WordPress Upgrade

Since updating this website to WordPress v2.8 in the middle of June they’ve released two additional security updates.  Unfortunately, the latest update also required a little extra tinkering and work on my part.  I look on constant security fixes for this fantastic (free!) open source software as a small price to pay for increased security.

Again, the calculators should all be completely impervious to changes in the WordPress program itself.  However, its theoretically possible you might notice a little weirdness in how the website looks/acts.  If so, please drop me a line and let me know so I can take a look.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled rating…

goodmorningohmanishouldreallywritesomenewstuffforthiswebsite!!!

Some days I’m inspired to develop new things for this website.  Here’s a few things I did this morning:[1]

• Added a guest article
• Wrote a new plugin to handle the disclaimers on guest articles
• Added several features to the plugin that displays the related posts
• Edited the theme for this website
• Added a little search engine optimization magic to the site
• Added to and edited the “About” page
• Put together a database of the various WCAB district offices so that I can continue my series of posts providing photos, contact information, and driving directions to each office

1. Photo courtesy of lepiaf.geo

How to stretch your law office's budget

Cost: $0.00

Savings: $150/computer

Here’s an easy way to save your law practice several hundred dollars in the next few months.  The next time you have to purchase a new computer do not buy a copy of MicroSoft Office, MicroSoft Word, or WordPerfect.  Even basic versions of these programs can run several hundred dollars per computer.[1]  You don’t have to purchase these programs!

Try OpenOffice instead!  I have been using OpenOffice on my home and work computers for the last three years and have been extremely happy with it.  I have given copies of this program to family, friends, and colleagues who are also all very happy with it.  I’ve used it for simple correspondence, legal pleadings, spreadsheets, and presentations.

Here are a few “real world” benefits:

OpenOffice is totally 100% free open source software

Free as in free.  Give it to your friends.  Install it at home and on your kids’ computers.  Don’t worry about software piracy.  Its totally, completely, free.

OpenOffice has better document recovery

Its important to know that OpenOffice is much more stable than anything MicroSoft or WordPerfect has to offer.  It is extremely rare that OpenOffice crashes on me.  If you’re using MicroSoft Word and you haven’t saved your document at least once, a single crash will completely erase all of your progress.  The very few times that OpenOffice has crashed on me I have gotten all of my data back – even when I haven’t saved the file once.

OpenOffice has everything you need

OpenOffice has all the features of MicroSoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and WordPerfect.  You can also use the OpenOffice suite of software to open, edit, and save to MicroSoft Word and WordPerfect formats.  It won’t automatically open the MicroSoft Office 2007 formats yet, but you can find plugins and software to do this for you (also for free).  OpenOffice has spell check, grammar check, autocorrect, macros, and templates (even legal pleading templates!).

OpenOffice can do more than its competitors

OpenOffice can save as, open, and even edit a PDF.  Editing a PDF requires a plugin, but it is very easy to install (and also free!).  Just being able to print to a PDF is going to make your documents easier to share with others and, hopefully, one day easier to share with EAMS too.[2][3]

If you’re not convinced to make the leap with your next computer purchase, then download OpenOffice now and give it a shot on your current computer.  Here’s their website link:

Download OpenOffice.org – free word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software

1. Photo courtesy of Krug6
2. Not that EAMS will share with you.
3. Don’t take it personally – EAMS pretty much hates everyone.

Wordpress Upgrade

Last night I updated this website to use WordPress v2.8.  There’s a lot of new features under the hood.  One that I really like is the ability to browse new website themes.

The calculators should all be completely impervious to changes in WordPress.  However, its theoretically possible you might notice a little bit of weirdness in how the rest of the website looks/acts.  If so, please drop me a line and let me know so I can look into it.

Enjoy!

Wordpress

A friend of mine owns and operates a number of websites – all of which run on ASP/.NET/MS-SQL servers.  He knows what he’s talking about, but he’s fairly dismissive of WordPress, PHP, and MySQL.

All this time I’ve been raving about WordPress, telling him that you can basically do anything with it.  I’ve mentioned how easy it is to use, how easy it is to maintain, its open source, how many global corporations use WordPress to build their websites, how its the tool of choice for so many designers, and how huge the WordPress community is.

In the meantime, he’s referring to his millions of rows in his “real-SQL, MicroSoft SQL” database.  I believe he’s been stuck thinking of PHP and MySQL as “kiddie” stuff, just not ready for big time.

That is, he’s been dismissive of WordPress until about two months ago.  In the last two months other people (SEO consultants, professional designers) have been raving about WordPress to him too.

I think he’s finally coming around.

New Laptop

Since I reviewed available netbooks about two months back several new options have opened up.[1] There’s the new Samsung NC110[2][3] and a slew of new Acer One’s.

However, none of them can touch the 4GB Dell Mini 9 on sale right now for $199 with Ubuntu.

I know I had earlier said that 8GB was too small for my purposes. I had even suggested that I was more interested in some of the other available netbooks over the Dell for this reason.  However, I want to make my next computer a Dell, true to my word.

The reason I’m considering the 4GB version where I was dismissing the 8GB version before is the incredible price and the purposes to which such a laptop would be put.  In order to do about 98% of what I need with a laptop, I could easily use a netbook.  On any given day I use:

• Firefox for web browsing
• Thunderbird for e-mail
• Pidgin for instant messaging
• FileZilla for FTP transfers
• Notepad++ for programming/text editing
• OpenOffice for word processing, spreadsheets
• TightVNC for remote access

All of these programs are open source software and available for Ubuntu[4] and Windows.  So, in shopping for a laptop, I really don’t care about which operating system I use.  The 4GB Dell Mini 9 with Ubuntu could do all of these things – and for a $199 price tag.  Plus, with the Mini’s SD card slot, I could pop in an extra 16GB of memory for only $26.

1. Photo courtesy of Ciccio Pizzettaro
2. The Samsung NC110 is the successor to the NC10
3. A review of the NC110 I found helpful
4. An easy-to-use Liniux installation.

Wordpress Upgrade

I upgraded to WordPress v2.7.1 as soon as it came out (after testing on another website, of course).  I can honestly say WordPress is the only software I use that I actually look forward to upgrading.

Since version 2.7 RC 1, upgrading to the next version of WordPress has been this easy:

How to Upgrade WordPress

You click “Upgrade Automatically” and wait about 5 seconds.

You’re done.

Not entirely off topic: a friend of mine asked me yesterday about the best way to put up a new website.  She had thought about using Yahoo Site Builder or some such.  Yahoo and its like are great at building free, quick, and ugly websites.  If you’re going to publish on the internets, why not just opt for something just as easy and that has hundreds, if not thousands of possible totally free themes to choose from?  I say, go with WordPress.

I used to code sites by hand – that’s a chump’s game.  Just install WordPress and call it a day.

Once I tried OpenOffice, I never looked back.  Its my preferred word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, office suite program.  Not only is it better than MicroSoft office in just about every way, but its also completely free.  You might be interested in trying it out because I believe it will help you tremendously with EAMS.

OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org released version 3.0 of their program on October 13, 2008.  It was so wildly popular that their website was crushed under the overwhelming demand.  The three most important things to know about OpenOffice are:

1. Its open source, so its completely free.  So, there’s no reason not to give it a shot.
2. It can open, edit, and save to any MS Office 2000, 2003, 2007, and WordPerfect formats.
3. It can print or export any file to a PDF.

If you’re a Workers’ Compensation professional in California, you’re probably dealing with EAMS.  Since filing things with EAMS means working with a lot of PDF’s.  In order to keep from reinventing the wheel, it makes sense to save those PDF’s of the document cover sheets.  But what if you need to make a small change later on?  Well, OpenOffice v3.0 can help with that too.

Using an extension ((basically a small program)) OpenOffice can open and edit and re-save a PDF file. Not even Adobe, the company that promotes the PDF format[1] , does a good job of opening and editing PDF’s.

This is a really big deal to me because editing saved PDF’s is going to save me a lot of time editing settlement documents and various pleadings.

Update

I wrote the above about a month ago while I gave OpenOffice 3.0 a shot.  It won’t install on my Vista laptop but works great on my XP desktop.  I’ve reverted to OpenOffice 2.4 on the laptop while I wait for a fix.  OpenOffice 2.4 is still free, but it won’t open MS Office 2007 formats (which not everyone is using anyhow) and cannot edit PDFs.

1. I know that’s redundant.

Wordpress

I’ve been upgrading to the latest releases of WordPress as soon as each one comes out.  And, its a good thing too.

Over the last week or two a website named “Wordpresz.org“ ((I’ve edited the link so that it goes to WordPress.org instead.  I don’t want contribute to these hackers fooling anyone else.)) was discovered.  The people who created this website were using a vulenerability in WordPress version 2.6.2 to redirect users to their website.  Their website purported to release WordPress version 2.6.4[1].  The problem was that they had hacked one file in the installation package to create a bigger security vulerability.

This just goes to show that:

1. Monitor for Updates. Many programs these days automatically check to see if new versions are available.  If the program does not have this feature[2] , its a good idea to check about once a month or so.
2. Update Frequently. Not all software updates are equal.  If the program is being updated to fix security vulnerabilities or improve the program’s stability, you definitely want to install the update.  This website’s installation of WordPress was already “inocculated” against this kind of attack because I had alled version 2.6.3 almost as soon as it came out.
3. Use Official Sources. WordPress is open source software built using PHP and MySQL.  Since the program is open source, its easier to modify the code. ((As Uncle Ben said, “With great power comes great responsibility.”))  The themes and plugins available through WordPress.org are reviewed by other users for malicious code and for possible improvements.  If you’re not certain how to examine source code for malicious code, its best to only use official sources.

1. The latest version is 2.6.3 which is just version 2.6.2 with a small but important security fix.
2. Or if you turn it off, as I sometimes do.

Wordpress Upgrade

Quick Update

or those of you keeping score at home, I’ve updated to WordPress v2.6.3 last night. [1]  This version was released as a security fix.  Unlike other WordPress upgrades, this one took only a few seconds.

Less Quick Updates

Admittedly, prior updates probably only take about 10 minutes, max.  This 10 minutes includes roughly 9 minutes of backing the website and database up and 1 minute of actually uploading the new version.  Since the 9 minutes of backing up is essentially all processing/downloading time, there’s nothing for me to monitor which makes the whole process very painless.

Upcoming Updates

The kind folks over at WordPress have been hard at work on the version 2.7. [2]  If you scan through the above link, you’ll get to see what the new WordPress 2.7 control panel/dashboard is supposed to look like.

Best Thing About WordPress

(If you just can’t wait, skip down two paragraphs.)  Regular readers have heard me go on and on about the virtues of WordPress. [3]  The interesting thing about new versions of WordPress is that any upgrades would be seamless to a website visitor. [4]

A website that is easy to read is a function of the author

Website content is really all that matters to a website visitor.  Visitors don’t care about what software a website owner is using – just as long as the content is useful. [5]

A website that is easy to write is a function of the program

The single best thing about WordPress is that this program makes maintaining a website a breeze.  I would recommend WordPress to absolutely anyone interested in creating a website.  For the novice, the program makes it easy to write, edit, and delete single pages or the entire website without any knowledge of programming.  For the tech-minded, the program makes it easy to install, upgrade, and personalize a website.

If you know a little PHP, MySQL, and javascript you could do some c-r-a-z-y things with WordPress. [6][7][8]

1. Talk about unnecessary decimal places.
2. I call them “kind” since a lot of these people are working for free.
3. You know, you three should really form some kind of support group for people who read unnecessarily nerdy and self-referential blogs.
4. I think its interesting, anyhow.
5. If they don’t care about what kind of software, they sure as heck don’t care its version 2.6.3.
6. You could even put together your own workers compensation calculators and EAMS search engines!
7. Am I going overboard with these footnotes?
8. The answer is “No, I’m not going overboard.”  In the immortal words of Ferris Bueller, “You can never go too far.”

Among the myriad of incompatibilities between Microsoft’s various products and operating systems is the mind bending error thrown by Remote Desktop.  Remote Desktop should work between any version of Windows starting with XP.  Even when using full versions of MS operating systems, you will likely still get this error:

The remote computer disconnected the session because of an error in licensing protocol.

89 days and counting...

There are two reasonable ways around this.

• First, if you’re not an advanced Windows user, you should really try TightVNC.  Its small, free, open source, uses very little bandwidth, and is easy to install and use.  It will do probably 90% of everything Remote Desktop will do.  As a bonus, you won’t have to monkey with it every 90 days.

• Second, if you are an advanced Windows user and are comfortable using Regedit, there is another option.  If you’ve never heard of Regedit, you really really should not use this option.  If your Windows registry settings get fouled up, and it is incredibly easy to do, you can kiss your Windows install goodbye.  In any case, the solution is to go to, “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSLicensing” and delete everything under that heading.  The only downside is that this must be performed every 90 days.

FYI, this second ridiculous work around is from the official MicroSoft website!  You’d think that if your product stopped working every 90 days you’d, you know, try to fix it.  Instead their game plan is to actually suggest users delete vital parts of the operating system.

For what its worth, I use a combination of the two solutions.  I fire up Regedit every 90 days so I can use Remote Desktop and I use TightVNC when I can.

1. Photo courtesy of Laffy4k

Fixing things

Changing the website’s theme has involved a few small tweaks[2] :

• For about four days the Articles section was merged with the Blog section.  This has been fixed.
• I’ve found a really great plugin that allows me to insert footnotes into blog posts.[3]  My previous attempts at inserting footnotes manually were either time consuming or incredibly clumsy. [4]
• I’ve made minor alterations to the current theme – background colors, menu ordering, etc.
• Some people were separating their WCAB “legacy” number to ADJ number searches by semi-colons, rather than commas.  I believe there’s really no sense in fighting users. [5]  If a slightly different method makes sense to users, go with it.  I’ve adjusted the WCAB “legacy” number to ADJ number search function so that you can separate by semi-colons or commas.[6]
• In printing out some Average Weekly Wage calculations, I discovered to my dismay that this website looked terrible when you tried to print it out.  Worse yet, the website header, sidebar, and other navigation information took up nearly a page.  This meant that a printout of a calculation might span two or more pages.  I’ve since fixed this using some particularly cool CSS.[7]

1. Click this link see what the prior theme looked like.
2. Photo courtesy of CharlesThompson
3. Cool, no?
4. A special thanks to Mr. Simon Elvery for writing this great footnote plugin.
5. Unlike a certain “web-based” electronic adjudication management system…
6. Or both!
7. Well, my definition of cool, anyhow.

New v5.0

First off, don’t be afraid, this is the same website you’ve come to know and love.  Change can be good!  Besides, this latest change is almost 100% cosmetic.

I have been meaning to change the entire look of PDRater.com for a while now.  Thus far I’ve been focusing on improving the workers’ compensation calculators and the website content.

Previously I showed the evolution of PDRater.com from a ridiculously ugly but useful website into a less ugly and more useful website.  Since these latest changes have been mostly cosmetic rather than functional, this should really be something like Version 4.647.  I figure with adding six new calculators in September and updating the look, I’ve earned the right to call this Version 5.0.

Besides, its my blog, right?

The last theme I used was based upon the fantastic WordPress Themer Kit, which is an incredible tool for people who either have little graphic design skill or who don’t want to build a new theme from scratch.  Ultimately, I just don’t have the skill, time, or inclination to build an aesthetically pleasing theme.  (But, let’s be real, its mostly the lack of skill thing).

That said, I am good at adjusting and incorporating.  The original Aeros theme looked significantly different than the one you see.  I’ve changed the background color, removed the slight transparency, highlighted the different sidebar sections, and moved the top menu to the left side.  Since the theme was open source, this mostly involved tinkering with the CSS and underlying PHP.

How do you like this new theme?  Shoot me an e-mail or leave me a comment.

I’ve already disclosed what a terrible designer I am. Its for this reason I’m looking for a new theme for this website. You know, something that isn’t a step-cousin to ugly. Take a look at the ones I’ve found.

Top Three Contenders

• “Aeros”
  • Pros: Rounded corners and clean looking layout.
  • Cons: I’m not sold on the dark colors or small font in the sidebar showing the menu.
  • Aeros, front page
  • Aeros, calculator page
• “Magicblue”
  • Pros: Clean, straight forward layout, not too many distractions.
  • Cons: The graphic at the top is okay. I’d probably replace it with something else.
  • Magicblue, front page
  • Magicblue, calculator page
• “Business-Style”
  • Pros: This really does look like a business website. Good layout, each section of the sidebar is set apart.
  • Cons: Too monochrome and not enough contrast?
  • Business-Style, front page
  • Business-Style, calculator page

Since you’re here anyhow, you might want to look at the WordPress Themes page. Hundreds of free themes for every occassion. Just in case you’re a glutton for punishment, here’s a few more potential looks for this site.

Top Three Runners-Up

• “Blueberry”
  • Pros: Simple straight forward layout, pleasing color scheme.
  • Cons: Too similar to the current theme?
  • Blueberry, front page
  • Blueberry, calculator page
• “Quickpress”
  • Pros: Simple straightforward layout.
  • Cons: Too blocky and clunky?
  • Quickpress, front page
  • Quickpress, calculator page
• “Blueshadow”
  • Pros: Another straighforward layout.
  • Cons: Theme looks a little cluttered and somewhat like a news blog to me.
  • Blueshadow, front page
  • Blueshadow, calculator page

Let me know what you like and don’t like about them. While I’m no designer, I’m at least capable of chaning parts, combining parts, and putting in new graphics.

“Bonus” Material

These are some of the other themes I briefly considered. Some are just amusing.

1. ParterProgram – Almost as good as Business-Style
2. Nostalgia – GREAT menu system (which I may still use) but too monochrome
3. Extend – A little too flashy for this site
4. 8some – I’m just not a fan of left side menus or the layout
5. Aspire – Good idea if this were a website in the Victorian era or it ran on steam-power
6. Kitten – Everyone loves kittens!
7. YAST – The theme is actually broken to begin with. Not a good sign.
8. Company Website 001 – Another theme that just looks broken

Google Chrome

Google jumped head fist into the browser war last week.

The big players at the moment are Internet Explorer, Firefox/Mozilla, Opera, and Safari (Mac).  From Google’s information about Chrome, it looks like it was designed based on Apple’s popular Webkit and Mozilla’s very popular Firefox.  An added benefit is that this new browser is open source.  Google’s online comic about Chrome and their new vision of how a web browser should look and behave is actually fairly interesting.

The other bit of good news is that I’ve downloaded and installed the beta version of Google’s Chrome in order to see whether it is compatible with this website and its web apps.

Good news!  Chrome works flawlessly with my workers’ compensation calculators!  So, feel free to use your choice of web broswer to calculate permanent disability percentages, temporary disability rates, life pension rates, and nearly every other kind of benefit available under California workers’ compensation law.

Wordpress Upgrade

Last night I upgraded from WordPress v2.6.1 to WordPress v2.6.2.  You’ve heard me extoll the virtues of WordPress.  Free, open source, easy to modify and customize, highly secure and… updated (infuriatingly) often.

If you see any weirdness, please let me know so I can take a look at the issue.

I’ll discuss them later on, but for the ravenously curious my plugins include:

• A plugin that creates rounded corners throughout the website
• A plugin that creates the “accordion” menu effect on the Links and Calculator pages
• A plugin that adds AJAX effects throughout the website
• A plugin that creates a “gray-out” screen over certain pages when you’re not logged in or a registered user
• A plugin that redirects a user to the calculator page when they log in
• A plugin that changes the look and operation of the registration page to be more user friendly
• A plugin that makes lots of little tweaks to the site to make it look and act better (I’m constantly adding to this one)
• A plugin that allows users to sign up for automatically recurring subscriptions using a credit card or their PayPal account (I’m still working to make this more user friendly)

• User Access Control
• It requires more resources (hard drive space, RAM, processor speed)[1]
• It will not work with MS Office 2003

In this day and age, there is exactly one reason to have Windows – Microsoft Office. If you want to play games, you’re better off with an XBox or PlayStation 3. If you want to surf the web, you can use your phone. For anything else, you can use a Mac or Linux.

A friend of mine confided that when her copy of MS Office 2003 didn’t work with Vista she bought MS Office 2007. This exact problem, my copy of MS Office 2003 not being able to run on my laptop running Vista, is why I turned to OpenOffice. Here’s the vicious cycle I perceive:

1. Your old computer is slow.
2. Buy a new computer.
3. New computer comes with newest version of Windows.
4. You buy all new software to run on the new version of Windows.
5. Your computer is now loaded down with so much junk you need a faster computer.

I absolutely refuse to believe Microsoft is incapable of figuring out a way for their newest operating system to work with the world’s most popular office productivity software. The only possible explanation I will accept is that Microsoft is using the manufacturer’s theory of LRR.[2]

1. Compare Windows XP’s requirements to Windows Vista’s for yourself.
2. Lather, rinse, repeat.

• Upgraded from WordPress 2.6 to WordPress 2.6.1
• Infinitesimal changes to the theme
• Adapted a new plugin for WordPress that redirects you directly to the calculator page as soon as you log in

Why keep upgrading WordPress?

Using open source software can be a two-edged sword. On the down side, anyone with the ability to read the source code can figure out the security vulnerabilities. The plus side is that people are constantly working to improve and eliminate those very same security vulnerabilities.

Since people are working on WordPress all the time, it will need to be upgraded all the time. Doing so allows me to take advantage of the latest features and security updates. So far I’ve used WordPress 2.3.2, 2.5, 2.5.1, 2.6, and now 2.6.1.

Why change the theme?

The theme (the “look” of this website) is completely user configurable. Since this website’s launch I’ve been constantly tweaking the look. Minor changes to the color scheme, menu at the top of the website, and how many posts are shown on the blog page.

I work on the theme in order to (hopefully) make the website more aesthetically pleasing and easier to use.

Why the new plugin?

I’d like to make the free registration process as quick and as painless as possible. I’ve had the opportunity to watch a few people go through the free registration process for this website. What I saw was that people were logging in for the first time and were sent to their user page – which looks totally different from the rest of the website. Unfortunately, this caused no end of confusion.

I modified an existing plugin to override website’s default settings to send users directly to the calculator page as soon as they log in.

As I mentioned in the prior post in this series, my first few versions of this website and its workers’ compensation calculators did not use MySQL.  The initial versions of this site only saved information – which meant I only had to use PHP to open a file on the server, add an extra line of information, and then close the file.  This had several problems:

1. Once my website became more popular, it was not uncommon to have more than one user online.  That meant the server tried to open the file – but couldn’t since it was already open.  This caused the program to freak out.
2. In order to view just a little bit of information, I had to download the entire file.  This got crazy pretty quickly.
3. Each time the file got larger, it would take slightly longer to open, append with more information, and close.

MySQL is an incredible tool for storing, organizing, and retrieving a large amount of data.   Like PHP, it is also open-source.  This means it is:

• Well supported.  There are lots of online resources and books to help you learn.
• Secure.  Lots of people spend a lot of time thinking of ways to prevent security vulnerabilities.
• Customizable.  You can configure or even rewrite it, if you wish.
• Interoperability.  You can save it to just about any format – including MS Excel spreadsheets.
• Free.  Unlike Oracle or any of the MS alternatives, it is totally free.

So, why did I avoid MySQL?  I didn’t want to have to learn a whole new programming language.  I had to learn how to set up a database, tables within the database, how to search for information in a table, how to put information into a table, and how to change information which was already in a table.  There was a lot of trial and error.  I ended up doing some pretty cool things in the process of learning this language.  Some examples:

• Teaching others some of the basics of MySQL
• Writing a program for cataloging books
• Writing several programs which performed various calculations to track invoices, billings, etc
• Setting up several blogs/websites

The end result of learning this language is a more interactive website.  One of the last incarnations of this site was a version that would show different color schemes, advertisers, and messages depending upon the user.  All of this was made possible by large amounts of data stored in MySQL.

Thus ends my technical overview of my workers’ compensation permanent disability calculators!  If you have any questions, please feel free to email me or leave a comment below!