March 13, 2007 – 11:55 am
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. [...]
February 13, 2007 – 2:01 pm
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. [...]
By Dougal
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Posted in Microformats, OpenID, Services, Standards, Tech, Themes, WordPress
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Also tagged FOAF, hCard, Identity, Microsoft, plugin, Sandbox, SingleSignOn, SSO, Web, WordPress, yahoo
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February 5, 2007 – 1:57 pm
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all the old WP files (I traditionally haven’t bothered with that step, but I knew that several files were renamed/outdated, and I wanted to do some general housecleaning anyhow), installed the new ones, and upgraded the database schema via wp-admin/upgrade.php. [...]
By Dougal
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Posted in Announcements, Blogs, Personal, Plugins, Themes, WordPress
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Also tagged Amazon, plugin, Plugins, Sandbox, Spam, this-site, Upgrades, WordPress
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January 30, 2007 – 12:22 am
I’ve spent some time converting my Rockem Sockem theme to a Sandbox skin, and getting my Now Playing hack converted into a sidebar widget. I’m more-or-less happy with the results, so I’ll be throwing the switch sometime soon. Be on the lookout for changes around here, and let me know if you spot anything broken.
January 23, 2007 – 11:54 am
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. [...]
January 19, 2007 – 2:20 pm
I’ve added OpenID authentication here, thanks to the excellent WordPress OpenID Plugin from VerseLogic. If you already have an OpenID identity, you can now use it when commenting here, and your name will be flagged with an icon to signify that your identity was confirmed. If you don’t already have one, you can sign up with any of several OpenID providers. I use MyOpenId.com for mine.
If you want to read more about what OpenID is about, try starting with Simon Willison’s excellent post, How to turn your blog into an OpenID. [...]
January 16, 2007 – 10:34 am
WordPress 2.0.7 has been released (yes, I know I missed announcing 2.0.6, but I was on vacation). The major focus of this release was a new security patch under certain versions of PHP with register_globals turned on, plus a fix in Conditional GET support under certain combinations of IIS/PHP-CGI versions (AKA the “Feedburner bug”). [...]
September 18, 2006 – 4:41 pm
For quite a while, I had considered nuking Windows from my laptop and starting fresh. A few weeks ago, I finally took the plunge. I started with a full backup (two, actually — a file-by-file backup, and a partition image). I toyed with the idea of dual-booting, but finally decided that I’d try to go completely non-Windows, and see how well I could get by.
After hearing one of my co-workers rave about how impressed he was with Fedora Core, I was going to give that a try. But the DVD he burned for me wouldn’t install for some reason. [...]
By Dougal
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Posted in Browsers, Linux, Open Source, Operating Systems, Tech
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Also tagged Firefox, InternetExplorer, Laptops, Microsoft, Perl, Ruby, Ubuntu, Unix, Windows
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I’ve been planning to write up a plugin to serve as an example of using the WordPress Object Cache, but haven’t had time to finish it up. However, this topic came up on the wp-hackers mailing list recently, so I thought that I would go ahead and give a brief rundown on how to use the cache from within your own plugins.
The goal of the WordPress Object Cache is to provide a way to persistently store results from expensive queries in an external cache file. [...]
Some blog spam cases you might want to watch for
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. [...]