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Brilliantly Simplistic

a collection of the inessential to some, and indispensable to others.

Eric Wagner

Programming the Volume Control on the Philips RC122 Remote

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I recently upgraded my Time Warner cable box and with it came the Philips RC122 remote. (I have to say this remote is a step backwards from my old remote in that it doesn’t have a ‘system’ on/off button. I need to individually turn on/off the TV, the cable box, and the Bose sound system. But I digress…)

I wrote an article many moons ago for the instructions to lock the volume control on my old Time Warner UR5U-8780L-TWP remote control so that even when in CBL mode the volume buttons will control the AUX device, in my case an old Bose sound system. Here’s what I found to do the same for the RC122:

  1. Press and hold the SELECT/OK and CBL buttons until all device buttons blink twice.
  2. Press 993. (The CBL button should blink twice.)
  3. Press the AUX button. (All device buttons should blink three times.)

Pretty simple! To set the volume control back to the TV, it’s default setting, follow the same process but press the TV button in step 3.

Enjoy!

Contact Form 7 and Bluehost

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I’m finally writing this down after having to google for it for two clients in the past two months.

When the Contact Form 7 plugin for WordPress won’t send emails from a website hosted with BlueHost, try the following:

  • Log in to the Bluehost cPanel
  • Under the Mail heading click on MX Entry
  • Select the domain you are trying to send email to
  • Press the More button under MX (Mail Exchanger)
  • Select Remote Mail Exchanger

Loading jQuery in WordPress

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jQuery-LogojQuery has been bundled with WordPress for some time now. But just because it’s bundled doesn’t mean it’s automatically loaded on your pages.

For example, I’ve been toying with the Bootstrap 3.0 navbar recently on a test site, and the navbar was working perfectly. When the site is compressed to under 768px wide, the horizontal navbar collapses into fancy dropdown stacked menu. Bootstrap uses jQuery for this.

(Yes, I’m also using a custom navigation walker to insert the required Bootstrap classes into the default menu html. Stay tuned for an article on how I did it. It was too easy!)

Everything was wonderful until I disabled a plugin on the site…a plugin that was conveniently loading jQeury for me. It took me a few minutes to figure out that the loss of jQuery was why my menu stopped working in collapsed mode.

I found a number of articles on how to load jQuery, but it was always about loading a specific version of jQuery. After reading a Pippin’s Plugins article on why this is actually “irresponsible”, i realized I didn’t need to load a new version of jQuery, I just need to tell WordPress that when it loaded the Bootstrap javascript file to also load its currently bundled jQuery. Simply adding “jquery” in an array to the dependency parameter of the wp_enqueue_script in my functions.php was all that was needed!


wp_enqueue_script( 'bootstrap-js', get_template_directory_uri() . '/js/bootstrap.min.js', array('jquery'));

Here is the WordPrexx Codex article on how to Link a Theme Script Which Depends on jQuery

WordPress 3.6

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wordpress-logo-notext-rgbI updated the blog today to WordPress 3.6, as well as a number of test sites I use for template and plugin tests. I’m happy to see that this release hasn’t broken anything I’ve been working on.  Thank you WordPress!

Released a few days ago, “Oscar” comes with a number of new features, many of which I see useful for those that are using WordPress as a blogging platform.  Using WordPress as a platform for building business websites, not so much.

The updated Revisions reminds me of some of the source control systems I’ve used in the past. In fact, it’s actually better than some of those systems.  Seeing the two text revisions side by side, with the differences highlighted, is brilliant for those writing long complex articles.

Auto-Save and Post Locking is going to be great for multi-author blogs.

The new Twenty Thirteen theme…meh. But I think it’s just that I haven’t yet warmed up to it yet from a design perspective.  Maybe I’m not ready for a single column layout yet. I need to roll up my sleeves and get behind the scenes to see what tricks the team at Automattic has done.  Lately I’m beginning new projects with a modified Underscores starter theme, so maybe I’ll find some new concepts that I can apply to my starter theme.