Blog Archives

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 →

Tags and Categories in WordPress 2.3

Sep222007

Since the upcoming WordPress 2.3 release will debut the new tagging system, I thought I’d take some time to address what it means to use “tags” versus using “categories”. These things mean different things to different people, as it’s really just a matter of how you want to use them. But let’s examine what tags and categories are, how they are similar, how they are different, and why you might choose to use one system … Continue reading →

Sep192007

How to podcast with an iPhone

Aug292007

My coworker, Andy Edmonds, has a video tutorial on how to podcast using an iPhone and a Mac. I don’t have an iPhone or a Mac, but I wish I had both. Maybe one day…

WordPress 2.3 Beta 1

Aug292007

As announced on the dev blog, WordPress 2.3 Beta 1 is now available for download and testing. Some of the features of 2.3 include automatic notification for plugin and core code version updates, built-in tags support, faster javascript, and SEO-friendly URL redirection. The new tag system includes an importer for those using the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, and importers for a couple of other popular plugins are in the works. There is also a conversion … Continue reading →

Sandbox Design Competition Winners

Aug072007

The Sandbox Designs Competition is over, and the results are in. The overall winner was the Sandpress theme. That theme was one of my favorites. When I get a few minutes to back through them again, I’ll try to write up my list of favorites, and what I like and dislike about each theme. All in all, there were some very nice designs in the competition. I could tell that the designers all put a … Continue reading →