Technology Insights

Update WordPress Amazon Product in a Post Plugin 2.X to Amazon Product in a Post Plugin 3.X

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If you use the Amazon Product In A Post Plugin on WordPress you might have either not upgraded yet or decided to not upgrade because the shortcode syntax has changed. You can get around not upgrading by updating the WordPress post content immediately after you upgrade the Amazon Product In A Post Plugin. Below I describe the version that I upgraded and the MySQL syntax used to update the shortcode syntax to display Amazon products in WP posts.

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Append Or Prepend Text To Every Line In Text File With Notepad++

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When I need to use Windows either for Microsoft Office products or some other reason I find myself in Notepad++ a lot. Notepad++ is a great free tool that provides a ton of functionality including the ability to easily add plugins, etc. One great feature of Notepad++ is the Regular Expression capabilities when using find/replace. If you wanted to add data to the beginning of each line or add data to the end of each line you can easily do so using find and replace with Regular Expressions enabled as shown in the below examples.

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Replace A Single Line Of Text In Multiple Files On Mac OSX

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Earlier I was transferring some configuration files from an application on a Windows 7 computer to an application on a OSX Lion computer. The location of a file referenced in the configuration files had changed so I needed to update about a hundred different INI files with the new location. Doing this on OSX is very easy using perl as long as you get the syntax correct as it can be tricky if there are multiple quotes and or slashes. Below is a quick example of a perl command used to replace a single line of text in multiple files without having to modify each file individually.

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Use Notepad++ To Search For Variables In Documents, Notepad++ Reglar Expressions

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I had a document the other day that I needed to search through on my Windows laptop and find specific number combinations that started with a specific three digits and ended with another digit. For example I had a list of thousands of numbers and needed to find any number that matched 333xxx4 where the xxx could be any number combination. At first I wasn’t sure what application I should use on Windows but then I remembered that Notepad++ had regular expression search and replace support. Below is an example of searching for the combination I mention above along with a list of other regular expressions that can be used for matching variables in documents opened with Notepad++.

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Move Skype History From Windows XP To Windows 7

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If you got a new computer like me then you probably want to move your Skype history from your old computer to the new one. In my case I needed to move my Skype history from a Windows XP computer to a Windows 7 computer. This is fairly easy but you want to make sure to do this as quickly as possible so you don’t loose any new conversations on the new computer when you copy the actual data over to the new computer. Follow the directions below and you will have all of your Skype history on the new computer in no time. The below has the same concept on any Operating System but the guidelines are very similar for all Windows computers and Windows Vista has the same path as Windows 7.