Tag Archives: internet

Computers

In Private Browsing – aka Porn Mode

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I’ve recently started using the In Private browsing feature of IE8 more and more, and no not for Porn!

For testing sites I’m developing or doing a clean Google search, it would usually involved closing the browser, clearing cookies / cache etc. and then restarting. It is now reduced to Tools -> InPrivate Browsing, and bang you’ve got a clean browser session. And I know Firefox supports this, but they really make it unusable if you run Firefox with lots of open tab (currently I’ve 36 and it isn’t a busy day) because it shuts the browser down, opens the private browsing mode and then restores things after it is finished.

I guess I’ve long since used two browsers. Firefox for personal stuff and general web development tasks. IE for Intranet net applications and not the InPrivate feature.

If only someone would invent some proper work spaces for a browser. And some better way of storing/organising favourites.

Computers

Magpie RSS

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So I’ve used MagpieRss for quite sometime. First used happened a few years back when I did a little work customising my own version of TorrentFlux. Someone back then introduced me to Magpie which proved much easier than using my own XML parser.

Anyway since then it has been used in quite a few places to auto update sections of sites. One of the recent “bugs” I’ve come across is where it displays the message below from time to time.

Notice:  Undefined property:  etag in rss_fetch.inc on line 156

Anyway from the usual googling, there is more than one place that this type of message shows up. Annoying though is that this bug is fixed in the development version of Magpie and was actually fixed over two years ago.

Basic fix is to swap line 156

if( $rss and $rss->etag and $rss->last_modified) {

to

if ( $rss and (isset($rss->etag) and $rss->etag)
 and (isset($rss->last_modified) and $rss->last_modified) ) {

On a side note, WordPress needs a nice way to handle code windows.