Customer Reviews of Strictly AutoTags version 2.9.7

Custom Reviews of Strictly AutoTags version 2.9.7

Here is what people are saying about it!

By Strictly-Software

The new PRO version of Strictly AutoTags is out version 2.9.7 which you can buy for merely £40 from either my site: www.strictly-software.com/plugins/strictly-auto-tags or on etsy.com.

With Etsy.co:m I have to constantly check an old email account OR the site for sales or messages.

Sometimes this can cause issues if you are using Etsy's own message system as I don't get the messages straight away as they don't email to my main account so I won't know about them.

If you are going to buy the plugin I would prefer you did it from my own site: www.strictly-software.com/plugins/strictly-auto-tags as I get notified straight away. Plus if there are any problems I can help solve them ASAP.

If you cannot find my email address or the contact link doesn't work you can always email me at ,

Reviews of Strictly AutoTags

Here are what some of the people who have used my plugin have said about it. Just a quick Google Search will give you more than enough sites talking about it. Here are some of the best reviews.

Manage Your WordPress Tags with Strictly Auto Tags

Tagging was such a chore for me before that I am going to get the paid version of Rob’s Strictly Auto Tags plugin so I can run it with all the extra features and avoid the tagging problems which caused me to get rid of them all before. I did find tags to be a good thing and I do see that they add to traffic and the chance for my blog posts to be found. So, doing away with tags was a good experiment, but I’m bringing them back now. Very glad to have found a plugin to do a lot of the work for me. Sure, I could have ignored all the past posts and just started tagging from here, but that would bug me. I am a bit all or nothing in that way.

http://wordgrrls.com/2014/04/manage-your-wordpress-tags-with-strictly-auto-tags/

I'm so happy I received the paid version. It was a giant goof up and neither of our faults :(.

WOW is all I can say, the extra features in the paid version are just, GREAT!

If you like the free plugin, you will LOVE the paid version!

YAH! 

Dugg Brown

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/paid-version-is-downloading-free-version?replies=5

From BlackHatWorld

This is from a forum about the best tagging plugin to use in WordPress.

Best one is "Strictly auto tags"

Works just like a charm and its hell simple to use.

BlackRat

I find 'strictly auto tags' better than simple or tagpig. Fast and superefficient.

theindiaphile


I am using two plugins at same time. Auto tag plugin and strictly auto tag plugin. I have set some fixed number of tags from both...Auto tag plugin is good as it fetch some keywords from Yahoo and tagthenet while strictly auto tag is really cool...once you will use...you will love it...

chdsandeep

From the BlackHatSEO Forum

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/blogging/261512-best-auto-tag-plugin-wordpress.html

I need to start out by saying that no automated tool is going to be able to match the abilities of a good editor or content architect. There are tools, however, that will help streamline the process and take a large amount of that potentially heavy load off your back.

My go to solution for this scenario is the Strictly Auto Tags plugin.

Geoffrey Fortier

http://itswordpress.com/tips-tricks/tag-you-are-it-part-3-auto-tagging-for-the-high-volume-blogger/#sthash.q9C3ghFv.dpuf

WordPress Reviews on Strictly AutoTags

Simple, Powerful and Effective... a MUST have!!!

I love how easy it is to auto-generate relevant tags on all posts or just the ones that are not tagged already.

There are some valuable options in the settings area to fine-tune what you want the plugin to do for your particular site. Great work!

I wish more free plugins were this powerful and effective at doing what they are designed to do.

By lazy_sunday, January 30, 2013 for WP 3.5

http://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/strictly-autotags

Great Tagging Plugin

Am using this on a sports site and it's picking out player names, team names, organisations etc no problems.

By VATCalculatorPlus, May 22, 2014

Great plugin 

it does what it says. 

thanks for such a nice plugin for tagging... 

By anuragk098, October 28, 2013 for WP 3.7                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

User Friendly

User friendly, save lot of time, Increase SEO,INCREASE TRAFFIC

By muqeetsoomro, May 4, 2013

http://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/strictly-autotags

Other sites

Top must have WordPress plugins > http://www.justin.my/2011/11/top-must-have-plugins-for-your-wordpress/

Best SEO WordPress plugins > http://robertmstanley.com/tag/strictly-auto-tags/

Now you have seen some of my reviews I hope that will ease your mind about the quality of the plugin, it's usefulness and ability to increase your sites SEO.

However when used in conjunction with another one of my PRO plugins, Strictly TweetBOT, which has automatic configuration so that the Strictly TweetBOT plugin is linked to the latest edition of Strictly AutoTags.

This means that when a post is being tagged no tweets are sent until the tagging is completed so that post tags and categories are available to be used as #hashtags in your tweets!

The PRO TweetBOT version has an option to disable this auto configuration feature so that tweets are send out immediately after an article is posted.

However I don't recommend turning this on unless you are having problems and are willing to always use default hashtags within your tweets.

I use these two plugins in conjunction with each other on sll my sites and with the new PRO Strictly TweetBot's delay options you can now put your new post into a caching plugin and stagger out your tweets to prevent Twitter Rushes.

With the great dashboard feature and "Test Configuration" option it really is a great tool for autobloggers and when used in conjunction with Strictly AutoTags it makes AutoBlogging a great way to make your site look like it has regulatr unique content as well as unique tweets with relevant #hashtags.

Check both plugins out on my site:

Strictly AutoTags
Strictly TweetBOT

Or on Etsy.com

Strictly Software Etsy.com Shop

Problems with CloudFlare

Problems with CloudFlare

By Strictly-Software

Recently I moved a couple of my sites behind the free Cloudflare proxy option and set the DNS so it pointed to their server rather than the 123reg.co.uk ones I had been using.

However before I did this I tested out whether there was much difference between the sites.

1. I set to use Cloudflare and WP Super Cache.
2. I used WP Super Cache, Widget Cache and WP Minify.

I actually found that that the 2nd set-up gave me better results. Why I don't know.

However in the end due to all the spam and apparent blocking Cloudflare claimed to be able to do I set the other site up behind it.

However after a while I noticed a few things you might want to be aware of

1. I had a number of email scripts that sent out thousands of emails and I used a

set_time_limit(5000);

at the top of the file to ensure it didn't time out by the Virtual Servers standard 30 seconds.

Also and in-between each email (which I appended to a log file) I did a wait command with:

sleep(2);

So that I didn't overkill the server.

However you should be aware that when you use set_time_limit and then use functions like sleep or file_put_contents or file_get_contents the time it takes to wait, access files and retrieve data is not included in the time limit.

Also as I was using Cloudflare, my PHP script which is web based so I can easily call it by hand if I need to, was using the standard domain e.g http://www.mysite.com/mysendemailjob.php.

However Cloudflare it seems has it's own timeout limit which overrides anything you set in Apache or in your PHP file of about 60 seconds.

I noticed this because my script kept bombing out after around 60 seconds and returned a Cloudflare 524 error which you can read about here.




So to get round this problem I used the "direct" domain method they set as default to bypass CloudFlare.

I have obviously changed mine as you should to for security sake but once changed to something else when I ran the url: http://www.mysite.com/mysendemailjob.php it didn't bomb out any-more and carried on until the end.

Another thing you have to be careful about CloudFlare is if you have spent ages filling your IP Table up with IP addresses that you want banned due to spam, hack attempts or just over use.

Because all IP addresses in the Apache Access Log are now CloudFlare addresses these won't be used and you are now relying on ClouldFlare's own security measures to block dangerous IP's.

The same goes for your .htaccess file. If you have banned a whole countries range say China or Russia (biggest hackers on the earth - apart from the NSA of course) then these ranges won't mean jack as the user from China will be going through a CloudFlare proxy IP address to your site so any IP you had banned him from will now be useless.

The only thing left to do is ban by user-agent, blank agents is a good one and so are short ones (less than 10 characters as they are usually jibberish).

I ban most of the standard HTTP libraries like CURL, WGET, WIN HTTP, Snoopy and so on as most script kiddies download a library, and don't even bother changing the user-agent before crawling and spamming. Therefore if someone isn't going to tell me who they really are then they can get a 403!

So they are a few things to watch out for with Cloudflare.

I know you can get modules that replace the Cloudflare IP with the original users IP but if you are on an old Debian Lenny box then they don't have support for that.

They must be supplying x-forwarded-for or other headers as when I did a scan using the bypass URL I got back my original IP but with a www.mysite.com scan I got back CloudFlare IPS e.g 104.28.25.11 etc.

The only thing you can do if you cannot take a modern module and reverse engineer it to older code is use the WordPress CloudFlare plugin that lets you get real Akismet IP addresses so you can still ban them.

It is a pain and one I am debating on whether to return to the days of before Cloudflare where my own security measures meant I banned over 50% of traffic and my server bills didn't go up and up.

"CloudFlare is supposed to save me bandwidth but ever since I have installed it although it claims it has saved me loads my Rackspace bill for bandwidth use has gone up and up!"

So just be careful when using Cloudflare it may seem like a magic tool but all those rocketscripts they add to your code are just "async" attributes and you can get many a plugin to minify your source and compress it on the server without using PHP to do so.

The choice is yours but be warned!

Introducing Strictly TweetBOT PRO

Introducing Strictly TweetBOT PRO

By Strictly-Software

Today I created a premium version of my popular WordPress plugin Strictly TweetBOT.

This is the plugin I use on ALL my sites to automatically send out Tweets to various Twitter accounts related on the content of the article.

For example on my horse racing site UK Horse Racing Tipster I set up multiple TweetBOT Accounts that are linked to various Twitter Accounts e.g @ukhorseracetips and @ukautobot and when an article is posted the system uses the words in each accounts content analysis box to decide whether to send the Tweet out or not.

You can choose to
-Always send the Tweet.
-Only send it if one or more words are in the article.
-Only send it if ALL of the words are in the article.
-Don't send the Tweet if any of the words are in the article.

You can also prevent Tweets being sent if they contain "noise" words. This can be a list of swear words or other words you would never want tweeted.

Linking your accounts with Twitter is easy and using the new OAuth Twitter 1.1 API.

To link an account you set it up, save it, then when the page reloads a link will appear saying "Click Here To Authenticate", when you do you will be taken to Twitter where you login and are given a PIN number.

You go back to the plugin admin page and enter the PIN number in the relevant box. Hit save at the bottom and if the details are correct your account will now be linked to Twitter.

If you have already linked a Twitter account then adding another is easy as it will remember your credentials and authenticate it automatically.

The Admin dashboard will contain information on your last posted tweets and there is a "Test Configuration" button that will test all your accounts, links with Twitter and any problems you may have. Excellent for checking your plugin is set-up correctly.

The best thing about this plugin is you can use the articles post tags as #HashTags and with its automatic configuration with Strictly AutoTags it will wait until the tagging is complete before Tweeting rather than Tweeting on publish which would mean some articles wouldn't have tags at that point.

This is possible because of the new finished_doing_tagging hook in Strictly AutoTags which is fired once Tagging is complete. Other plugin authors are free to use this hook as well to ensure actions are only carried out AFTER tagging and not on the "onsave" action/event.


The PRO version of the plugin is only £25 and contains some very useful features especially if you are sending out a lot of Tweets or have an underpowered server. 

It can be bought on my site: Strictly TweetBOT WordPress plugin
Or on Etsy.com in my shop: The Strictly-Software shop.

The PRO version extends the performance features including those which enable you to send an HTTP request to the new article to put it into a cache (depending on the settings of your caching system e.g WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache) and ensure when the first visitor hits it they get a cached version of the page.

In the PRO version you can do the following:

-Add a delay of X seconds so that after the HTTP request is made no Tweets are sent for a while. This ensures the caching system has time to build and cache the new post.
-Add a query-string to the URL as some caching plugins require special keys or query-string parameters to force the page to be cached.
-Use a special user-agent when making the cache HTTP request. This enables you to track the requests in your Apache Access Log as well as white-listing the user-agent to prevent it from being blocked by .htaccess rules.
-Specify a delay between each Tweet that is sent out from your site. This ensures not too many Tweets hit your account at once and not too much Twitter traffic hits your website all at once. Staggering out your Tweets prevents Twitter Rushes and stops too many new Apache processes from being spawned.

Remember when one Tweet is sent out you will get at least 50 requests to the new post immediately from BOTS who have found the link on Twitter.

This is called a Twitter Rush and can cause major performance problems especially if you are sending out 6+ tweets (6 * 50 = 300 concurrent requests). You can read more about Twitter Rushes here.

Any messages back from Twitter such as posting duplicate Tweets or API errors will be saved and listed in your dashboard so that you can view the status of your last post and all the accounts it tried to tweet to. It will tell you whether the account matched the content analysis or was blocked and the result of any "sleep" or "caching" actions.

The PRO version also allows you to:

-Specify the maximum length a Tweet message can ever have e.g 137. This will ensure all Tweets are sent as sometimes when Tweets are exactly 140 characters long they still get rejected by Twitter.

-Turn off the link between Strictly AutoTags and Strictly TweetBot. If you are having issues with the combination OR just want Tweets to be fired ASAP on publishing whether or not tagging is complete you could turn this option on.

Reasons might be debugging or the use of categories or default hashtags instead of using post tags in your Tweets. If you don't need to use the tags against a post then there is no need to wait in the first place so this option can be disabled.


AutoBlogging - Automatic Posting On WordPress

Combining two of my plugins, Strictly TweetBOT and Strictly AutoTags, make a powerful force for any auto-bloggers out there.

If you are posting your articles by importing them from a feed then these plugins make your site a diamond in the dust.

Not only do you have do nothing but when your feed importer inserts a new article the Strictly AutoTags plugin will do it's job making your article a custom piece of work by:
-Basic content spinning by removing old HTML formatting as B I, FONT and SPAN tags
-Wrapping important tagged content in strong tags to highlight them and tell SERPS like GoogleBOT and YSLURP they are the important words in your article.
-Converting textual links like www.ukhorseracingtipster.com into real clickable links e.g www.ukhorseracingtipster.com.
-Converting a certain number of important tags into links to their relevant tag page.
-Adding rel="nofollow" to existing links in your article that don't already have them as well as those converted to links

Plus the SEO benefits are amazing (as my sites can testify) as the Premium version of the plugin allows you to find certain words and tag others. For example you could find words like al-Qaeda, ISIS, Taliban but add the tag Terrorism. You can add as many of these "Tag Equivalents" as you want.

Also for your "Site Keywords", the words you want associated with your site, for example for my racing site it would be Horse Racing, Racing, Tips, Betting etc, then you can set them to be ranked higher than any other words when it comes to relevancy.

And of course you can specify that words in the Title, H1-6 tags, Anchors, Strong Tags and other content be ranked higher than words outside special format tags.

So the AutoTag plugin does it's magic (read more here) and then once it has completed and you haven't turned the link off between the two plugin the TweetBOT goes to work sending Tweets out to all relevant Twitter accounts.

The Strictly TweetBOT PRO Version is even better than normal because it allows you to stagger your tweeting so they all don't get blasted at once causing a Twitter Rush and because you can format each account differently you could have two accounts both going to the same Twitter Account but with totally different messages.

Plus you can use different tweet shortening functions for each e.g Tweet Shrink or Text Shrink.

For example if the article was about a horse race at Royal Ascot titled "Kingman destroys the pack at Royal Ascot" and the first account was using categories (Ascot, Racing News Horse Racing) as hash tags with the format:

Another Ascot news story %title% which you can read about here %url% %hashtags%

You would get:

Another #Ascot news story Kingman destroys the pack at Royal Ascot which u can rd about here bit.ly/34f53 #RacingNews #HorseRacing

And another account that uses post tags (Kingman, Night of Thunder, Royal Ascot, Ascot and many more) as #hashtags with the format:

Racing news from UK Horse Racing Tipster %url% %title% %hashtags%

Would give you this tweet.

Racing news from UK Horse Racing Tipster bit.ly/34f53 #Kingman destroys the pack at Royal #Ascot #RoyalAscot #NightofThunder #JohnGosden

Putting a time delay of 20 seconds in between each tweet would mean that the first tweet would get sent to your account causing 50+ BOTS and visitors to come and hit your new page (a Twitter Rush) and then 20 seconds later another tweet would be sent causing another lot of visitors. Staggering the tweets prevents Twitter Rushes.

Another new feature is the ability to send an HTTP GET request to your new post hopefully causing it to be cached by WP Super Cache / W3 Total Cache or any other caching plugin.

You have the ability to add another time delay after this request to give the caching plugin time to build the file as well as passing special parameters in the querystring (such as special keys or values required by caching plugins to force a cache).

You can also use a special user-agent to make this request so that you can prevent the request being blocked (for example if you ban blank user-agents like I do) or to identify the request in your log files.

If you don't want to use post tags as #HashTags you can use the articles categories or even specify default hash tags. The system will take the list of possible tags and then order them by size and try to fit as many into the Tweet as possible.

It will now even try and scan the title of the tweet looking for tags contained within the tweet itself and add a # in front of the word as this saves room and allows more hash tags to be used in your %hashtag% parameter.

Buy Strictly TweetBOT PRO

So if you want to aid your WordPress sites performance consider buying the Strictly TweetBOT plugin from my site or Etsy.com or if you download the free version please consider donating some money.

If you want to enhance your auto-blogging capabilities then combining the premium versions of both Strictly TweetBOT PRO and Strictly AutoTags Premium Version will do your site wonders as well as saving you time!

If everyone donated just a single pound for every plugin they had download from WordPress then I would have made hundreds of thousands of pounds by now and could spend my time developing plugins full time AND FOR FREE!

You can also buy a voucher from Etsy.com for £15 that will let you hire me to set the plugin up for you if you are having difficulties or are not a WordPress or Twitter expert. All I would need is access to your admin area to do the work.

Also if you haven't checked lately Strictly AutoTags has a premium version which you can buy for £40 and has LOTS more features than the free WordPress version. It also can be bought with a set-up voucher that you can purchase from Etsy.com.

Also if you could please visit my facebook.com/strictlysoftware fan page and "like" it if you could. Leave comments and pass it onto your friends and fellow WordPress developers.

Strictly AutoTags Fit For WordPress version 3.9.1

Strictly AutoTags Fit For WordPress version 3.9.1

By Strictly-Software

A couple of posts ago I told my users of my plugin that they should be careful if upgrading to WordPress version 3.9.1 as they have totally re-written their core database file wpdb.php to handle a newer format for MySQL queries MySQLi.

They have also added in some good functionality such as their own version for my own fix for their "MySQL Server has gone away" error which just loops for 5 times while trying to re-connect to the database if the connection has been lost. Almost an exact copy of my own idea!

Anyway I was a bit wary about the change but after going over the code in the file I can see they have branched everything out so that if your plugin is still using the older MySQL code-base it will still work.

Basically anything to do with MySQL has an IF statement to check whether the user is using mysqli or not. If not they still run with the older version of the code.

Therefore after a slight issue yesterday which you can read about here: WordPress Forum where a user who was using BOTH Strictly AutoTags AND Strictly TweetBOT ran into an error with JUST the TweetBOT plugin.

There was no mention of Strictly AutoTags which I guess he would have mentioned as he said in the first line he was using BOTH the plugins and the two were working in conjunction with each other. Therefore after some scanning of the code I am 99% sure there isn't a problem with the code and it would be safe to do an update to WordPress 3.9.1.

The issue yesterday was that WordPress had extended their Prepare function so that it ran a test to see if any % signs existed in the SQL statement it raised an error if they didn't. Why they did this I don't know but I removed the prepare function from the offending SQL statement and now Strictly TweetBot works fine with WordPress 3.9.1.

Also I notice in the main section of the plugin page people have put in the compatibility box that it DOES work with version 3.9.1 of the WordPress codebase so if it doesn't someone (or lots of people) are lying!

By the way you can now also buy the premium version of my plugin on etsy.com if you so wish as I setup a shop yesterday. I have already added more products including digital vouchers that will enable you to let me configure your own sites for the best use of my plugins as well as for SEO, security and much more.

Anyway I thought I better let you know in case you were holding off upgrading your WordPress core code base.

In any case (as I do with any big backup - and as WordPress advice) I would backup the files and the database just in case (especially the /wp-includes/wpdb.php file) and if anything goes wrong let me know either here on the blog or on the WordPress support forum.

Thanks

Rob

Problems with WordPress version 3.9 and 3.9.1 - Prepare Statement

Problems with WordPress version 3.9 and 3.9.1 - Prepare Statement

By Strictly-Software

If you have upgraded to WordPress 3.9.1 and suddenly found yourself with a bunch of errors coming from you in every direction it will probably be due to their decision to re-write their wpdb.php class.

Whilst I applaud their decision to implement their own version of my own code that was fixing the "MySQL Server Has Gone Away" Error that seemed to appear everywhere due to lost connections.

It does this by repeatedly calling a "reconnect" in a loop if the error is spawned.

I have to say as a WordPress developer with not much time on his hands that to be told a day before by email (from WordPress) that they were releasing version 3.9 the very next day was not very helpful indeed.

I did warn all my plugin users NOT to upgrade to it (see >  http://blog.strictly-software.com/2014/04/please-dont-upgade-to-wordpress-39.html) as I have no idea what will break with my own plugins if they do.

I still am on 3.8.2 and I won't upgrade until I know I won't be causing a whole shit storm of bugs for myself.

One of these bugs is the prepare statement.

Whilst a newbie PHP / WordPress developer I got into the habit of using $wpdb->prepare all the time when creating inline SQL statements - "where are the decent, transaction, multi recordset returning stored procedures that MS SQL did 10 years ago I still cry in the air at MySQL in vain!"

Therefore a statement like this where I am replacing certain parameters with values is what prepare is aimed for and will work fine in WP 3.9.1

$sql = $wpdb->prepare("UPDATE {$wpdb->posts} SET post_content = %s WHERE id = %d;", $newcontent,$object->ID);

However because of the new re-write of their wpdb.php class in /wp-includes to handle both old and new versions of the MySQL library functions they have also added some unnecessary (or maybe they think they are - forgetting the millions of people who use their code and the plugins built on it) methods and new functionality to existing methods.

One of those is in the prepare method

At the top of the function are these lines of code.

function prepare( $query, $args ) {

if ( is_null( $query ) )
   return;

// This is not meant to be foolproof -- but it will catch obviously incorrect usage.
if ( strpos( $query, '%' ) === false ) {

              _doing_it_wrong( 'wpdb::prepare', sprintf( __( 'The query argument of %s must have a placeholder.' ), 'wpdb::prepare()' ), '3.9' );

}

Notice what it is doing?

It is making sure that the query passed into the prepare method has at least one % symbol in it.

Therefore if you are a plugin write who has just got into the habit of wrapping all their WordPress SQL strings in $wpdb->prepare functions - whether OR NOT they actually have parameters to be replaced you are now in a big hole of doom.

Instead of the error message I guess they hope users see ("The query argument of %s must have a placeholder") is shown to people instead I am getting complaints (see > WordPress bug in my plugin - really WP 3.9.1 ) that don't contain that error message at all.

Instead it will just be a warning that

Warning: Missing argument 2 for wpdb::prepare(), called in XXXX

Therefore quick fixes

1. Use my own wpdb.php class in 3.9.1 and forget about the newer MySQL functions but still have the fix for MySQL Server Has Gone Away and NO ERRORS when Prepare is used without parameters.

2. Remove those lines of code from the top of the wpdb.php class. e.g

function prepare( $query, $args ) {

if ( is_null( $query ) )
   return;

// REMOVE THESE LINES BELOW!
// This is not meant to be foolproof -- but it will catch obviously incorrect usage.
if ( strpos( $query, '%' ) === false ) {

              _doing_it_wrong( 'wpdb::prepare', sprintf( __( 'The query argument of %s must have a placeholder.' ), 'wpdb::prepare()' ), '3.9' );

}

3. Return to using WordPress 3.8.1. There might be some legitimate security holes that the WordPress team have fixed so be careful and check what they actually did in the 3.9 and 3.9.1 updates. Also make sure you are blocking spammers, hackers and the like with tools like fail2ban, .htaccess rules, firewalls, DenyHosts, WordPress firewall plugins and constant analysis of your log files.

Read my article on WordPress security for more information: blog.strictly-software.com/2012/03/wordpress-survival-guide-part-3.html

4. Or get every plugin developer who has used this method without placeholders to rewrite his code, even though he has a hectic day job and may not care or have the time.

If you do - donate!

If you do try and get him to change his code due to WordPress changing theirs as it's not the plugin developers fault in my eyes.

Running WAMP on Windows 8 alongside IIS - 403 Forbidden Index

Problems with WAMP on Windows 8 - Forbidden 403 - Running IIS and Apache side by side

By Strictly-Software

I have just got a new laptop which has come with Windows 8.1.

Thankfully this version of Windows gives me more of  a Windows 7 feel as I really hate those big tablet like buttons. I can't use them as a touch screen anyway and I code not spent all my time on Facebook so they give me no benefit.

I want to get where I am going without Windows telling me how things should look and feel and Windows 8 is numptyfing the user interface even more so that old people can buy their wool with a few swipes but a coder has to hack about for ages to get anything working.

Anyway as I develop in PHP and C#, ASP I need to run both IIS and WAMP side by side on the same PC.

If you have read my earlier article on getting round issues with IIS blocking port 80 you will know that I like to change the port Apache uses to 8888 (a common HTTP alternative) so that I can run both web servers side by side without having to switch IIS off before switching WAMP on and vice versa.

Quick overview is to edit the httpd.conf file and change the listen port from 80 to 8888 e.g

Listen 8888

Also changing the line that mentions the server to:

ServerName localhost: 8888

You can read this article here. Troubleshooting WAMP Server on Windows 7

However with Windows 8 I found this didn't fix the problem and when I tried to access localhost:8888 I would get a Forbidden 403 status error code back when accessing index.php or phpmyadmin.php.

Apparently there are multiple solutions depending on what you want to do with your server.

As Windows 8 is an IPv6 Operating system and WAMP is IPv4 the loopback address is NOT 127.0.0.1 but ::1.

A simple ping to localhost in your command prompt will prove this as you will get back ::1 and not 127.0.0.1.

To fix this problem there are two solutions depending on whether you want to run IIS alongside WAMP. If you don't mind toggling between IIS and WAMP then follow Method 1. If not try Method 2.

Method 1

To get round the differences between WAMP being IPv4 and Windows 8 being IPv6 you need to edit some files.

Instead of changing your httpd.conf file as my previous article does you change the following line.

Listen 80

to

Listen 0.0.0.0:80

Then you would need to edit your hosts file in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc to comment out the line ::1 localhost e.g:

# localhost name resolution is handled within DNS itself.
127.0.0.1       localhost
# ::1                   localhost

However this doesn't stop the issue of running WAMP alongside IIS.

Therefore if you do want both to run side by side without toggling them on/off ignore what I just said and instead follow method 2.

Method 2

Follow all my steps in the earlier article: Troubleshooting WAMP Server on Windows 7 and then you need to also change the following lines of code in your phpmyadmin.conf file which will be in your c:\wamp\alias\ folder to the following:

<Directory "c:/wamp/apps/phpmyadmin3.5.1/">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
    AllowOverride all
        Order Deny,Allow
 Deny from all
 Allow from all
</Directory>

And then in your C:\wamp\bin\apache\apache2.2.22\conf\httpd.conf file (or whatever version you are using) you need to have these lines of code.

Remove the allow from 127.0.0.1 and replace with allow from all like we did in the previous file.

<Directory />
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Order deny,allow
    Allow from all
</Directory>

Now you should be able to access phpmyadmin with either http://localhost:8888/phpmyadmin/ or http://127.0.0.1:8888/phpmyadmin/ and still get your .NET or ASP classic code running with IIS from a simple http://localhost or http://127.0.0.1.

These two methods should sort you out if you get stuck like I did and I am sure when the next version of Windows comes out we will all have some more problems to solve to get WAMP running alongside IIS!

How to send a developer USEFUL information - Debugging Strictly AutoTags

How to send a developer USEFUL information - Debugging Strictly AutoTags

By Strictly-Software

I understand that a lot of people who use CMS systems like Joomla or WordPress don't know how to code otherwise they would be using proper code they had written themselves.

However most people don't know how to code and therefore they install plugins and themes that they download for free and then expect them to do everything they want and more. On top of that they expect instant free support.They don't seem to realise that:
a) A developers time is not spent just working for free on open source projects
b) A donation for time spent fixing a problem that is only apparent to the user in question would be nice at the very least.
c) A developer cannot fix a problem  on a server across the world without:
   -Access to their system or website e.g logins, FTP, SSH, Database etc.
   -Information about the problem and how the developer can go about replicating it to fix it.

If the developer cannot replicate the problem then how on earth are they supposed to be able to fix it for you?

Therefore the first thing you should do if you have a problem with 3rd party code is check to see if other people have had the same PROBLEM and whether the same SOLUTION works for you.

It may be you are asking a common rookie mistake that many previous people have done before and all you need to do is find out from those people what they did to fix it.

However if a search of Google, BING, Techie Forums like stackoverflow.com and others does not reveal an answer then you should go through a step by step guide to narrow down the problem before contacting the developer in question. Believe it or not they do have lives and don't live to fix other peoples bugs.

Below I have reproduced one the debug notes I give out to my WordPress plugin users for one of my own plugins Strictly AutoTags, It should be used as a guide when you are asking for help but please note some questions are plugin specific.

However in general the steps are useful for ALL plugins or problems and therefore they should be read by all WordPress users. 

This step by step routine should ALWAYS be followed by the user before even thinking of emailing me. Also if I do find a problem and fix it for you then some kind of appreciation would be nice e.g a donation would not go a miss.

Steps to narrowing down your problem with a WordPress plugin

1. If you add a post but no tags are added then it does not mean the plugin is not working just that no tags could be found to associate with the post.

2. Test the plugin is working by creating a new post with the following content and saving it as a draft (this is relevant to Strictly AutoTags and may not be needed with your own problem) :

Article Title:

The CIA now admits responsibility for torture at Guantanamo Bay

Content Body:

Today the CIA admitted it was responsible for the recent accusations of torture at Guantanamo Bay.

Billy Bob Johnson, the chief station manager at the Guantanamo Bay prison said that the USA had to hold its hands up and admit that it had allowed its CIA operatives to feed the prisoners nothing but McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken meals whilst forcing them to listen to Christian Rock Music for up to 20 hour periods at a time without any break.

The CIA apologised for the allegations and promised to review its policy of using fast food and Christian Rock Music as a method of torture.

3. Save the draft post and check the number of tags that get added. The plugin should have found a number of words to use even if you have no existing saved tags in your site. It is always best to save the article as a draft, check which tags have been used, remove or add any yourself before publishing an article.

4. Some people have complained that they have added words to the stop/noise word list which still get tagged and think the plugin is broken. This is not the case and the problem is usually that the user hasn't removed any new noise words from the system first BEFORE re-scanning. The noise words are only used in the auto discovery stage of the auto tagging and if tags have already been saved in the system then the site will use them in it's relevancy check whether or not they have been marked as noise words. Version 2.0 has a new option to aid the easy removal of noise words from the saved post tag list and this option should be run whenever new noise words are added.

5. If you have articles with lots of capital words in the title e.g THIS IS A TEST ARTICLE or body then set the Ignore Capital Percentage to a level appropriate for your site. Otherwise words will be treated as acronyms when they shouldn't.

6. If you don't want the plugin to hunt out possible new tags for your site then turn Auto Discovery OFF. Then only existing saved post tags will be used to find relevant tags in new articles.

7. Auto Discovery will find new possible words to use as tags using the settings you give it so set them carefully. However if these new words are not found to be relevant to your article they won't get saved against the post OR in the system. Use the Rank Title and Rank HTML options to ensure words in the post title or already in special formatting HTML such as headers or strong tags are considered more relevant than other words.

8. If you have any problems make sure it not related to Wordpress, your server/hosting or other plugins before requesting support.

9. Please check existing support tickets before writing a new support ticket as the problem may have already been answered.

10. Always disable all other plugins and leave just Strictly AutoTags on before considering it the likely cause of a problem.

11. If you are going to write a new support question that hasn't already been answered can you please provided the following information all which can be got from your host, WP, plugins, DB or a combination of  all.

12. Download the wp-config.php file from your server, edit it and turn the constant WP_DEBUG to TRUE and re-upload e.g

define('WP_DEBUG', false);

define('WP_DEBUG', true);

It will mean your visitors see a lot text all over the screen but it will also help you find any critical errors.

Notices and Warnings do not matter as much. But if you see anything Critical or Erroring - take note to supply the developer with.

If nothing is notable return it to FALSE ASAP!

For example load a version of phpinfo.php onto your server but call it something else so hackers cannot guess it e.g my-3467phpINF.php this way you can see what your server has installed but they can't!

It is very important you tell the developer all of the following information so they know what they are working with.

1. Version of PHP (or other language) you are running (make sure it's compatible with the code)
2. Version of MySQL (or other database system) you are running (make sure it's compatible with the code)
3. Any error message you get when you run the routine that breaks.
4. The time it takes to run before breaking.
5. If you can hit F12 and view the console any Nework/JavaScript errors you may have - also if you have lots of 404's due to missing files fix those as that will cause overhead. If you don't have them just create blank file with the same name.
6. If you can code, turn on the debug constant in the plugin, change your IP in the MyIP function to your own IP address (just type "What is my IP" into Google to get a value, re-upload the file (after backing up) and send me the output of the debug.
7. If you have lots of browser add-ons try it in a fresh install of a new browser, e.g download Opera/Safari for windows and test it on that.
8. If possible install HTTP Fox on FireFox, open it, and then press play just before doing the action that causes the problem. This will give you all the HTTP requests and responses from the server. Look for any 500 status codes or errors. Send me anything unusual - and only related to my site/plugin as it will also record all the plugin guff from your FireFox extensions as well.
9. The more information the better, so screeen shots, video casts (free online, click play, do action, stop, send link etc).and step by step guides of what YOU did to reproduce the problem will help.
10. How many articles are on your site?
11. Is it a big or small site?
12. Do you get hacked a lot?
13. What were the last errors in your hosts error_log (available through VMIN and SSH e.g PUTTY using a less command on the error log)

So although there is more you can do this should be the first things you do when you notice an issue with your code.

Please remember developers are NOT mind readers. So sending in emails or messages like

"When I do X nothing happens"

of

"When I hit the send button it breaks"

Are more than useless.

Please help a developer have a break! And thank them with more than words if they do spend all day and night helping you!

Thanks

Buy Strictly AutoTags NOW!

Remember there ids a PRO version of Strictly AutoTags which you csn buy from etsy.com or my own site.

For only £40 you get all the normal features plus:

• The ability to match on tag but tag another.
• Set up your "TOP TAGS" whih wil be ranked above all overs.
• Turn text links like www.strictly-software.com into real clikable links like www.strictly-software.com.
• Remove old HTML like B and I and replace them with modern tsgs like E and I.
• Set limits on the