Category Archives: Blogging

WordPress 3

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

For some time now, I have been playing around with WordPress 3, and I must confess I am disappointed.

I have nothing against WordPress itself, but I expected something pretty radical with the advent of a major release, and for the general user there is very little there.

Of course, one of the main features is the integration of WP with WPMU, but I wonder just how many use WPMU in the first place?

For the ordinary user, one of the major changes has been the departure from some of the default settings on installation.  From the security standpoint, this is a good thing.  No longer is Admin the default user, and the prefix to the database tables is now customisable, but the problem here is that it affects new installations only.  An upgrade from V2 to V3 is going to leave the old defaults intact, and to avail of the new settings one would have to scrap the old site and do a fresh install.  Even then, importing the old database into the new is going to be difficult, as all the table names will have changed.

Apart from the above, there are very few things that stand out.  A new default theme?  The ability to bulk update plugins?  As I said, I expected more from a primary upgrade.

I still love WordPress as a package, but this isn’t something I would queue all night for.

A bit of an overhaul

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

I think the look of a site is important.

First and foremost, it should be pleasing to the eye.  It should also reflect the general content of the site, so that a simple glance at the screen should give an idea of the type of site it is.

Customising a theme can be simple or difficult, depending on how far you want to go.  My philosophy is to take a theme that is as close as possible to my final desire, and then to make the minimum of changes.  Head Rambles, for example has been through a couple of modifications.  It is now heavily customised to the point where the original theme is almost unrecognisable.

As I said before, I wasn’t too happy with the theme here.  I felt it was time for a radical overhaul of the entire site, both in look and name.

Why chose “A Pipe and a Keyboard”?  Mainly because it sums up my necessities for writing.  It is a personal site, with quite a bit of technical stuff, so the pipe represents the personal, and the keyboard represents the technical. 

I chose the design for its simplicity.  I like the simple layout, which doesn’t detract from the content, and apart from a few minor tweaks to the font, the only big change I have made (so far) is to substitute the banner image.  There are a few changes to be made yet, of a minor nature, such as additional navigation and tweaks like that.  I’m not too sure about the image, as yet.  I know the pipe looks a little unusual, but it is the pipe I generally smoke, so it deserves its place on the Internet. 

Bulk editing blogroll entries

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I don’t profess to be a complete expert on WordPress and its finer workings.

Whenever I want to do something like a bulk modification or something like that, I tend to search around for some kind of plugin or some other solution on the Internet.  I am rarely disappointed.

I have been doing some modifications over on Head Rambles where I have shifted the links (Blogroll) onto a separate page.  I wanted to go a little further with this and to do this, I needed to place the links into the database rather than have them hard coded on a page.

I am a great fan pf PHPMyAdmin, so writing up an SQL textfile to insert a batch of links into the Links Table was relatively simple.  The Links Table had some legacy stuff in there so the result was a refreshed table with 147 entries.  So far so good.

I wanted to set all my Links to a particular category, and this is where I ran into a problem.  The last thing I wanted to do was to have to manually edit 147 entries and it would have been extremely slow and tedious.  I searched high an low and found quite a few others trying to do the same thing, but no solutions.  I had discovered the numerical identity of the category (it was 2) and tried a bulk change of the field ‘link_category’ to 2.  This didn’t work, for some reason.

On delving a little further, I found that in fact the relationship between links and categories is held in the table Term_Relationships.  As an experiment, I went back to my text editor and built up a series of inserts for this table –

INSERT INTO `term_relationships` (`object_id`, `term_taxonomy_id`, `term_order`) VALUES
(X, 2, 0),
(X, 2, 0),
(X, 2, 0);

where X is the ID of the link. 

On running this file, I got several errors indicating duplicate fields.  These represented the legacy entries, which was fair enough.  I just deleted the relevant entries from the text file.

Ultimately, my batch fix worked, and all the links are now entered under their correct categories.

I strikes me though that this would be a fine opportunity for someone to develop a plugin that does batch jobs on Links?

WordPress Plug-ins – Comments

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The most important aspect of any website is to facilitate the reader.  Blogging has the additional factor of providing a two way conversation, so an easy to use site is essential.

I visit many blogs in the course of a day, and some of them make the very business of interaction so complicated that I tend not to revisit.

The most important aspect is to allow commenting to be as easy as possible.  Blogger [the free service] is a nightmare in this respect as it involves popups and Captchas which I hate.  In general, most blogs are easy to comment on, but they lack a couple of features which I think are rather irritating.

Another thing which I find irritating is to write a comment, submit it, and then find a glaring typo or omission when it is too late to do anything about it.  A very simple solution to this one is to install ‘WP Ajax Edit Comments’.  Unfortunately, I see they are about to start charging for updates to this, so I will either stick with my current version, or find an alternative.  In the meantime, this allows the commenter a pre-set period of time to revisit and edit their comments.

One plug-in I like, though it is not essential is ‘MCEComments’.  This embeds the TinyMCE code and adds the ability to format text in the comments, such as Bold or Italics.  The plug-in can be fairly easily tweaked to provide a huge range of facilities such as justification, image embedding and link embedding.  Most of these are best left off, but it is nice to have the facility if required.

WordPress Plug-ins – Security and Spam Filtering

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Running a blog can take a lot of hard work unless some of the tasks are automated.

One of the biggest problems facing bloggers is the number of spam comments that are blatantly promoting everything from lawn-mowers to hard core pornography.

There are several ways of limiting spam comment.

You can allow all comments, and then spend your days going through them all, deleting the spam.  This is obviously not the best method.

You can install a Captcha to try to eliminated the automated spam.  This has two disadvantages – it doesn’t stop the hand-written spam, and it irritates the hell out of genuine commenters.

You can install software to filter all comments as they come in.  This is by far the best method.

When I install WordPress, the first plug-in I would normally install was Akismet.  This is such an essential plug-in that it is now incorporated in the core of the WordPress release.

Another plug-in I install is WP-Spamfree which is very easy to install, and is remarkably effective.

I have both the above installed on my main blog and in the last few months Akismet has trapped 63,975 comments and WP-Spamfree has stopped a further 2,152.  During that period, there were 22,476 legitimate comments, which nicely illustrates the bad ratio of spam to genuine.

Another headache for the blog owner is that of security.

Hackers are always on the lookout for sites they can compromise.  Sometimes they infiltrate the site and abuse it by changing the content.  Sometimes they will insert code to allow the site act as a portal for illegal software, or porn.  This site was compromised recently whereby search engine spiders were redirected to another site, resulting in this site disappearing off Golle and others.

Hackers love a site where they know they can depend on certain information.  For wxample, they know with 99% certainty that all WordPress database tables are going to start with “wp_”.  During installation, it is a very simple matter to change this option.  Few ever do so though.

Another certainty is that there is a user called “admin” which has full rights to the site.  Happily, WordPress have changed things in the soon to be released WordPress 3, in that the default user is no longer “admin”.

With this knowledge, a “brute force” attack on a site is much easier, and therefore one plug-in I like to install is Limit Login Attempts.  This virtually removes the chance of “brute force” attacks

One of the biggest problems though is file and directory permissions.  Frequently these need to be changed for some reason, and it is all too easy to forget to change them back.

WP Security Scan is a nice little plug-in that checks through the installation and will highlight any potential security problems, including incorrectly set permissions.

If there ever is a problem with your site [God forbid] then reinstalling all the files should pose no major problem – you do have them backed up?  I hope?  However, the database is a constantly evolving animal, and last week’s backup is going to lose all this week’s posts, comments and other information.  A regular backup is essential therefore, An I find WordPress Database Backup the ideal plug-in for the job.  It can do scheduled or manual backups and will save them to the server, or can mail you the backup file.

Last, but not least, if you have a heavy duty site that gets a lot of traffic [and none of us knows when he or she is going to write the post that will set the world on fire?] it is a good idea to install caching software.  This not only speeds up downloads for the viewer, but also reduces the load on the server.  Probably the best plug-in for this is WP Super Cache.  This can be somewhat problematic to install, and may require a little technical expertise, but it is worth the effort.

With that lot under the bonnet [hood?] of your WordPress installation, you should be able to enjoy a little extra peace of mind.