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Computer repair is not just for geeks. You can repair your own computer too. We’ll show you how.

About Us

Geek Teks was a company that was founded in 2003, shortly before the word “geek” started to become so popular in other computer repair company names. It is not our goal to prove our originality in name. However, it is our goal to prove our trustworthiness and unparalleled quality of service offered to our clients. As a company, Geek Teks has attempted to formulate a business model that will provide our clients with a level of trust which is hard to find elsewhere in the industry. For proof...(click here for more)

Videobox - Lightbox for Videos

As I stated in my previous post, I am fairly new to this whole web blog / web designing thing. Out of necessity for our company’s business success, I have had to learn how to do some basic web designing and blog creation. While I have been learning, I have also been having a lot of fun trying new plugins and new code on our site and blog. I came across many sites that were using lightbox for pictures. This is not that new or exciting because it seems like almost every blog is using some kind of variant plugin which seems to have spun off the original lightbox. But (excuse me if I am wrong) it didn’t seem like many people were using lightbox to display their videos. In fact, I had a hard time locating the videobox plugin at all. It wasn’t in any of the common wordpress repositories, at least that I could find when I searched. When I finally did locate this great plugin, I found it on a site hosted somewhere in South America and I had to use Google to translate the page so that I could get some basic instructions on how to use the plugin. And I found that after all this, the instructions given were incorrect. Therefore, I had to look into the code of the plugin to figure out what the parameters for using this plugin should be. And since I am not a coder and I know many wordpress bloggers are also not coders, I thought my success and instructions for installing and using this great plugin might be helpful to those out there also attempting to do the same thing with their blog. But first, let me show you what the plugin does and explain the reasons as to why you might want to install the plugin on your blog or site.

Example:


Click here to demo.

As you can see, there are several reasons why this plugin might be useful for displaying videos on your blog or site; but allow me to enumerate just a few:

  1. It is neat. It seems like embedded video often appears to look sloppy when displayed on most blogs. With “videobox”, the appearance is much neater for a few reasons:
    • Size can be adjusted. The size of the video thumbnail can be enlarged or shrunk to the size of your choosing. This is a very beneficial aspect, especially for those blogs that display a large amount of video content.
    • Text can be wrapped around the thumbnail. Unlike embedded video, with videobox your text can be wrapped around the thumbnail image but I did not demonstrate that capability in this example. This would help to save even more valuable space.
    • You can choose any image thumbnail to most accurately demonstrate what your video will be about. With most embedded video you are not allowed to specify what the thumbnail picture will be.
  2. It’s just plain cool. Of course, this second point, is just a matter of opinion. But if you agree, let me now briefly explain how to install it.

Here’s how to install the Videobox plugin:

  1. Download and unzip the plugin. Install the folder contents to your wordpress plugin directory.
  2. Activate the plugin.
  3. To use, simply add rel=”videobox” to the anchor tag of your video clip thumbnail. Within the rel=”videobox” tag you can add dimensions to your video’s size if you want. In my video example above, I made the video size to be 600×450. Notice the code example below. I simply edited the tag to be rel=”videobox 600 450″. So here is how my code looked for the above video example:

<a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWfIhFhelm8″ rel=”vidbox 600 450″ title=”Ron Paul, a real life American patriot.”><img src=”http://img.youtube.com/vi/IWfIhFhelm8/2.jpg” />Click here to demo.</a>

That’s it. Yes it really is that easy! And trust me, I am very new to blogging (less than 10 post old) and so if I can do it, truly anybody can.

As always, if you found this blog article helpful or useful in any way, please digg or social bookmark it, or both.

-Kyle

Popularity: 30% [?]

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. 25 Jan 08 | Web Design | Comment (1)

Bad Behavior 2.0.11 Wordpress Plugin Blocking Digg Submission

2

OK. I am fairly new (less than a dozen posts old) at this whole Wordpress blogging thing. So when I run into problems, sometimes I am just not quite sure whether I am the problem or the software I am working with. Almost always it ends up being the latter for which I am glad since this helps to support the fact that maybe I am somewhat capable of helping to manage and run a nationwide computer repair company. Anyways, let’s get to the chase here. I know social submission is important to promoting your website or blog. So before I started this blog, I tried to include some important wordpress plugins prior to publicizing some of my articles. My mistake was really to add all of my plugins at the same time. Do not do this! Because of this mistake I was not easily able to narrow down what was causing the problem I was having when I attempted to submit my articles to Digg. I kept on getting, “This link does not appear to be a working link. Please check the URL and try again.” So yesterday, I wasted a few hours racking my feeble brain and trying to figure out which one of the twenty thousand plugins I had installed could be causing the problem. I knew it couldn’t be:

  • My links: I had checked them all and they were fine.
  • My WWW- Redirect plugin - I though maybe Digg didn’t like the submission of redirect links. They don’t. But this was not the problem. After deactivating this plugin the problem still existed.
  • Couldn’t be my Digg account. I just recently signed up and barely have any activity on the account. I could log in and digg other stories.

It must be something else. And that is when I had the epiphany. Could it be one of my spam prevention plugins? Long story short, turns out that is exactly what it was. Bad Behaviour (I have v. 2.0.11) was preventing me from submitting my articles to Digg. Problem is that I am so new to Wordpress, blogging, PHP code, plugins, etc. that I did not think I would be able to fix it. And, as of the writing of this article, I really couldn’t find any information on how to fix the problem. So why not use my new blog to help others who might be having the exact same problem. And that is exactly why I have written this article.

How to fix Bad Behavior 2.0.11 from blocking your diggs:

  1. Locate the “whitelist.inc.php” file: It should be in “(your blog’s root)/wp-content/plugins/bad-behavior/bad-behavior”
  2. Edit this file with notepad.

    3. pic1.gif
3. Find the following code,
“$bb2_whitelist_ip_ranges = array(” and add 64.191.203.34 to next line of
whitelisted ip’s. This is Digg’s ip and it will unblock Digg from Bad
Behavior and allow you to now make Digg submissions without those annoying
errors:
Click on the picture for the clearer full size picture.
Now if you found this blog article helpful or useful in any way, please
digg it. I am trying to figure out what kind of information is going to
drive traffic to this blog.Thank you.-Kyle

Popularity: 32% [?]

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

. 14 Dec 07 | Web Design | Comments (0)

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