Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

WordPress, web development, and world domination.

Monthly Archives: October 2007

Creating a secure WordPress install

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

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

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

glTail: Realtime Logfile Visualization

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