mark.bockenstedt.net » WordPress

WordPress Gets Admin Facelift

Mark — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 15:15:38 +0000

WordPress 2.7 was officially released yesterday. There are a number of pretty dramatic (yet exciting) changes on the admin side. Here are my favorites:

Upgrading becomes much easier
Threaded comments, and better comment layout in general
New admin look makes navigation quicker
Compatible with mu

This was really just a test post to make sure mu still works. I performed the upgrade here in about 10 minutes and it seems like nothing was adversely affected.

What Happens When WordPress Stats Fails

Mark — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 15:30:43 +0000

Here’s an error message that I’ve never seen before. It’s from the WordPress Stats plugin for WordPress blogs.

Aren’t error messages fun?

More mu Updates Coming

Mark — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:35:48 +0000

Look up – directly above this text. See it? That’s one of mu’s newest features. I decided that as a gesture of convenience, mu will now create a short link anytime you publish a post. Since it usually already does it anyway, I decided to make it automatic and give you the chance to display it wherever you want on your posts.

All you’ll have to do is make a small change to the posts table in your database to add a place for this link. When you publish a post, mu will grab the short link (from the service of your choosing) and hang onto it so your readers don’t have to waste time getting one themselves. Hooray convenience!

There will be two functions in the next release of mu, one that returns the text and one that displays it directly. The other treat in store for mu 0.4b* will be URL shortening using Cli.gs. I’ve decided to build it in and give you a place to enter your API key rather than make you figure out the API call by using the Custom option.

Look for the update next week – I’d like to make sure it’s working correctly over the weekend before I release it.

* There will also be a few small bug fixes included because I’m an idiot

WPTouch Skins Your Blog for iPhone Look and Feel

Mark — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:00:56 +0000

This morning I was alerted (by @trutter) of a WordPress plugin that greatly improves the UI experience for iPhone and iPod Touch users called WPTouch. When a user hits your blog with a user agent resembling that of these two devices, WPTouch takes over and transforms your blog into something that fits with Apple’s look and feel.

The plugin has a good number of options you can set, including disabling AJAX and fancy stuff to make it load faster (EDGE and even 3G users will appreciate this). There are a slough of other options regarding what’s displayed so be sure you spend some time on the settings page for the plugin.

mu Updated

Mark — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 23:53:04 +0000

I was informed of a small flaw in the code that controls the URLs for your microblogging account settings pages (thanks Katie). It was a pretty small fix, and it’s been sent off to the SVN repo so you should be prompted to update soon.

At some point I also moved the options page from the Manage menu to the Settings menu. I also added the SQL for the database tables I forgot to include that in the initial release, so some people might have had issues with updates not getting sent out. Instructions for installation are in the README.

You can get mu here if you’re interested.

WordPress Releases Version 2.6.3

Mark — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:38:48 +0000

Someone found a security flaw in Snoopy, the technology that WP uses to grab feeds on the admin dashboard. There are two files that need updating, so this is a pretty minor update. Now would be a good time to remind you of the article I wrote in early September, Installing/Updating WordPress with Subversion. My update took about 10 seconds this morning because I had everything installed from SVN. Hooray for simple!

Akismet Launches Stat Tracking

Mark — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 20:35:20 +0000

In a recent announcement, Akismet has launched some pretty nice graphs for WordPress blogs. The graphs are just a part of the new statistics features that come with the release of Akismet 2.2. Since the release of 2.2, version 2.2.1 was released, which fixes a few bugs.

Akismet stats tracks the nature of your comments and breaks it down into spam, ham (legit comments), missed spam, false positives, and a spam-to-ham ratio pie chart called “yummy pie”. The other major feature of 2.2 is instant adaptation to the feedback you give Akismet. This means that if you mark a comment as spam, it’s filter will adapt to that message so it gets better over time. It’s already pretty dang good, blocking 99.4% of all spam comments to this blog.

The next thing I’d like to see Akismet put in is a chart with all the IPs that have spammed and how many spams they’ve left. After one IP reaches a certain threshold, I’ll ban them into oblivion with no remorse. Until then, I’ll just monitor it manually.

Update: I left out a few important details. I assumed that everyone knew they’d have to update their copy of Akismet on their blog to see these changes. The other detail is that the stats page is on the main dashboard under “Akismet Stats”.

Banning IPs in Ubuntu

Mark — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 18:30:59 +0000

Last Friday I was subject to a barrage of spam on this site – somewhere between 100 and 150 comments came in that were spam (prior to that I’d had 300 spams since May). Akismet caught every single one of those comments, but it was still a pain because I still had to trudge through and verify they were all spam. I’m not really that hesitant to drop the ban hammer on the IPs that most of the comments were coming from.

I crowdsourced some solutions to Twitter, not knowing exactly what software to use to ban an IP. @jcollie replied saying I should use iptables to block traffic. So, I took his advice and ran the following command on the server to block the IP:

iptables -A INPUT -s [IP] -j DROP

This worked well, and I saw the torrent of spam slow immediately (there were multiple culprits). However, iptables doesn’t like to reload its rules when the server gets rebooted, so I was searching for another solution. I don’t reboot the server very often, but you know how it goes – when I would, I’d forget to run the rules again.

I also remembered that Ubuntu 8.04 comes with a built-in firewall utility called UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall). I wanted to give this a shot also so I ran this command:

ufw deny from [IP]

Much simpler than the iptables command was, but ufw status told me that the firewall was not loaded. Naturally, the next step was to run ufw enable to load the firewall, right? Wrong. I was immediately locked out of my own website because, by default, UFW seems to want to block all traffic. To remedy that problem, run ufw default allow to set the default behavior to allow traffic. Now, if you run ufw status, you’ll see that your firewall is loaded and it will show any rules you’ve set up. To recap, banning IPs with UFW is as easy as:

ufw default allow
ufw enable
ufw deny from [IP]

If you find yourself unable to hit your web server, try running ufw default allow after you’ve enabled the firewall. I actually did the previous in reverse order, but it makes more sense to do it in the order that’s shown.

Have a better solution? Share it in the comments.

Installing/Updating WordPress with Subversion

Mark — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 20:00:49 +0000

WordPress 2.6.2 is officially out now, and I’m yet again inconvenienced by having to upgrade. Since I installed from source by unpacking the ZIP file downloaded at WordPress.org, I have to go through the process of doing it all over and overwriting the old material. It’s a real pain and I’m always nervous I’m going to screw it up and hose my custom theme.

In retrospect, I really should have installed WordPress using Subversion. Providing you have Subversion installed on your server (apt-get install subversion), installing and updating WordPress is infinitely easier than doing it from source. Here are the steps you need to follow to install and update WordPress using Subversion:

Installation

Figure out which version you want to install (you can browse tags here)
Change directory to your web-accessible document root
Run mkdir blog and cd blog to get down into your blog directory. This can be customized to whatever directory (or root) you need it to be in.
When you’re in the location where you want your blog installed, run : svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.6.2 .
Be sure you enter it exactly as shown, meaning don’t forget the trailing period.
Point your browser to your blog and go through the installation process.

Upgrading

This is where using Subversion makes your life so much easier. Assuming you have anything older than the current version installed:

Run the command: svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.6.2/ . (this operation will tell your .svn files to switch the repository to the new location and download the correct files)
Point your browser to your blog and go through the upgrade process

Converting the Packaged Installer to a Subversion Checkout

Create a new temporary blog directory: mkdir blog-new
Use the Subversion commands from above get WordPress
Copy all your custom files from the old blog location to the temporary directory
Rename the temporary directory to match the old directory name: mv blog blog-bak, then mv blog-new blog
Point your browser to your blog and go through the upgrade process

A hidden gem of using Subversion is that you can install any version you want without having to dig through and find old packages. If you want to install WordPress 2.0 for some reason, you certainly can by entering that tag in place of 2.6.2 above. As always, you should make a backup before you make any changes of this magnitude.

Information via WordPress Codex

Official Beta Page for mu

Mark — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 13:54:33 +0000

I put mu up on the WordPress plugins site yesterday and it looks like everything’s working now. This post will serve as the central point of contact for all things mu in beta stage. If you’ve got any questions, comments, suggestions, or need help, this is the place to post it. For a description of mu or to see its progression, check out the mu tag.

mark.bockenstedt.net » WordPress

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