Category Archives: Tech

Gizmos, widgets, and doodads.

WordPress 2.2 Release Candidate 1 Now Available

Last night, rob1n tagged WordPress 2.2 RC1 in the svn repository, and Ryan Boren posted an announcement on his blog. That means that at this point, there shouldn’t be any major feature changes going into this branch, just bugfixes. It also means that it’s almost ready for official release. . [...]

New WordPress Releases: 2.0.10 and 2.1.3

That’s right, two shiny new bugfix/security updates. One for the 2.0 branch and one for the 2.1 branch. There are some small bugfixes in both of these versions, but the main reason to upgrade is for the security fixes (I’m going to write more on that subject later).

Visit the downloads page for version 2.1.3, and the Release Archive for version 2.0.10.

Watch later this month for the release of WordPress 2.2. [...]

My Favorite WordPress Plugins

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. [...]

WordPress.com supports OpenID

The word just went out today that the WordPress.com blog hosting service now supports OpenID, both as a server and a consumer. Supporting it as a server means that if you have a blog on WordPress.com, you can use your blog URL as an OpenID. Supporting it as a consumer means that you can use any OpenID to login to your WordPress.com account (once you’ve associated your OpenIDs with your regular login). [...]

Important: Upgrade to WordPress 2.1.2

In the interest of getting the word out as quickly and as widely as possible, a brief word about a new WordPress release: If you recently installed version 2.1.1, you should upgrade to WordPress 2.1.2 immediately. There was a security breach on the server which housed the download archives, and some files in the 2.1.1 download were modified to include a serious security hole. There are more details in the official WordPress Dev Blog announcement.

While technically this only affects those who downloaded the 2.1.1 .zip or .tar.gz archives from the wordpress.org site in about the last week, it certainly wouldn’t hurt to go ahead and upgrade, even if you downloaded earlier, or installed from SVN. [...]

OpenID News

Since my WordPress upgrade and theme change, the OpenID sign-on functionality here has been a little iffy. I think I’ve got all the kinks worked out now, and it should be working correctly again. There seems to be a buglet in the functions that attempt to automagically add the OpenID login fields to the comment form. So I had to disable that option and manually edit my comment template file to insert the appropriate bits. I don’t like having to modify the theme files (it’s going to make it harder to upgrade when a new version of Sandbox comes out), but that was my best solution, short-term.

In other news, Microsoft is working on interoperability between OpenID and their CardSpace™ framework. [...]

Reinvigorated

Reinvigorate Stats

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. [...]

Site Problems

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. [...]

WordPress 2.1 Released

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. [...]

Atom Publishing Protocol Clients?

Does anyone have a suggestion for a blog client that implements the Atom Publishing Protocol API? I’d prefer a client that runs under Linux, but I could also deal with a Windows-based client using Wine. I’d particularly like to find something that actually attempts to deal with media resources (images, sound files, etc). . [...]