRL+Z ([CTRL]-key and Z-key pressed at the same time) undoes your previous edit. Multiple CTRL+Z’s will undo multiple edits and can even restore a document to an older revision, if it was changed during the same session. It works in almost every application…text editors, graphics editors, and even in games.

I thought it was a no-brainer that everyone knew about CTRL+Z until I had a recent encounter with a young relative who was struggling to recreate a project that she had accidentally erased before saving. A few “command+Z”s (on MacBook) and the document was back and I was a hero. Continue reading →

A Fix for "get_currentuserinfo undefined"

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How to Fix the Fatal Error “get_currentuserinfo() undefined” in WordPress

If you write a WordPress plugin that calls the function “get_currentuserinfo()”, you should be aware that this could trigger the fatal error, “get_currentuserinfo undefined’, in some WordPress configurations. Depending on what your plugin does, this error could impact a WordPress site’s display, so it is important to prevent it from ever happening.

One fix (as published by several WP bloggers) is to edit your plugin to add the code, include "/wp-includes/pluggable.php", manually before you call “get_currentuserinfo()” (or other WordPress user functions). This methods works in most cases, but it runs the risk of causing an irreconcilable conflict with any membership or user management plugins that may be installed on the same site.

A better fix is to include a priority argument with your plugin hook function to make sure that it loads into WordPress after any membership/user management plugins and after “pluggable.php” loads. Continue reading →

Optimize with MySQL Procedure Analyse

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How to Use “Procedure Analyse” to Optimize MySQL Table Size

MySQL provides a useful tool called “procedure analyse” that can help you optimize your tables for storage. “Procedure analyse” examines the contents of a table’s columns and suggests a field type for each column selected that reduces the total table size.

So, why bother to reduce table size when storage is cheaply available? Big tables not only use up memory, but queries on them eat up CPU usage as well. If you have a web site with large custom MySQL tables and your site is on a shared server, you could end up getting penalized monetarily or even have your site shutdown by your ISP, if queries on your MySQL tables consume more CPU than allocated. To keep this from happening you should optimize both your queries and your table size. “Procedure analyse” provides a quick and easy way to do the latter.

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Sleeping with Javascript

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When I went looking for a built-in “sleep()” function in Javascript, I quickly learned that it does not exist. This is surprising considering that “sleep()” is in all other languages that I have used. To get around this javascript shortcoming, I decided to create my own sleep function. The result is a function that loops internally until the number of seconds passed is greater than the argument value, “naptime”.

Initial tests of “sleep()” were successful, however, I soon discovered that most browsers will interrupt “sleep()” and show a “Slow/Busy script” dialog message whenever the “naptime” argument is greater than 10 seconds (7 seconds in IE). Trying to work around this problem was too much effort, so I left the script as is. If you use this function, I recommend a “naptime” of less than 10 seconds so your site visitors won’t encounter this “slow script” dialog message.

Below are some examples of the javascript “sleep()” function. Just click on a link below to start sleeping for the preset amount of seconds shown.

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