Problems Getting WordPress Emails

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Are you having problems getting email sent from you WordPress blog?

One of the features that I really like is being able to get emails when new comments are posted. I also use the Contact Form 7 plugin which needs to send mail.

The Problem

I recently switched web hosts to Webfaction. They’ve been great — what I think you should be able to expect out of shared hosting.  The only problem is that they don’t support PHP’s mail function. They claim it’s to reduce spam — mail() can be used to send email defining the from address as whatever you want without having to authenticate. It can be very convenient, but it’s really not the ideal way to send mail using PHP anyway. WordPress does it because it’s pretty rare to find a server that doesn’t support it and the alternatives are too commonly uninstalled.
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Google Apps

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A little over a year ago I did a post about forwarding your godaddy email to gmail. This worked great for me for about a year, but I recently discovered that you can setup Google Apps for free on your domain and this is much easier to manage. I’m not going to document the process here, since their documentation is pretty easy to follow. It’s pretty much just a bunch of MX records to setup in your DNS.

Once you’re all setup, managing the whole system is super easy. Every account can have gmail, google calendar, google docs and google sites. Once you’ve got the email account setup you can forward to another email address if you want, or just use the inbox that they give you.

Adding Tumblr

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It sounds rediculous, but I think I’m going to start using tumblr. No, no, it’s not going to replace anything on this site. This will be in addition to the nothing that I already do here. Told ya it sounded ridiculous.

I think it was when I was on @garyvee‘s website one day when I decided to sign up for an account. The idea of different post-types is something that I tried to start on my blog awhile back with asides(which I’ve since ditched) and image galleries(which I’m currently working on), except on Tumblr it’s built in and not some crazy theme hack.

I’ve been curious about Tumblr for a long time. As soon as I saw the interface I loved it. As soon as I saw that you could set it up with a custom URL, for free, I was hooked. It’s ridiculously customizable with some good looking templates right off the line.

Integrating it.

I knew there had to be some way to integrate this into my site without imposing on the WordPress blog. I had no idea how I would generate enough content for my main blog and a tumbleblog, but now it seems quite obvious. (more…)

Extra Space under Image Links Fix

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Have you ever had the problem of having a little extra space under images on your website? This has been driving me crazy since I started the FancyFlickr plugin and noticed a little extra space under all of the images on my site.

The problem is that by default the bottom of images are lined up with the baseline of the text — which means the bottom of most letters, but there is still that small space for the bottoms of letters like p and q.

By default vertical-align is set to baseline. All you have to do to fix the problem is set

a img { vertical-align: bottom; }

Viola! Problem solved.

Dell Mini 10v unboxing

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So the Dell Mini 10v that I’ve been waiting for since Christmas came in yesterday. What a great little machine. Right now I’m calling it the Macbook Mini since I installed OSX shortly after taking it out of the box.

Unfortunately the first thing I had to do was downgrade the BIOS, which was a little stressful, but after that it was smooth sailing. Here are some photos of the unboxing: (more…)