Whitney Krape

Blog

  • Hide Google Analytics when Logged into WordPress

    Hide Google Analytics when Logged into WordPress

    Another quick but helpful tip. Most sites use Google Analytics to track visits, pageviews and overall traffic but if you are constantly updating a site you can end up wildly skewing your analytics with constant refreshes. To avoid this, you can go into Google Analytics and add an IP Filter:


    However this doesn’t help much if your updating from different coffee shops, or cities for that matter, on a regular basis. For an easy fix use WordPress “if user logged in” function.

    if ( is_user_logged_in() ) {
    //Also a good place to add scripts specific to logged in users.
    } else {
    //script code
    var _gaq = _gaq || [];
    _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-xxxxxxx-x']);
    _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
    _gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']);

    (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
    })();
    //script code
    }

    Now, no matter where, if you are logged in your constant reloads won’t affect your analytics.

  • Blender 2.5 Network Rendering: Part 02 Windows

    Blender 2.5 Network Rendering: Part 02 Windows

    Windows is a solid platform for animation as all of the major 3D platforms support it; however, making it remote render friendly require it to have command line support. Being able to do remote command line for a machine is essential to keep render maintenance to a minimum. First I will go over the SSH (Secure SHell) setup for Windows then get into the a few changes to add better network and Blender support.

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  • Quick fix for rel=”category tag” in WordPress

    Quick fix for rel=”category tag” in WordPress

    Here is a quick tip for helping WordPress, WordPress 3.2 specifically, with the HTML5 spec. HTML5 spec says that only certain rel types are allowed and WordPress’ “category tag” isn’t one of them. Fortunately I found a good bit of code here http://smalldiary.com/wordpresshow-to-add-nofollow-to-category-links.html which strips out the current rel=”category tag” and adds a rel=”nofollow” as a filter in the fuctions.php file for the theme. By adding it to the functions.php for the theme this provides a theme wide fix rather than having to edit individual templates.

    I altered the code a bit for my uses, however, as I’d still like the search engines crawling around my site so I stripped the code down to:
    add_filter( 'the_category', 'add_nofollow_cat' );  function add_nofollow_cat( $text ) { $text = str_replace('rel="category tag"', "", $text); return $text; }
    Now the W3 Validator has one less WordPress quirk to pickup on.

  • Blender Transparency Map Shadows Quick Fix

    Blender Transparency Map Shadows Quick Fix

    Over the weekend I was working out how to tear a piece of paper in Blender and stumbled on the annoying but easily solvable issue of transparency shadows.

    By default a material will not receive shadows based on the texture but on the geometry of an object. As seen here:

     

    To fix this, go to the receiving material’s proprieties and click “Receive Transparent.”

     

    Now the shadows are based on the texture:

     

    A simple fix, but if you are coming from a 3d software using clip maps or settings on the texture this can be a bit difficult to find. I will be taking a closer look on how this effect is best used and if it affects render times in a later post.

  • Blender 2.5 Network Rendering: Part 01 Systems

    Blender 2.5 Network Rendering: Part 01 Systems

    This post is an outline for setting up an offsite render network mainly for Blender Rendering but also for After Effects and possibly Premiere. I had started a series on this before but ran into a number of problems, which have now been sorted out. The network has been in use for a few weeks now and consists of all of the major platforms; Linux (Ubuntu,) Windows (XP/7,) and OS X.

    The main objective with this setup is to have a remote render farm where work is offloaded from the main workstation and left to work without constant management; however, variations based on individual needs this setup should be easy to do. I will be covering everything from the OS setup for easy remote management to Blender install and setup to terminal commands. I won’t be covering hardware setup, OS installation or general use for each program; there are any number of guides these so no sense going over them again, I’ll be sticking to what you need to manage renders in Blender.

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  • Blender Network Rendering: Quick Update

    I’ve noticed in the past few weeks the site getting more traffic and most of it to the Blender Network Rendering post, there will be an update on this soon. I wanted to point out that the tutorial series isn’t dead but it did end up going though major revisions when put into practice; the changes are mainly due to LuxRender being a bit too heavy for animation use and my workflow switching to Blender 2.5.