Monthly Archives: October 2007

Creating a secure WordPress install

Oct302007

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 … Continue reading →

Easy Gravatars Plugin

Oct242007

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 … Continue reading →

Gravatars

Oct222007

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. It worked with size=40 and … Continue reading →

New theme, same as the old theme

Oct162007

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, … Continue reading →

glTail: Realtime Logfile Visualization

Oct112007

This screenshot shows how glTail visualizes a comment spam attack in my configuration. A few days ago, in my usual daily link browsing, I ran across a link to something called “glTail“, which was described as “realtime logfile visualization”. I’m often keeping an eye on my server logs to catch unusual activity, so I thought I’d give it it a look. There’s a video there that shows it in action — very cool! For those … Continue reading →