Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

WordPress, web development, and world domination.

Author Archives

About Dougal Campbell

Dougal is a web developer, and a "Developer Emeritus" for the WordPress platform. When he's not coding PHP, Perl, CSS, JavaScript, or whatnot, he spends time with his wife, three children, a dog, and a cat in their Atlanta area home.

Twitter Updates for 2007-12-11

Hmm… Here’s a new (to me?) webdev teamup: http://sidebarcreative.com/ # Finally got my PHP SOAP to generate XML that the .Net service could consume: $client->_namespace = ‘WhateverItSaidInTheWsdl’ # Powered by Twitter Tools.

Twitter Updates for 2007-12-10

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. # Powered by Twitter Tools.

VPS Recommendations?

I’m looking for a Virtual Private Server host. The server I’m currently on is woefully underpowered for the handful of sites I running (on the plus side, it’s been free), and it’s high time that I moved my stuff to a box that’s up to the task. Ideally, I’d like the following features: Virtual Private Server with at least 1GB of RAM (preferably with root access within my instance). SSH shell access. Decent monthly bandwidth … Continue reading

Easy Gravatars version 1.1

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 … Continue reading

Easy Gravatars with Google Analytics Plugin

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. I hope to release a new version of Easy Gravatars with some new features sometime next week, as well.

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