I’ve just added the Gravatar plugin to my WordPress install, allowing Gravatars to be displayed for comments.
Gravatars are “globally gecognized avatars” associated with an email address. The idea is that you can upload a small avatar (picture), and any site on which you post which supports them will be able to show that picture.
I found out about them from search.cpan.org which now supports them, and Andy Hexten produced a page showing gravatars of CPAN contributors (I’ve only just created one for my @cpan.org address, so I’m not on there yet).
I learnt something new today about WordPress. I thought it would be useful to schedule a post to be published automatically at a specified time in the future - occasionally I knock up a few different posts the same day/evening and don’t really want to release them all at once but would prefer to save them to be published at intervals.
This facility is built right in to WordPress - just use the post timestamp facility and set a date + time in the future (making sure to tick the “Edit timestamp” box):
Continue reading ‘Scheduling WordPress posts for the future’
The Subscribe to Comments plugin by Mark Jaquith allows anyone who posts a comment to your blog to elect to receive an email when any further comments are made.
This can really help to foster an active discussion from your blog readers, as people who have posted a comment will know if someone replies to a point they made, and can return to post further comments. Let’s face it, once you’ve read a post and commented, most people don’t have time to keep returning to check for any new comments.
Do yourself a favour, download Subscribe to Comments and install it (it’s trivially easy to install).
The default setup will add the “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” tickbox to the comment form. If you want to offer the ability to subscribe to comments without having to post a comment first, just add the following just after the closing </form> tag of the comment form:
<?php show_manual_subscription_form(); ?>
Wordpress 2.3 was released today, introducing native tagging support, plugin update notification, URL handling improvements, and much more.
Continue reading ‘Wordpress 2.3 released’
UK2 asks "What scripts have you found most useful during the last year?"
Ditlev from UK2 is trying to put together a list of the most popular scripts & web apps and asks for feedback on your favourites - whether it’s WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, phpBB, phpMyAdmin, SquirrelMail or any of the thousands of scripts out there, go and cast your vote 
Oh dear - just had a spam comment that got past Akismet. That’s the first one it’s missed, out of 842 spam comments it caught, so it’s really not that bad
The comment included links (as most spammy comments do) so it was held for moderation anyway.
So far I’m dead happy with Akismet.
My blog hasn’t been running long, but the excellent Akismet has already caught over 100 spam comments for me - with a 100% success rate - no false positives, and none missed either.
Akismet recently cross the big milestone of one billion spams caught - that’s a whole lot of spam! According to the stats, of all submissions passed through Akismet, 95% were spam. With Akismet seeing about 10 million spam messages per day, it’s a good illustration of the scale of the problem.
Continue reading ‘Akismet rocks! (and spammers are a pain)’
Meant to post about this a while ago. I’ve set up the DoFollow plugin, which disables the automatic rel=”nofollow” that WP adds to links to combat comment spamming. Akismet is doing a pretty fine job at catching spam, and I mostly moderate comments anyway, so I’m happy to provide Google Juice to people whose links end up on here
Continue reading ‘Using DoFollow to give Google Juice’
As much as I liked the theme I was using before, Glued Ideas Subtle, I wanted to make my blog look, well, mine, rather than being identical to too many others. Plus, my mate Jim said (probably quite rightly) that the flowery header image didn’t really suit me.
Continue reading ‘Sexy new theme with K2!’
Uh-oh. According to this security announcement from WordPress, a server hosting WordPress downloads was recently compromised, and a cracker modified the 2.1.1 download, adding code in wp-includes/theme.php and/or wp-includes/feed.php.
The announcement states:
It was determined that a cracker had gained user-level access to one of the servers that powers wordpress.org, and had used that access to modify the download file. We have locked down that server for further forensics, but at this time it appears that the 2.1.1 download was the only thing touched by the attack. They modified two files in WP to include code that would allow for remote PHP execution.
This is the kind of thing you pray never happens, but it did and now we’re dealing with it as best we can. Although not all downloads of 2.1.1 were affected, we’re declaring the entire version dangerous and have released a new version 2.1.2 that includes minor updates and entirely verified files. We are also taking lots of measures to ensure something like this can’t happen again, not the least of which is minutely external verification of the download package so we’ll know immediately if something goes wrong for any reason.
If you downloaded 2.1.1 in the last few days, you may have a compromised version. However, for safety, even if you downloaded it before then, it’s probably worth upgrading anyway. Get 2.1.2 from the WordPress download page, then follow the upgrade instructions.
Continue reading ‘Wordpress 2.1.1 considered dangerous, upgrade now!’
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