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.
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?
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
Last night my server went down. There was a ‘poof’, and then nothing. The status LED on my motherboard was still in the green, so it could be either the motherboard, CPU or the power supply.
This morning I head out to the local computer dealer to get me a new motherboard, CPU, and a power supply. Thankfully, it was just the power supply that died.
This might actually be a good opportunity to upgrade my server to a Mac Mini.
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).
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.
I’ve been experimenting a bit with some of the plugins available on “the market” for Wordpress. It’s nice to see that so many people participate in the enhancements of this great product. There is a BUT. Several plugins I tried were specially made for a none Windows platform. It would be nice if this was mentioned BEFORE I even downloaded them. It would save me a lot of trouble trying to get them to work.
Anyway, I added some anti-comment-spam stuff (don’t know yet if they work). Next ‘project’ will be to find a plugin (or hacks as they are sometimes called), which enables me to submit images by mail (or phone) to this blob. If I try to submit an image by mail, it just adds a bunch of gibberish (aka BASE64 encoded stuff) to the frontpage. The ones I found so far are non Windows-based :cry:.
The quest goes on.
This entry describes the challenges I faced when I tried to install WordPress on a Windows 2003 webserver. The WordPress website has a page about installing WordPress in 5 minutes. Well, I know now that this is impossible. Especially, if you’re trying to install it on a machine without PHP already installed and configured with MySQL.
I started out with a webserver which had MySQL v5.x running. This server was configured correctly, since I used MySQL for ages. This post doesn’t describe the MySQL installation. If you download the latest Windows installer, it shouldn’t be that hard to install (Setup.exe -> Next -> Next -> etc. -> Finish).
I started out with “installing” PHP v5.1.6 for Windows. Somehow I was hoping to get a nice installer, but all I got were some files in a zip container :(. Anyway, I extracted those files to “c:\PHP” on my webserver. All I needed to do now is to configure PHP by editting “PHP.ini” (I hate those long ini files :x). As a starting reference I used the recommended INI file in the PHP directory. Scrolling through the file (which is thouroughly documented inline) I changed the things that I needed. Since it was the recommended ini file I didn’t bother much on all the possible features. I just wanted to get Wordpress to work.
