WordPress is getting a tad tiresome
I had a new implementation of WordPress installed on a motorcycle site, which was previously written in html. I wasn’t aware of any problems with the WordPress visual editor until I encountered it on the new site. I did a search and was able to come up with quite a few solutions, but none of the solutions worked for me — or for many others, it seems. No big deal. Find a thread, post a question, and someone will eventually come up with something that works.
It would appear that some of us have touched a WordPress nerve, thus we have this:
and here’s a general rant to those of you that are whining that your threads arent getting replied to (ive seen like 7-8 in the last 4 hours) — its a fucking holiday in the US (where 90% of us live), and some people dont spend them online. Im ONLY here because Im working. Get a grip — your dumb little “i cant get my adsense to show up” or your “i want an archives page” crap isnt more important than someone spending a damn holiday with their family, and away from a bunch ingrates that cant use a search box. FFS, most of you dont even say please, or thank you.
Go here if you want to see the thread. I’m the guy with the palm tree in my avatar.
As a result of this, I have decided to leave my site in html and remove WordPress. It looks much better the way it is, and editing the html is a breeze for me.
Thanks, but no thanks, WordPress.
Furthermore, I get absolutely no spam on the site since it’s in html. It’s not a high-traffic site, but it does get three to four hundred hits a month, purely for the technical articles.
And whooami, male or female WordPress goowill ambassador that you are, you’ll find sympathy in the dictionary, somewhere between shit and syphilis.
Now for the history lesson
You knew it was coming, right?
The “it’s a fucking holiday in the U.S. of A.” that whooami makes reference to is called Thanksgiving. It’s celebrated in the U.S. as a time when invading religious zealots gave thanks to the native North American population for letting them come ashore, bringing religious fervor, pestilence, slaughter, mass displacement and ownership to an otherwise pretty satisfied people as a whole.
Outside of North America, I can’t think of one other country or nation that celebrates Thanksgiving. Certainly not Mexico or Central America, where visitors from Europe (for you geography-challenged Americans, that’s a continent, not a country) brought disease, more pestilence, religion-induced slaughter, and conquest to a civilization that was more than a little advanced. Obviously, Europeans (people living on a continent, not a country) don’t celebrate Thanksgiving.
South America (another continent, consisting of many countries) doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving. Nor does Asia, Australia, Africa, the Middle East and on and on and on. So basically, we have a country of 330 million people, far outnumbered by the remainder of the known world, completely in ignorance of the other six billion scattered here and there on the globe.
Oh well, it was ever thus.
Throwing stones
Oh look — someone is slagging WordPress because of security problems. He goes so far as to recommend a competitor, in this case, Moveable Type, which he promotes on his web site.
Should one take the time to read down to the last paragraph, one will discover that in order to have a secure Moveable Type (MT) installation, one must disable comments. His link to Moveable Type security notes mentions several additional security precautions one should take with Moveable Type to remain secure:
If you can turn off comments and search then you can effectively hide all traces of your Movable Type installation from the public eye and just use it as a convenient tool for generating static but easily-updateable pages. Most people won’t even know you’re running Movable Type. By putting your install in an out-of-the-way location, you can use security through obscurity (not always a bad thing) to protect you from any flaws that might be in the product. I use this technique on my personal weblog…
So then, in order to have a more secure blogging product, we do the following:
- convert to another platform, specifically MT;
- turn off MT comments;
- and while you’re at it, turn off your MT search function;
- don’t advertise the location of your MT install;
- move your MT install location to a more unintelligible URL.
I really don’t have any problem with it all, I just thought it was amusing that in order to recommend overcoming the security lapses of one product, one must use another product with its own security problems.
Yawn.
(Thanks to Photo Matt for the post. He’s the founding developer of WordPress.)
Seamless WordPress 2.2.1 upgrade yet again
Once more, thanks to the Instant Upgrade plugin, version 0.2 from Zirona. I’ve used it for the last two upgrades, and it has worked quickly and flawlessly. Of course, I also do my daily backups of the database and program modules in the event of any kind of failure. Call me astute paranoid one more time.
The 2.2.1 upgrade provides some required security fixes as well as some bug fixes.
I’ve noticed that some are complaining about the recent frequency of upgrades, as well as the trashing of plugins by those same upgrades. To them, I say, why not try Instant Upgrade?
It won’t solve the plugin problem, but it certainly makes for a smooth, fast, trouble-free update: no searching for a site with the required files; no messing with manually moving files; no worrying about whether one has moved the correct files to the appropriate directories.
Thanks again, Zirona and Alex Günsche.
Contact form blues
Updated below
I was having trouble with Beast-Blog.com’s contact form on my site, so I scrapped it entirely in favor of another I found here at The Marketing Technology Blog. He calls it the WordPress Contact Form with Spam Protection.
It’s configurable, it fits nicely on a page, and by the look of it, it will prevent email spamming. More importantly, it took a minimum of fiddling to get it set up — which is all I really care about at this point in my life.
I have no time for fiddling.
I’d rather be riding.
Update: The most recent version of this plugin (v3.1.2) is broken and doesn’t display properly in FireFox. IE isn’t so great either. Sigh. I’m off to find another one that does work.
For all my faithful readers…
all five of you:
Fair warning: you might wish to turn off the feed readers for a bit.
I’ve been investigating search engine querys that have hit my blog pages. Consequently, I’m going to be updating some of my posts with metas and tags over the next several days. The reason for this is that while some queries show up with a direct link to the page in question, others do not, and land on the blog’s front page, making finding the article difficult.
I know, I should have started this from the beginning, but who knew? Not me, obviously.
Of course, I would be most pleased if at some point you would turn me back on.
I’ll be using All in One SEO Pack for this — another plugin.
Post2Blog 3.0 is now free
It never ends. Just when I think I’ve found all the blog software and more that I’ll ever need, I learn of another useful little ditty that I can’t resist downloading and trying. That goes for this, too: Post2Blog 3.00 from ByteScout, which is now free for all.
Probably the sweetest surprise is that the software can be put on a USB stick and used in its portable version. Converting it over isn’t too difficult either. Simply go to the Start / Programs menu and select “Create Portable Version”. Yes, it’s that simple.
It interfaces with FireFox and IE as well as MS Word. It handles image uploading. For a complete list of what it does, scroll down to the bottom of the Post2Blog page and read up.
Oh, yes, and one more thing I must mention: the spellchecker is live! - which, of course, can be turned off.
More on WordPress plugins
Ah plugins. Where would we be without them?
Clean Archives, from Geek With Laptop, cleaned up my archives page instantly. I didn’t have to make coding changes, other than to insert the appropriate link on one of my sidebars and the bottom menu. The plugin comes with a configuration menu as well. It will put a link on the topmost menu of your blog, if in fact you use a top menu. Obviously, the plugin can be prettied by means of modifying the .css file. Check it out at the top of my page.
From Beast-Blog.com, I found a slick little email contact form as well. It too is very configurable. Take a look at mine, or go to Beast-Blog for the full monte.
Seamless WordPress 2.2 upgrade
I just this minute upgraded my WordPress from version 2.1.3 to the new 2.2, and it took only a few seconds. How did that happen, you ask? (Even if you didn’t ask, I’m going to tell you anyway.)
When I noticed that the WordPress software had just been updated - information here - I went over to my Plugins page and activated the Instant Upgrade plugin by Alex Günsche of Zirona. To my complete and utter astonishment, the plugin worked as advertised, and I had absolutely none of the problems that Mr. Günsche spoke of with regard to implementing the plugin. As advertised, the update was fully automatic, and it took only a split second.
Of course, before using the software, I backed up my database tables. I already had copies of all the other files that I use in my WordPress blog that I download as needed. I learned a long time ago that backups are a lifesaver, even if one isn’t having a near-death experience.
For database backups I use two programs - WP-DB Manager by GaMerZ, and WordPress Database Backup. The latter does timed backups, depending on the schedule you set, and will email, download, or store on-site my WordPress database backups.
Thank you very much, Alex Günsche.
Plugin blues
After installing the http:BL WordPress Plugin and successfully walking stumbling through building a new table for it in my WP database, today I discovered this: http:BL Lite. No database table modifications are required, since data logging is not built in.
Here’s what the author says:
The primary difference between http:BL Lite and the original http:BL WordPress Plugin is that my version does not include the logging feature. I did not feel that it was necessary and preferred the simplicity of the plugin prior to logging being added. After stripping out all of the code pertaining to the logging feature, redesigning the plugin’s option page, and cleaning up various aspects of the code, I decided to release my rendition…
I jumped on that bandwagon immediately and removed the long-winded http:BL, and replaced it with the much cleaner http:BL Lite. I’ll keep my database table addition, just in case.
More WordPressWorld anti-spam plugins
Spam is a constant problem for blog sites. Consequently, I tend to scour the WordPress Plugin site for anti-spam plugins. I currently use Akismet, and it works exceptionally well. Thank you very much, Akismet.
I think I’ve found another good one. From the http:BL site:
“The http:BL WordPress Plugin allows you to verify IP addresses of clients connecting to your blog against the Project Honey Pot database. Thanks to http:BL API you can quickly check whether your visitor is an email harvester, a comment spammer or any other malicious creature. Communication with verification server is done via DNS request mechanism, which makes the query and response even quicker. Now, thanks to http:BL WordPress Plugin any potentially harmful clients are denied from accessing your blog and therefore abusing it.”
After installing http:BL in my plugin folder, I discovered that my WordPress database needed a new table for the http:BL plugin to record its data. lunarpages.com provides access via cPanel to MySQL account maintenance. From the bottom of that page, I selected phpMyAdmin.
On the right sidebar, I selected my database, which in my case was worp1, and then selected Databases from the main page.
The names of my databases appeared next. I then selected the name of the database for which I wanted to add the table.
When the new page came up, it showed all of my current tables in my selected database.
At the bottom of this page, I chose Create new table on database. I typed in the name of the table I wanted to create, and the number of fields in my new table.
Fortunately, ht:BL has included a php file (I wasn’t able to run the script) - httpbl_log.sql - with the information I needed to create the database table
CREATE TABLE `wp_httpbl_log` (
`id` INT( 6 ) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY ,
`ip` VARCHAR( 16 ) NOT NULL DEFAULT ‘unknown’ ,
`time` DATETIME NOT NULL ,
`user_agent` VARCHAR( 255 ) NOT NULL DEFAULT ‘unknown’ ,
`httpbl_response` VARCHAR( 16 ) NOT NULL ,
`blocked` BOOL NOT NULL
from which I was able to glean the six field identifiers (id, ip, time, user_agent, httpbl_response, blocked) for the creation page that popped up next. From the above, I filled in the appropriate field information, and was sure to scroll to the far right to insert all of the field information in the form, especially the PRIMARY KEY identifier.
When I viewed the actual code for the routine I created, I saw that it added at the bottom of the routine, TYPE = MYISAM ; After comparing it to the existing database table types, I saw that it was correct for the type of database I had just created.
Upon completion, a new table (The table is working. I checked later in the day and found data written to the table. Success!) was inserted into my WordPress database.
That was simple, wasn’t it?
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