The only problem with any (or most) new Linux installations is that the fonts are blurry and spacing is just off.. So I did some googling and found this thread on the Ubuntu forums, if you follow the 2 simple steps given you’re fonts will look a lot better..

Create a file called .fonts.conf in your home directory (vim ~/.fonts.conf) and paste in the following contents

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
  <match target="font">
    <edit name="autohint" mode="assign">
      <bool>true</bool>
    </edit>
  </match>
</fontconfig>

After that relog.

Apperantly the reason this isn’t done by default is because Apple has some patents on the techniques used to make this happen.. don’t you just hate patents..

Note that I’ve only tried it on Linux Mint 6 (based on Ubuntu 8.10), but I reckon it should work for most distro’s.. gonna try it tomorrow on Centos 4.7 at work.

So I used htaccess to have mod_rewrite redirect the main domain to the “domains” folder… which is the same folder all my other domains use, this way I can have things the way I like.

Here’s the code that you put right inside your public_html folder;

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

RewriteEngine On

ReWriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} naatan.com

ReWriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT} !domains/

ReWriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT} !subdomains/

ReWriteRule ^(.*)$ domains/naatan.com/$1 [L]

</IfModule>

Of course you’re gonna want to replace naatan.com with your domain..

Note that I am placing an ignore on the domains and subdomains folder, seeing as it would keep redirecting indefinitely if I didn’t put that on the domains folder, and I want to have my subdomains in their own folder as well.

Now you can still use htaccess in the main domains folder, but as it’s home directory  is different from the directory the files are actually in (thanks to mod_rewrite) you need to base the path on the homedirectory.. so my .htaccess file for my default domain looks like this;

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule . /domains/naatan.com/index.php [L]

</IfModule>

And voila, I got all my domains in one folder..

I am still hoping for cPanel to allow you to customize this some day.. but it doesn’t seem like this limitation bothers the developers behind cPanel much.

On a small side note, I’ve had a bit of trouble with wordpress admin redirecting after a login using the method described above.. but by simply logging in and then manually entering the wp-admin url it all works fine. Even so, if anyone knows a better way of going about this, I’d love to hear it.

Anyway, I was not the only one getting annoyed by this and so a plugin already exists to fix this behaviour, only this plugin will make ugly nbsp’s appear in your post when editing it, to fix this, simply replace line 39 with the following

$text = str_replace(' ',' ',$text); // Allow NBSP's

That’s it, you should now be able to use multiple spaces in your posts.

After some researching I found this to be quite simple, of course there is unfortunately no global way of doing this for all your widgets at once, since every widget has it’s own backend, but it’s quite easy to achieve and is not limited to widgets, you can use it in plugins and templates all the same.

Simply add the following lines to your code right before you are outputting the string that you want to contain smilies

global $wp_smiliessearch, $wp_smiliesreplace;
$content = preg_replace($wp_smiliessearch, $wp_smiliesreplace, $content);

Replace $content with the name of your string containing the content.

If for whatever reason this does not work for you, try adding the following line before the 2 lines given:

smilies_init();

This will populate the smilie replacement vars.

And that’s it, in this case I was applying it to a widget called MiniPosts (version 0.6.6), you can get the patch file for it here (right click > save as).

To apply the patch on a linux box simply execute the following command

patch -i /path/to/miniposts2.php.patch /path/to/miniposts2.php

Basically what you need to do is add the following 2 lines at line 424 of miniposts2.php

global $wp_smiliessearch, $wp_smiliesreplace;
$text = preg_replace($wp_smiliessearch, $wp_smiliesreplace, $text);

I’d drop the modified miniposts2.php file here but I don’t feel comfortable posting / hosting somebody elses work, I’ll contact the author though.