Category Archives: Blogs

Happenings in the blogging community.

Upgrade or else!

By Dougal | Published: April 8, 2008

UPDATE 2008-04-16: Well crud. I was just re-reading the WP 2.5 announcement post for something else, and spotted a bit about security updates between 2.3.3 and 2.5. So my previous advice about 2.3.3 being okay was incorrect. This is one of the areas where I disagree with the core developement team — if it was up to me, there would be a 2.3.4 security release for those who have good reasons why they can’t upgrade to 2.5 right now.

Okay, people, if you are running any version of WordPress older than ~~2.3.3~~ 2.5*, you need to upgrade now. [...]

Also posted in Search, Security, WordPress | Tagged payattention, Plugins, Search, Security, Spam, Technorati, Themes, upgrade, Upgrades, WordPress | 91 Comments

Roadwork Next 15 Miles

By Dougal | Published: March 13, 2008

I am preparing to move all of my web and email hosting to a new server. I’ve been fortunate to have an in-trade hosting arrangement for many years now (thanks to Jeff at Iguanasoft!). But my host’s owner is winding down some of his equipment, and I had outgrown the server I was on. I’ve secured a new server at Slicehost (a 1024slice running Ubuntu), and I’ll be transitioning my data over the next couple of weeks, as time allows.

I mainly mention this as warning that if my site appears to be down, email bounces, or any other strangeness occurs, it might be because I’m in the middle of moving things around. [...]

Also posted in Announcements, Personal, Servers, Tech, WordPress | Tagged 1024slice, app, hosting, Linux, moving, Servers, Services, slice, slicehost, Ubuntu, WordPress, wordpressmu, wpmu | 22 Comments

Benefits of Blogging

By Dougal | Published: April 27, 2007

My brother-in-law, Bob, has been keeping a blog on wordpress.com for a while now called Arcane Code. He mostly writes about software development using Microsoft tools, because that’s what he does for a living. He’s also had some interesting posts lately about installing various flavors of Linux under Virtual PC, and a long series digging deeply into SQL Server. But one of his most recent posts caught my eye and I wanted to share it: Arcane Thoughts: Benefits of Blogging.

In this article, Bob briefly outlines six benefits that he gets from writing on his blog: Meet and Greet, Self Documenting, Self Promotion, Mentoring, Education, and Giving Back. [...]

Also posted in Blogging, Community, Family, Personal, WordPress | Tagged Microsoft, WordPress | 12 Comments

My Favorite WordPress Plugins

By Dougal | Published: March 13, 2007

One of the coolest things about WordPress is the powerful Plugin API which allows us to create add-ons which can radically extend the basic functions of our sites. Most plugins can be used simply by dropping them into your plugins folder and activating them. I don’t use a ton of plugins compared to some people — I can be a bit picky about what I add. And I’m not going to list every plugin that I’ve got active here, but I thought I’d point out a few of my favorites:

Akismet: There are a lot of people who swear by Bad Behavior or Spam Karma 2. [...]

Also posted in Plugins, Software, Tech, WordPress | Tagged Akismet, PHP, plugin, Plugins, Spam, this-site, WordPress | 35 Comments

Reinvigorated

By Dougal | Published: February 7, 2007

Reinvigorate’s Hourly Stats

About a year-and-a-half ago, I wrote about how the Reinvigorate web stats service was entering a private beta, and I hoped to get a chance to try it out. I applied to the private beta program and waited. And waited. [...]

Also posted in Services, Software, WordPress | Tagged Beta, Google, Sandbox, Statistics, this-site, Web | 15 Comments

Upgraded

By Dougal | Published: February 5, 2007

Okay, I think things are finally (more-or-less) back in shape around here. Sorry about the problems you might encountered here over the past few days. I finally upgraded this site to WordPress 2.1, but I encountered some problems along the way. The problems were really indirectly related to the upgrade, and turned out to be my own dumb fault.

On Friday, I decided to use my lunch hour to perform the upgrade. I backed up my database and my wp-content directory, deleted all the old WP files (I traditionally haven’t bothered with that step, but I knew that several files were renamed/outdated, and I wanted to do some general housecleaning anyhow), installed the new ones, and upgraded the database schema via wp-admin/upgrade.php. [...]

Also posted in Announcements, Personal, Plugins, Themes, WordPress | Tagged Amazon, PHP, plugin, Plugins, Sandbox, Spam, this-site, Upgrades, WordPress | 8 Comments

Site Problems

By Dougal | Published: January 23, 2007

Over the last few days, it’s possible that you might have tried to visit this site and gotten a blank page. It’s not you, it’s me. Or more precisely, it’s my server, and my attempts to eek a little more performance out of it.

The problem seems to come from APC (Alternative PHP Cache). I’m not absolutely sure why it decides to crap out on me like that, but I suspect that the real root of the problem might be some old supporting libraries on this server that need to be updated. [...]

Also posted in Servers, Software, Tech | Tagged Performance, PHP, this-site, Web | Leave a comment

WordPress 2.1 Released

By Dougal | Published: January 22, 2007

Hot off the presses is the latest feature release of our favorite blogware: WordPress 2.1 “Ella”. You can find a bore-you-to-tears detailed list of bugfixes and feature changes in the Milestone report over on Trac. But here’s my version of the short list of changes:

Tabbed WYSIWYG/Code editing: You can now easily switch back and forth between the WYSIWIG (AKA: RTE, or “Rich Text Editor”) and the old-style editor with quicktags.
Autosave: When editing posts, your changes are automatically saved every two minutes, as long as you’ve set a title.
Spellcheck: The RTE now includes a spelling checker. [...]

Also posted in Announcements, Software, WordPress | Tagged Akismet, plugin, Plugins, Releases, Spam, Web, WordPress | 21 Comments

Blogging is like that

By Dougal | Published: November 17, 2006

Plans by Death Cab for Cutie

You know how sometimes a song comes along and gets stuck in your head? But in a good way. [...]

Also posted in Blogging, Music | 6 Comments

Some blog spam cases you might want to watch for

By Dougal | Published: October 27, 2006

I like to think that I’ve got some pretty decent spam prevention measure in place on my server. My mail server uses RBL/DNSBL services and sets maximum limits for certain protocol violations. All my blogs use Akismet for comment spam detection. I’ve got a large number of entries in my comment moderation and blacklist lists. And I hook it all together into my SpamValve plugin, which automatically adds firewall rules to block repeat offenders.

Still, though, occassionally I get bursts of traffic that either aren’t detected by these measures, or that are detected, but the process of handling the connection causes excessive load on the system. [...]