Cavalcade of Mammals

Putting video clips on my blog was a bit harder than I expected. I first tried converting the .MOV files the camera writes into .avi files using ffmegX and posting them using <embed> tag code. The files showed up great on my Mac but not at all on a Windows computer.

Flash format files, .flv, are the easiest cross-platform way to post video clips. Flash does require that the site supply a Flash player. There are many Flash players available. I tried OS FLV and it worked nicely.

To edit video files I used avidemux, then ffmegX to convert them to .flv, and I put them on the site using the ‘noscript’ <embed> code suggested by OS FLV with the OS FLV player.swf.

To reset a wordpress password, first generate the hash:

perl -e 'use Digest::MD5(md5_hex);print md5_hex("the_password"),"n";'

then update the password in the database:

mysql
mysql>select * from wp_users;
mysql>update wp_users set user_pass='the_hash_string' where ID=xx;
mysql>exit


I’ve messed with the site’s css style sheets. If it looked OK before, there’s no change. If the layout used to suck, it should be fine now. Css is such a tar baby, I won’t tell you how long it took me.

And I went and downloaded 400+ new mammal pics, should be enough to keep the site in mammals all year!

Daily cycling of the images in the left hand bar is now running!

It’s done with a perl script, cycle_web_images.

Old images go to the cavalcade page.

First post!

The install of WordPress went smoothly:

Unpack WordPress blogging software. Copy to /home/http/html/blog,
Copy wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php and localize:

// ** MySQL settings ** //
define(’DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress’); // The name of the database
define(’DB_USER’, ‘jiml’); // Your MySQL username
define(’DB_PASSWORD’, xxxxx’’); // …and password
define(’DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change
this value

Run http://elegans.uky.edu/blog/wp-admin/install.php

It complains can’t see the DB, so do some hand setup:

MySQL setup:
mysql> create database wordpress;
grant all privileges on wordpress.* to jiml@localhost;
grant file on *.* to jiml@localhost;
grant select on wordpress.* to nobody@localhost;

Last two may be overkill, but can’t hurt.

OK, it tells me, “Now you can log in with the login “admin” and password
“b9cc0a”.”

Login, change password to . Start setup!