Damn. I keep forgetting that the purpose of this blog isn’t to write profound pieces of prose (or astounding achievements in alliteration). Nope, ‘cuz that’s what killed the last blog… the pressure. This one is all about getting juicy morsels of tech/tips/code/hackery out into that ever expanding void known only as the internet. That way it’s findable. That way, dear reader, you don’t have to suffer as I did.

So having said that, here’s a juicy morsel, in handy tip format: Apparently, Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard changed the location of a crucial MySQL file. PHP can’t find it anymore. To be honest, I don’t know the extent of the damage this causes, but it definitely makes WordPress unhappy (WordPress won’t connect to MySQL. Yeah… that’s somewhat of a problem).  So here’s how you fix it:

1. Crack open the WordPress config file that you’re going to need to crack open to config WordPress anyway. You know, wp-config-sample.php.
2. Punch in the normal config info… database name, username, password…
3. After that, there’s a line that asks for the DB-HOST parameter and then a comment that say’s “99% chance you won’t need to change this value”. Well, guess what? You need to change this value. Change ‘localhost’ to ‘localhost:/tmp/mysql.sock’.
4. Last step, throw your hands in the air and thanks the heavens (or curse the heavens… your call).

It took me about four hours to troubleshoot my way through this. I eventually found the problem buried deep within this tutorial (thanks, Warker!).

This might turn into somewhat of a multi-parter as I’m finding myself becoming increasingly more enchanted with Fluid and the idea of site specific browsers in general (SSB). So, in this post, I would just like to introduce Fluid and the SSB concept.

In one sentence, I’d condense the SSB concept to the following: Confining a website to a single independent browser running as a stand-alone app. Yep. There you go. If I were to expand that into two sentences, I’d add: It feels like you’re running a website as a desktop app. The best way to visualize this is to use an example that many of us are probably familiar with: webmail. Imagine taking Gmail (or Yahoo! Mail… or (god forbid) Hotmail…) and turning it into a desktop application that you can launch in its own space, removed from the browser. Hot!

But why the heck would I even want to do that? Well, many of us (myself included) feel that certain web activities, like email, should be separate from other online activities, like shopping and the ambiguous, surfing (email, for me, and presumable many others, is a constant. If the computer is on, email is happening… not necessarily so with other activities). Using the SSB method, your webmail is now separate from other casual web use. You can close and open and interact with your browser without touching your email.

Okay, enough of that. What about Fluid? So Fluid is a Mac app that creates these SSBs (there are, I’m sure, PC equivalents… but I’ll leave it to another blogger to point to those). Just aim it at a URL and hit go! Next thing you know, you’ve got a brand new app sitting on your desktop (or wherever). It’s just about that easy. What makes Fluid so special though, is some of the other stuff that it can do… like support for custom icons (more on that later), plug-ins, user styles, and the ability to turn the whole dang SSB in to a menu bar app (definitely more on this in a future post)! Oh and if you are turning something like Gmail into an SSB, Fluid will auto-magically change it’s dock badge to reflect the number of unread messages in your inbox (if you’re SSBing Google Reader, it’ll do the same with unread posts)!

Alright, one more geeky thing to note and then we’ll call it a day: WebKit. WebKit is the open source rendering engine behind such browsers as Safari and the lesser known Omniweb and Shiira. Anyway, if the website works in Safari, it’s pretty much gaurunteed to work as a Fluid app because both are using the WebKit engine as their rendering platform.

Homework: Go get Fluid and build a site specific browser! Later, we’ll talk about tricking this thing out…

Need to type out the path to a file? Need to know where it lives? Sure, you could just think it through, but that takes… umm thought: “Okay… let’s see, users/scohen/library/… shoot, is that case sensitive?” Yeah, good luck with that. A better, easier, lazier thing to do is to simply drag and drop the file into a TextEdit window and copy the results.

1. Open TextEdit (make sure you’re in plain text mode… Command+Shift+T toggles back and forth from plain text to rich text). A blank window should appear.
2. Go find the file whose path you are too lazy to type out.
3. Drag and drop it into the TextEdit window. TextEdit will inscribe the full path for you.
4. Copy and paste.

Here comes some blurry video!

See, isn’t that so much easier than thinking? Don’t you think you should give me ten dollars?