Tag Archives: WordPress

No more daily Twitter posts

January 15, 2008 – 2:11 pm

Just as with my daily del.icio.us link posting experiment in the past, I have decided to discontinue my automated daily Twitter summary. I will continue posting to Twitter, and the most recent of my tweets will be displayed in my sidebar here. But think they should remain separate from my main blog content. I just feel like they “clutter” things up here, and the things I post on Twitter are different in scope from what I normally post in my blog.

I will likely continue to post mostly technical observations here in my blog (with the occasional side-track into non-technical areas). [...]

By Dougal | Posted in Blogging, Community, Services, Tech | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (8)

Merry Christmas to me!

December 18, 2007 – 12:26 pm
Crowd Favorite

I get to unwrap one of my presents early this year, and it ranks up there with some of the best — a new job! I’ll be working with Alex King and the other fine folks at Crowd Favorite. I’m really excited to have the opportunity to work with this crew to tackle some great projects.

Four years ago, when I joined in on the development of WordPress, it was just a fun thing to do on the side. [...]

By Dougal | Posted in CrowdFavorite, Personal, WordPress, Work | Also tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (14)

Twitterings

December 13, 2007 – 6:04 pm

You might have already noticed, but I finally hopped onto the Twitter bandwagon. You can see my latest tweets in the sidebar (it’s the “What I’m Doing” section), and I currently have it auto-posting a daily summary here on the blog (courtesy of the Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress). I’m not sure if I’ll continue that or not, though. Of course, if you are also on Twitter, you can just follow my tweets with whatever method you prefer.

When Twitter first started, I didn’t think I’d see much value in it. [...]

By Dougal | Posted in Blogging, Community, Plugins, Services, WordPress | Also tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (26)

Twitter Updates for 2007-12-10

December 10, 2007 – 11:59 pm
  • Watching the baby while my wife is at a job interview. #
  • Finally made to the the office a little while ago. Had to drop my car off at the dealership for "Check Engine" diagnosis. :-/ #
  • Need help getting PHP PEAR SOAP client to talk to a .NET service. The server end doesn’t seem to see the parameters my client is sending. [...]

By Dougal | Posted in Whatever | Also tagged , , | Comments (3)

Easy Gravatars version 1.1

November 16, 2007 – 11:26 am

My Easy Gravatars plugin is now in the WordPress Plugin Directory, and I’ve released version 1.1.

Changes:

  • Gravatar images now link to comment author’s URL, if provided.
  • Gravatar code now prepended to text instead of appended.
  • Added stylesheet for options page and improved layout. Split options into
    ‘General’ and ‘Advanced’.
  • New advanced option for selecting either ‘Comment Author Link’ or ‘Comment
    Text’ API hook.

When time allows, I’m going to try to add support for favicons on pingbacks and trackbacks, and maybe as a fallback for people without Gravatars. [...]

By Dougal | Posted in Plugins, WordPress | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (46)

Easy Gravatars with Google Analytics Plugin

November 9, 2007 – 9:56 am

Several people have reported problems using my Easy Gravatars plugin together with Joost de Valk’s Google Analytics Plugin for WordPress. I spent some time looking over the code yesterday and found the conflict. I sent a patch to Joost, and he has released version 1.4 of his Google Analytics plugin. . [...]

By Dougal | Posted in Plugins, WordPress | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (6)

Creating a secure WordPress install

October 30, 2007 – 5:23 pm

Over on BlogSecurity, there’s a whitepaper on How to create a secure WordPress install. It covers several areas, including MySQL setup, WordPress user configuration, Apache protection of directories, and some useful plugins. I’ve glanced over it, and I have mixed feelings. Here’s a quick list of notes, off the top of my head:

Pros:

  • There is detailed information about granting the minimum privileges necessary for the MySQL login. This is a good idea that many people probably don’t think about.
  • Creating a less privileged WordPress account for posting, separate from your blog admin login, is also a good suggestion.
  • The notes on password enumeration are important. [...]

By Dougal | Posted in Security, WordPress | Also tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (27)

Easy Gravatars Plugin

October 24, 2007 – 6:33 pm

Since so many people seemed to be interested, I went ahead and coded up my new Gravatars plugin: Easy Gravatars. It’s designed to be simple to use — just upload and activate. If you want it to be a little harder, you can visit the plugin’s options page to set the size and rating for the gravatars, and even set the location of a default image, and tweak the CSS a little bit.

Download: easygravatars.zip

I’m going to put it in the WordPress Plugin Repository when I get a chance. [...]

By Dougal | Posted in Plugins, WordPress | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (135)

Gravatars

October 22, 2007 – 2:42 pm

Even before the recent announcement about Gravatar joining Automattic, I had been wanting to turn on comment avatars here. I nabbed Matt’s code, fooled with it a little, and now my comments are Gravatar enabled.

A couple of things that I discovered:

  • I was always getting the ‘default‘ image until I added a ‘rating‘ parameter.
  • The Gravatar server wasn’t serving up all sizes of my image until I re-uploaded it. [...]

By Dougal | Posted in Blogging, WordPress | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (38)

New theme, same as the old theme

October 16, 2007 – 3:45 pm

I’ve done some minor maintenance around here. Can you spot the differences? Probably not. What I’ve done is upgraded my old Sandbox 0.6.1 theme to the new 1.0 version, and made a few minor adjustments to my CSS to account for the differences. Visually, there’s not a whole heck of a lot of difference between the current theme and the previous version, other than the addition of tags to the post metadata.

Speaking of tags, I’ve mentioned before that I had been using the WordPress category system more like a tagging system, and that I regretted that decision. [...]

By Dougal | Posted in Semantics, Themes, WordPress | Also tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (11)