Ever since I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 I had to moderate every comment posted on this blog. Note that I hadn’t turned this on in the Wordpress settings.
Some research showed that it might have to do something with ‘older’ plugins. After a trail and error period I found out that the WP Hashcash plugin was to blame. Ever since I de-activated it, the problem seems to be gone.
Today, I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5. The upgrade proces was easy as usual. Before the upgrade I checked all the plugins used, and upgraded those first. The new features / layout of the adminpages are great. Also the new editor works like a charm (even on Safari). Somehow it feels a bit more intuitive.
Only downside is that the Wordpress Stats on the dashboard won’t work in FireFox. It works fine in Safari. Instead of showing the graph in FireFox it shows the actual dasboard page from wordpress.com.
As you might have noticed, the server was down the last 24 hours. When I got home last night I found my server dead. The green power LED on the mainboard was still on, but apart from that… nothing. So I tried to switch the server on and off a couple of times. After a few tries, the entire room lit up for about a nanosecond followed by absolute silence, and darkness…..
The power supply had short-circuited and took the entire house with it. Byebye power supply.
The initial thought was; ‘Well, it’s gonna be a nice weekend reinstalling the server from scratch’, but thankfully, it was only the power supply that had died on me.
After replacing it, the server ran as before. This got me thinking about the life-expectancy of computer hardware. Frequent visitors may have read a similar post on my blog last year. So the power supply that died isn’t even a year old. I still might have had some warranty on it (if I hadn’t pried it open to see the internal damage 
). If I would like to use the warranty, I’m looking at at least a couple of days downtime, and since a new power supply is relatively inexpensive, I couldn’t be bothered.
The life expectancy of hardware is obviously shorter than the Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) given by the manufacturer. The new supply has a (theoretical) MTBF of >100.000 hours, This means >4000 days. Well, mine lasted <365 days.
Having a day off from work meant that I had some time to clean-up my server from everything crap. This also meant trying to upgrade Coldfusion MX 7 to Coldfusion 8. The new version supports some nice new features, with which I wanted to experiment.
Since none of my production websites run on Coldfusion (currently PHP), I could safely uninstall and install the new developer version. When I pressed ‘remove’ I had this flash from the past. When I tried to install version 7 I had humongous problems with the installer (services didn’t register correctly with IIS, etc.). But this could be just a coincidence…
Installing Coldfusion itself was straight-forward. The fun began when the installer wanted to launch the admin-panel to finalize the installation. No responds from the webserver. Even my blog was not working (”System cannot find the file specified“). Seemed that there were references to the old Coldfusion parser in the IIS.. After removing those instances, I had my blog back up-and-running.
Next was to finalize the Coldfusion 8 installation. I had to manually add the Coldfusion parameters to IIS (allowed Web Services, document types, … the works) After screwing around for nearly two hours, I could finish the installation.
Just to make sure that it wasn’t me, I installed it also in a virtual machine. And off course it worked flawlessly. Guess I need to reinstall my server in the next couple of weeks. Who knows what else is f*cking up the system.
Oh, another thing; I used to use RDS for development of the websites, so I tried to configure it again…. Well you might guess it… Not working. After yet another hour searching I found that RDS uses a ‘virtual file‘ called ‘ide.cfm‘. This file is located in /CFIDE/main/. The actual location (main/) doesn’t exist, so IIS returns a 404 error.
It seems that you need to uncheck ‘Verify if file exists‘ in IIS for the .cfm extension for RDS to work. Or do as I did; create the directory ‘main‘ and create an empty file called ide.cfm in that directory.
Well, this was an afternoon well spent…. NOT.
Next mission is to upgrade MySQL to version 5. So expect some serious downtime.
UPDATE: MySQL has also been upgraded to v5.something. It went surprisingly easy.
Wordpress.org release version 2.3 of their blogging software. Lot’s of improvements, so time to upgrade.
The upgrade itself was pretty straight forward. First backup everthing. Second, upload the new files and run the upgrade script. After that it was business as usual…. Well not quite.
I needed to alter my theme to allow widgets etc., and that wasn’t that easy. Especially since I’m not that familiar with PHP. Finally I got most of my plugins up and running.
The only thing that won’t work is the Rich Editor. When I want to create a link the ‘window’ doesn’t appear. Only a white placeholder appears.
UPDATE: Oke, I found the cause of the white placeholder after some deliberation on things I did the last hours. Apart from the upgrade on wordpress I didn’t do much. I did however play with OpenID for a couple of minutes, and installed the VeriSign OpenID SeatBelt extension for FireFox. After disabling the extension everything worked just fine.
I wonder if this is an extension, TinyMCE, or a FireFox problem?
Someone requested S40 support for the CA certificate Import ‘Wizard’. This ‘tool’ is being used over 50 times a day, so I guess that it works :-). Knowing that it is being used, I added S40 support (theoretically that is, since I don’t have such a device).
Just select the type of device you have (S60 or S40 based). Depending on the selection the extension, and MIME type will be changed.
The S40 devices expect a different MIME type (application/vnd.wap.hashed-certificate). So I added this MIME type to my webserver and associated it with .cer files. More information on this page.
Note, that you need to upload a WPKI certificate instead of a normal one. I’m still figuring out what the exact difference is, so I might do a conversion….
I installed Ultimate Tag Warrior recently, because I liked the tag clouds I saw on other blogs. Unfortunately, the plugin seems to cripple the search capabilities on the website. If the plugin is activated, you can’t find any posts with a search query. Disabling the plugin make things work again.
So, I want to humbly apologize to all those people trying to find important stuff on this blog
100Mbps is soooooo 1993, and fully insufficient in copying lot’s of Linux images 
over my internal network. So, today I upgraded to Gigabit. Even with the purchased el-cheapo hardware (Intel Pro NIC’s, and a 3COM 10/100/1000 switch) the speed increase is noticeable (70-80Mbps versus 300-350Mbps).
Too bad that my DSL connection doesn’t go that fast 
The last couple of weeks my blog was under some sort of spam attack. I got about 50 to 80 spam comments a day. Thankfully, Askimet intercepted 99% of those messages. But Askimet shouldn’t be getting these messages, because my captcha plugin should keep them out… well, it didn’t.
Yesterday, I found Wordpress Hashcash. A plugin which uses crypto to keep automated spammers away. So far it’s working.
UPDATE: ever since I installed WP-Hashcash it has been awfully quiet on the spamming front
Never mind… Thankfully Askimet is catching them all (50 per day at this moment)
I’ve got this blog running for a couple of months now. Even though not many comments are left behind (I don’t care), the spammers definitely found my blog. I receive over 30 spam comments a day now. Thanks to the Askimet Anti-spam plugin for Wordpress, the spam entries are quarantined.
Every spam entry looks the same, and all the links the f*ckers try to leave behind won’t work (I must admin that I try some of the links they are leaving behind). So I ask you; What’s the point in spamming useless links? If a link won’t work, you won’t even try a (spammed) link in the future, because it’s a waist of time. Same goes for e-mail spam. I receive lots of spam in my inbox, but what is the use in advertising viagra, if the shop is offline.I guess that there are just too many people with too much spare time on there hands. But not enough to create, or host a decent online drugstore
I upgraded my version of Wordpress to version 2.1.2. This went the usual ‘problems’.
First of all I ‘forgot’ to make a recent backup. Second, I used Transmit (an OSX FTP Client) to upload the new pages. Transmit has the possibility to overwrite files. No worries (I thought), I just renamed the files I editted, do I could rename them back when I had uploaded the new files. It seems that I didn’t read the warning very well. When I overwrote the directories, Transmit removed them first and uploaded the new files afterwards. This meant that all my uploads, and customized files were gone….. aaaaargh.
Fortunatelly, I had a backup from two weeks ago, so I could get the old files.
This reminds me to make a decent backup before doing anything about my Wordpress installation in the future….
I added a new plugin to Wordpress v2.1. It’s called WP Movie Review Ratings. It enables you to place movie reviews on you Wordpress blog.
At this time it’s fairly empty, but I’ll try to migrate my older existing movie database to this one, so it’ll be filled soon (I hope).
B.t.w. many thanks to the developer Paul Goscicki in assisting me in getting it to work. Seemed that I had a small misconfiguration in my PHP config.
The highly anticipated version Wordpress v2.1 has been released today.
This meant upgrading my older version (v2.05). The upgrading itself was quite easy (if you follow the upgrade instructions to the letter).
I also upgraded my hacked TinyMCE Wordpress Editor with an ‘official‘ upgrade…. Let the posting begin
Update: ‘unhacked’ it again because of erratic behaviour of the editor, and manipulated the original included TinyMCE editor (see the end of my earlier post regarding this).
Pixelpost is a PHP based image gallery for showing photos. It includes displaying EXIF info, and (according to the website) is VERY EASY to install. Since I’m not a PHP guru (yet), and needed to have a (customizable, and not too overpowered) photo gallery for my photos.
Downloaded the ‘install kit‘ from the website, and followed the instructions.
When I installed Wordpress on my Windows server, I ran into some problems with permissions on directories. Especially on directories which were used to upload stuff to.
Armed with that piece of knowledge, it shouldn’t be too difficult to get it up and running (I thought).
The installation itself was a piece of cake. The Pixelpost admin tool has an overview (General Info) which said that all settings were made correctly, and therefor should work. All directories were in place and were writable. The MySQL database was also set up correctly, because the initial tables were created by the PixelPost install script, and the config table was filled with the correct settings.
Time to upload my first test image…. Nothing happend. No matter what I tried, no images were uploaded to the server. Still the General Info page of the Pixelpost admin tool said that everything was OK:
Configured Imagepath: ../images/
Image Directory: OK - Can we write to the directory? YES. CHMOD: 0777
Thumbnails Directory: OK - Can we write to the directory? YES. CHMOD: 0777
Language Directory: OK
Addons Directory: OK
Includes Directory: OK
Templates Directory: OK
Even after setting the security for the entire PixelPost directory structure to allow the Internet User Account (IUSR_MACHINENAME) full control over the structure, nothing happend.
Well, that was another 3 hours well spent….. Off to find another PHP gallery.
The default TinyMCE rich editor for WordPress lacks a lot of functionality (IMO). I wanted to use other fonts, and be able to change font sizes in posts.
At first I started to look for an alternative rich text editor for WordPress, but I didn’t find any usefull alternatives. Most of them are suitable for older WordPress versions, and are not compatible with the latest WordPress releases.
While I was developing my former blog in Coldfusion, I used FCKEditor. This editor had the possibility to add extra functionality by editting the source files. So I started digging through the sources of the WordPress files, and found the file where the TinyMCE configuration was stored.
Although the changes are not that hard, it would be nice to have a more user friendly interface for changing the capabilities of the rich text editor. The following paragraphs explain the changes I made to add fonts and font sizes to the editor.
