Setup a catchall email account in Plesk

As I mentioned in several other articles this blog running is running on a server with Plesk. For my domain I can currently specify only one e-mail address for the domain at my hoster. But since I wanted to use other addresses I took advantage of the Plesk email function.

Since all email addresses of my domain would be forwarded to a single address anyways, I still wanted find a way in Plesk and finally found it. It’s failry easy to setup a so-called catchall email account. The setting, however, is a bit hidden.

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In April still a joke, but now it’s reality!

-In April I wrote about the brilliant April Fool’s joke of tagesschau.de. It reported that the last IP address was assigned and due to maintenance all DNS root servers must be shut down for 24 hours.

Now it is actually so far. They won’t shut down all dedicated server for 24 hours, but the last IPv4 addresses have been assigned (to be precise, the last five code blocks have been awarded) as you can read on tagesschau.de.

But what does this mean? Do we all need to panic? No we do not need to. With IPv6 we there has been a successor for a long time, but it hasn’t been fully enforced, yet. Many ISPs still haven’t converted their entire infrastructure.

I am so excited with which April’s Fools joke the media will come up this year, and how long does it take until it is sad reality.

Addendum:

Now the time has come for the 24-hour shutdown, as golem.de reported. However only large internet companies like Google, Facebook will test their services for 24 hours on IPv6 infrastructure. We will see whether everything still runs smoothly for IPv4 users. The IPv6 Day is planed for June, 8 2011.

Shortcut of the month: CTRL + SHIFT + T (Aptana)

A few days ago I was working with eclipse (or more precisely with Aptana 1.5) on a project. I have accidentally closed a file, although I was not finished yet. In trying to open this file again I could have go to the “Project View” open it through the directory list.

The Shortcut

We know this shortcut from many other programs to open a recently closed window/tab. So why shouldn’t it work in eclipse? So I just tried to reopen the file useing the shortcut:

CTRL + SHIFT + T

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Happy new year and a small shortcut

I wish all my regular readers (and those who want to be) a happy new year 2011. Fortunately, the Jugendmedienschutz-Staatsvertrag has not been adopted, so that I can still safely tell you about interesting topics related to web development.

One of my regular readers is my colleague Michael, who has pointed me on a new shortcut in the office and asked me if it would be worthy of a “shortcut of the month”. He is very handy, but I’m sorry Michael, there are 2 alternatives to it, so he will not make it to a shortcut of the month. But I want to introduce him anyway:

ALT + ESC

With this shortcut you can cycle through the open programs in Windows without seeing the previews of the corresponding program. Strictly speaking, the currently active window moves to the end of the z-order, so it can’t simple be switched back to the previous program by using the shourtcut again.

Because it changes so the usual behavior when switching between programs and since Windows Vista introduced the great “Flip 3D” function, the shortcut is probably used only by very few (if they know him at all). A detailed overview of the program switch shortcuts can be found on the Alt-Tab page in the English Wikipedia.

Now I wish once again a happy new year and enjoy reading my other blog articles!

Shortcut of the monats: ALT + SHIFT (Windows)

For many of you this shortcut will not be new, but I didn’t know him for a long time and many friends who have been using Windows for decades haven’t knew him until recently. I also found him by chance.

The shortcut

The shortcut is at least available in Windows XP and later. Whether it existed also in earlier versions I cannot say at present, because I do not have Windows running in a previous version in a VM or a computer anymore. But now let’s introduce the shortcut and what he is good for:

ALT + SHIFT

With this shortcut you can change the input language in Windows. Those of you, using the “Input Language bar” should see a change in the input language by using the key combination.

But why this shortcut is so important? In a German Windows version mostly German and English are set as input languages and German is set as the default. Many German users accidentally pressed that key combination, without knowing it. Then only in the program you used the combination, the input language switched to English. Since Windows can adjust the input language for each program, the confusion is complete when you switch to another program and the input language is German again.

Conclusion and tip

With this shortcut you can change the language at any time immediately, if you accidentally changed it. As many of you rarely or never use the English keyboard layout (since all the letters can be typed with the German keyboard layout), I’d give you the following advice: The best thing to do is removing the English input language via the control panel. That will protect you from accidentally switching the input language.

Shortcut of the month: CTRL + ALT + J (eclipse)

I don’t actually know if there will always be a shortcut of the month or even one a week, but recently I found a new shortcut, which I would like to share with you. Even after finding it, I couldn’t find any documentation about it in the internet.

The shortcut

But now let’s introduce the shortcut. I work a lot with eclipse (especially with the plugin Aptana). That’s where I accidently found the new shortcut:

CTRL + ALT + J

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Change page title in the Thematic theme with the thematic_doctitle filter

For a blog I use the Thematic Theme. It provides the basis for own so-called Child Themes and can be customized in many ways. In addition to the normal WordPress actions and filters Thematic provides its own Theme Action Hooks and Theme Filter.

Some of them are very well documented and there are examples on the net. But now I append a text to the page title (i.e. the text inside the <title> tags in <head>) of every single page of the blog. Although the function thematic_doctitle() is discussed on the page of the Theme Filters in detail in an example, I could not imagine that it has to be written so complicated and with so many lines of source code. Therefore, I again check the source code to find the lines where the function is defined.

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Customize the WP-Instant Plugin for your theme

All of you have already tried or at least heard of the great new feature of Google, the “Instant Search”. Since this really is a great feature, I decided to program such a plugin for the WordPress community. But despite the enormous extensibility of WordPress this wasn’t an easy task. Unfortunately, for a layman, who previously had no contact with themes, it is probably difficult to get the plugin to work, as he has to go a little deeper into the source code at least twice.

First of all, the original “search loop” must be copied into a file named wp-instant-search-template.php. This file must then be copied into your theme directory. The “search loop” can usually be found in a file called search.php in your theme directory. It might for example look like this (from the old “default” theme):

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