Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

WordPress, web development, and world domination.

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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.

WordPress 2.0 Release imminent

Just three hours ago, Matt posted this on the wordpress-hackers mailing list: Subject: [wp-hackers] 2.0 Release Wednesday or Thursday, depending on the phase of the moon. Now would be a great time to start making sure your themes and plugins work with the new version, and post to hackers if you need any help updating them. Yow! On the one hand, I’m really excited about this release. A lot of the changes are under the … Continue reading

Poisoning the well

Overall, the volume of spam attempts on my server have been down lately. Oh, I still get a steady stream, I delete over 100 comment spams (caught by my filters) each day. But I’ve seen fewer of the massive, server-squashing spam runs that hammer my web service with too many simultaneous connections, blocking out legitimate users. On the other hand, I’m seeing a lot more attempts by spammers to poison the well. What I mean … Continue reading

The State of FeedLounge

Alex has posted a moderately detailed article explaining The State of FeedLounge. For any newcomers who don’t know what FeedLounge is, it’s a web based feed aggregator, not unlike BlogLines. But FeedLounge is a next-generation web service that looks and acts more like a desktop application than a web site. I’m one of the lucky alpha testers who have had access for the last six months. I committed to using FeedLounge as my only feed … Continue reading

Breaking the silence

Between projects at work (rolling out the largest indoor WiFi network in the world at a certain international airport near Atlanta) and projects at home (building more IKEA furniture — bed, dresser, chest, entertainment center, end tables, ottomans; doing what I can to help Suze prepare for Thanksgiving), I haven’t had much time for posting lately. But I’m making a minute to come up for a quick breath and note some of the things that … Continue reading

Blog Software Smackdown

Thanks to my friend Mike, who pointed out the Blog Software Smackdown article over on SitePoint. Author Vinnie Garcia compares the “big three” of blogging software: Movable Type, WordPress, and Textpattern. He gives a good overview of each, discusses their strengths and possible pitfalls, and provides links to example sites for each. In the final analysis, he compares the systems in 9 areas, grading them on a five point scale. If you average the scores, … Continue reading

Got a dog

Our new dog, Spirit I had hoped to post about this sooner, but several weeks ago, we got a dog. His name is Spirit, and he’s a border collie mix. We’re not sure what the mix part is, but I was wondering if he might have some setter in him. He’s about 16 months old, and weighs around 55 pounds. He’s had some training already, and is pretty good about obeying a ‘sit’ command most … Continue reading

WordPress 1.5.x safe from XML-RPC worm

In case you didn’t already see my post over on the WordPress Development Blog, rest assured that WordPress is safe from the recently announced PHPXMLRPC worm. Some of the articles about this worm point to old information indicating that WP 1.5 is vulnerable, but that is incorrect. Versions 1.2.x and earlier are in danger, however. So if you have any older WP installations, you should upgrade them immediately, or delete the xmlrpc class files as … Continue reading

Microsoft Wireless Network: Powered by Linux

Microsoft puts out a lot of FUD claiming that Linux is inferior to Windows. But their new company-wide wireless network will be driven by Linux-based equipment. Aruba Networks was selected to provide the networking equipment for what is considered to be one of the world’s largest next-generation wireless LANs, serving more than 25,000 simultaneous users a day in some 60 countries. According to an Aruba press statement, Microsoft’s new WLAN will be deployed in 277 … Continue reading

Phil Ringnalda switches to WordPress

Phil Ringnalda’s site is now powered by WordPress. But, I’m never again going to see my weblog software returning Perl’s infuriatingly common response to any problem, ‘Internal Server Error. Check the error log for a message that’s no more help than this.’ And I don’t think you can imagine just how happy that makes me. Freedom 0? I’m down with that. A vibrant, independent and free community? Cool. But I just wanted out from under … Continue reading

Happy Halloween

Goblin Dougal Halloween has snuck up on the Campbell household. It’s not like we’re unprepared — we have bags of candy and the kids have costumes. But I just can’t believe that it’s the end of October already. I spent the last couple of weeks under some tight deadlines at work, and lost track of time. I had hoped to dress my site up as I’ve done a couple of times in the past, but … Continue reading