Changing the default command prompt directory

When command prompt is started up in Windows, it defaults to the directory X:\Documents and Settings\Username.

This directory can be changed by creating a new registry entry which will contain commands which is automatically executed when command prompt starts. This can be compared to the “autoexec.bat” file which existed in old DOS and Windows systems.

In the Registry editor(Start> Run> regedit), navigate to “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor”. Click on Edit> New> Expandable String Value. Type in Autorun as the name and press Enter. Check that the value type is ‘REG_EXPAND_SZ’. Double-click on “Autrun”, and enter in the value data cd c:\desired_folder\. This command will be executed every time command prompt starts, and you will start right in your desired folder.

Disable user authentication after resuming from Stand By mode

By default, Windows will ask for your password every time your computer resumes from the stand-by mode. This may be useful for a public workstation or unattended laptops; but for a personal computer, it’s useless and to some extent, annoying.

To disable to authentication, follow these steps :

Windows XP

• Go to Start-> Control Panel ->Performance and Maintenance -> Power Options.
• Under the Advanced tab, in the Options settings, uncheck “Prompt for password when computer resumes from standby”

Windows Vista

• Go to Start, and type in “Power Options” and press Enter.
• Click “Change plan settings” for your selected plan, then click “Change advanced power settings“. In the dialog box that appears, click “Change settings that are currently unavailable” and go through the  User Account Control.
• Go to the “Require a password on wakeup” option and just select “No”. Then click “OK”.

After completing these steps, the computer wil not ask for passwords after resuming from standby mode.

Disable the compulsory automatic delay while installing plugins in Firefox

For those of you who use Mozilla Firefox, you must’ve noticed the customary 2 seconds delay while installing plugins. This may be useful for new users, but for experienced users and developers, who install a lot of plugins for testing purposes, this automatic delay just serves to slow down work.

To disable the compulsory delay, type in about:config in the address bar. If you are editing the browser variables for the first time, select “I will be careful, I promise!”. In the filter field, type in security.dialog_enable_delay. Double click on the entry to modify it. Enter the delay time value in milliseconds. If you want to disable the delay completely, enter 0 as the value.

Now you’ll be instaling plugins without any delay.

Prevent duplicate indexing while moving threads in phpBB

Moving phpBB topic/thread

Moving a thread from one forum to another cause duplicate indexing issues in phpBB3. In such cases, both the old URL and the new URL return a “200 Found” header response, even though the thread doesn’t exist in the old forum. Ideally, the old URL should 301 redirect to the new URL. In this post we’ll learn how to do this.

phpBB uses query strings like f=X&t=Y to determine which thread to serve, where ‘X’ is the forum id and ‘Y’ is the thread id. In a “view topic” URL, the f=X part of the query string serves no purpose except to note which forum the user is browsing and accordingly reflect it in the “Who is online” page. In fact, threads can be accessed using any ‘f=X’ value, even using non-existant forum ids. This isn’t much of a problem in normal situation, as the threads are linked using their corresponding forum ids, but the duplicate indexing problem arises when a thread(s) is moved from on forum to another.

Since we need to change query strings here, neither Redirect nor RedirectMatch will work as they don’t take query strings into account. We need to use RedirectCond using QUERY_STRING and a RewriteRule directive to externally rewrite the URL. We will will also send a “301 Permanently Moved” response header so that the spiders know the page has been moved. Let us suppose that a thread with thread id 5 is being moved from forum with forum id 1 to forum with id 2. Therefore, the old URL :

http://domain.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5

And the new URL :

http://domain.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5

We need to redirect the first URL to the second. Add these codes to your .htaccess file :

RewriteEngine On # Skip this if you have already turned on the rewriting engine
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^f=1\&t=5$
RewriteRule ^viewtopic\.php$ /viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^f=1\&t=5\&start=([0-9]*)$
RewriteRule ^viewtopic\.php$ /viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5&start=%1 [R=301,L]

Skip the first line if you have already turned on the rewriting engine in your .htaccess file. The second RewriteRule redirects the other pages of the thread (with URL like viewtopic.php?f=X&t=Y&start=10). For each thread moved, we need to add these directives in the .htaccess file, changing the forum ids and topic id’s as necessary.

This method seems tedious and cumbersome, but this is the only method I could devise as of now. If anyone has a better method, you are welcome to leave a comment.

Add keywords and description to phpBB’s index page without installing a mod

In these days of intelligent search engines, meta keywords and descriptions do not play a major role in SEO. Crawlers are more interested in the contents of the page rather than it’s keywords and descriptions. However, some people might still want to add keywords and descriptions to their pages, seeing that search engines like Yahoo still put some weightage on them.

A vanilla phpBB installation does contain keyword and description meta element, but they do not have any content. Here’s an easy to add meta keywords and description to phpBB’s index page without installing and/or maintaining any kind of a mod.

• Go to /styles/prosilver/template/ and open the overall_header.html file with your favourite text editor. Click Edit > Select all, or just press ‘Ctrl +A’. After that, copy the selected code by clicking Edit > Copy or by pressing ‘Ctrl + V’.
• Create a new HTML file in the same directory and name it index_header.html.
• Open the newly created file and paste the contents of the clipboard in it.
• In index_header.html, find :

  <meta name="keywords" content="" />

  Replace with :

  <meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3" />

  Find :

  <meta name="description" content="" />

  Replace with :

  <meta name="description" content="Here goes the description" />

• Open /styles/prosilver/template/index_body.html.
• Find :

  <!-- INCLUDE overall_header.html -->

• Replace with :

<!-- INCLUDE index_header.html -->

From now on remember to update index_header.html when you make changes to overall_header.html, or else, the changes won’t show up in the index page.