Itch Away

How2 Vol 3 No 3 is Live

At the end of last week, I finally pushed the button and put How2 LIVE!!!

As usual, it's a very large issue, with several substantial features, as outlined in the full flyer in this post, but there are a couple of other noteworthy extras with this issue: the new blog, and How2's presence on Twitter.

Regular Expressions

Regular expressions are used to detect and / or replace text from a given text input. RegExr is an online testing environment for formulating regular expressions. There is also an Air-based desktop app available for free download.

Experimental Gameplay Project

The Experimental Gameplay Project is a fascinating forum for developers to create varied and engaging games within thematic and time constraints.

It is hardly a new thought to suggest that the computation of a piece of art is integral to the art itself, but there is something in the improvisational method involved with coding in such desperately short spaces of time that foregrounds the modularity of such forms of writing.

Silliman Remixes, 2

Organize, see?
bird lets you prison view
anorexic spare point

in fact,
prison happens.

To garden with black face.

The it who will read –
empire women to
suburbs!
Joyous event shelves
skin tone

Language is entitled
to price.
I was realism immediately

an appendix as
perfect,
don’t… don’t not
blame
a place to Florida
in villainous orbit

Zyllimann

From a coded remix of Silliman’s blog, 3rd November 2009.

I have this ontological problem:
be young
a Pedro thug
one which shouts in no
way twice. what cut earlier wonders attempt. but One short
Robert Ronnow Lubbock
perhaps by color
neighbor & protégé
or won’t be
Los Angeles
where is the world I know?

by inference at least
it ran to 90 minutes
Events
even instruction
is entirely hateful as was consequence
terrain in analogy
problem birds red

that of the poem.
turn in Not toward

Tan Lin at PennSound

There are several Tan Lin videos now being hosted on PennSound.

Pretty fascinating kinetic texts here. I was particularly interested in Disco Eats Itself, which combines typed-out text animated and obscured / obstructed through Flash with a corresponding visual track of YouTube videos tagged with "Disco".

WordPress, Godaddy, Windows Hosting and Contact Forms

I have recently been working with a client on Godaddy’s Windows hosting, who wanted a WordPress blog transferred over to this hosting.  These days, with IIS 7.0 and PHP 5, hosting a WordPress blog on Windows is not a huge problem.  Using a standard PHP-based contact form plugin, however, is not so straghtforward.

What’s the problem?

WordPress and (as far as I can tell) all contact form plugins seem to use PHP’s mail() function to send mail through the web.  By and large, this is a convenient and configurable solution. However, it seems that on Windows hosting, this function will not work.  The only alternative is to use SMTP to send emails.

Thankfully there are two useful plugins and a decent tutorial out there, if you are using Contact Form 7. This tutorial is also useful for those using other contact form plugins who may be running into the same problem.

WP-Mail-SMTP

Cimy Swift SMTP

Contact Form 7

Tutorial by Mario Vargas

However, following these tutorials led to a further frustration. Though the test emails from each SMTP plugin’s setup pages sent perfectly, the forms still failed to work. It couldn’t be a hosting setup issue, but had to be a plugin issue.

The person who had worked on the blog originally had installed the wp-contact-form plugin. Having updated this, I was receiving errors relating to sending issues every time I tested the form live. Then I had a thought: the plugins that fix the mail() issue and convert to SMTP do so by telling WordPress how to send the emails.  Since WordPress has its own email sending function, it then made sense that forcing the mailing plugins to use this function might make things work again. Furthermore, delving into the SMTP plugins and looking at how they sent their test emails (which by this time I knew were working correctly) showed that they were using WordPress’s send function. This makes sense; the test send has to use the same method or it’s not much of a test!

And that’s where I finally had success. I was working with the wp-contact-form, and I opened up the plugin file (wp-contactform.php) in an editor (you can go to Plugins, find the plugin and click “Edit” too, if you do not have FTP access) and found the line of code that actually sends the email.  On 1.5.1.1, this is line 143. The code should read as follows:

mail($recipient, $subject, $fullmsg, $headers);

Ready for some extensive editing? Here goes. Modify this line to use the WordPress mail function instead:

wp_mail($recipient, $subject, $fullmsg, $headers);

That’s it! Hopefully everything should finally be working as expected.

I have not tested this out with Contact Form 7 yet, but if, after using Mario’s tutorials above, you still have no luck, try modifying the plugin in the same way…

Blackbox Manifold, Issue 3 (July 2009)

There is a new(ish) issue of Blackbox Manifold out, with poems by Dorothy Alexander, Simon Armitage, Jim Benz, Caroline Bergvall, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Iain Britton, Glenn R. Frantz, Giles Goodland, Robert Hampson, Kate Lilley, James McLaughlin, Bill Manhire, D.S. Marriott, Peter Middleton, Helen Mort, Burgess Needle, Ian Patterson, Robert Rehder, Steven Waling, John Welch and John Whale, and a review essay by Adam Piette on Geoffrey Hill.

Visualcomplexity.com

As internet software, and our interaction with it, evolves, so to does the representation of the data being used. An increasing amount of web-based services now incorporate data from multiple sources, integrating databased information to represent some sort of compiled narrative. Furthermore, this is not limited to the mining of data from static websites but includes the input of data direct from social media accounts such as Twitter, Facebook, and from GPS-enabled devices such as the iPhone. Such visual mashups reflect trends and merge information in unexpected ways to produce interesting ways to perceive the information being mined.

Visualcomplexity.com is a site dedicated to being interested in such data collection, and showcases various projects whose visual representations of data produce new, original and sometimes useful (such as the Google Maps traffic visualization) mappings of data which either live online or interact with online technologies.

New Website, Geoffrey Olsen, is up

I have just finished working on the site for artist Geoffrey Olsen. I designed the site way back at the beginning of the year, and programmed it more recently, in time for a launch to coincide with that of the exhibition being held at The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Florida International University, on 2nd September 2009. The site is designed to be regularly updatable with content regarding further exhibitions, news items and catalogues. With a WordPress theme built from scratch and a smattering of jQuery for improved front-end presentation, the site creates a presence which foregrounds the visual, and can be updated whilst remaining well-structured and organised.