The Musings of Chris Samuel

Well, I asked for feedback on putting adverts on the previously and got all positive responses, so I’ve now activated Google AdSense text-only adverts using the excellent no-adverts-for-friends WordPress plugin.

So, if you don’t like adverts, just leave an appropriate comment somewhere and you won’t see them. Either that or use Firefox and the great Adblock Plus plugin!

If for some reason you want to see adverts after leaving a comment I’m afraid you’ll need to go and delete any cookies for www.csamuel.org from your browser first.

Get it while it’s hot folks, the brand new shiny Wordpress 2.5 is now up for people to grab!

Just upgraded here from RC2 to the release version - please let me know if you find anything that has broken.

OK, now running 2.5 RC2. You know the usual drill - please comment, blog with a trackback or email about problems!

Well I’ve just completed an amazingly painless upgrade to the first release candidate ofWordPress 2.5, the only thing that caught me out was an old functions.php file left over from a previous release that caused a PHP5 error about redefining a function!

There’s bound to be some hidden breakage that I’ve not yet spotted, so leave a comment (if you can) or drop me an email as chris (at-the-domain) csamuel.org with the details please.

Update: After a few days of playing around with it I’ve got to say I like it the new admin interface. I’m finding it much easier to navigate and compared to the other WP 2.3 sites I admin the dashboard seems a lot less cluttered and that ever-so-subjective word, “clean”.

The only niggle I’ve got so far is that now in the widgets view you can only see the one column of widgets at a time, so if you’re using a 3 column theme (as the current one here is) you can no longer move a widget directly from one column to another. But I can live with that.

Bookmarking this useful information from Russell for future reference. I’ve just installed the RSS Footer plugin as recommended by the post that Russell links to.

I read on PLOA that Michael Carden briefly tried to open his blog for comments, only to find:

The WordPress UI balked at deleting 194,000 (okay, I ignored it for a while) comment spams. I had to dig in as admin and run a fun sql query on the database to delete all 47 meg of them.

I guess I’ve got a couple of suggestions for Michael to make his life a little easier should he decide to try again.

1. Akismet has an option to “Automatically discard spam comments older than a month“, that might help (though it’d be nice to be able to adjust the time).
2. Run, do not walk, to Rich Boakes most excellent Worst Offenders plugin. This will both group comments for deletion based on various criteria but also (if you have permission) add Apache “Deny From” rules for the offending IP addresses. It’s also worth bumping the number of IP addresses it can ban up, Donna’s blog is up to over 8,000 at the moment!
3. There are also tools like Bad Behaviour to try and catch bots before they get to you and if you are a member of Project Honeypot then there is the http:BL WordPress Plugin to check and block IP’s listed as baddies there.

Anyway, I hope that helps some people out.

My old friend Alec Muffett has switched his Dropsafe blog to Wordpress. Looks a lot nicer!

Andy Ballam left a comment on my post about migrating from PostNuke to Wordpress mentioning a tool he’s created called migratedata that I though deserved a wider mention..

This might be helpful to people: I’ve just started a project called migratedata (http://migratedata.sf.net/) that provides a framework for migrating between all different types of databases without writing any SQL - just editing an XML file.

It comes with an example that will migrate from PostNuke to WordPress 2.2. Nice work Andy!

Well after a few months of tinkering around my fab wife Donna has her new podcast Oddpod off the ground!

Her first guest is Caiseal Mor:

Caiseal Mor is best known as a bestselling fantasy fiction novelist. Those managing his public image have portrayed him to the public in many ways, none of them as a man with autism. Here Caiseal talks to autistic author, Donna Williams, about his decision to go public with his autism, a diagnosis he had in late childhood.

ObTech: The podcast is recorded using Cubase and then some extra tweaking done with Audacity under Linux. We’re using Wordpress with the excellent PodPress plugin to deliver it from our Debian Etch Linux virtual machine (using Xen) hosted with those nice folks at Rimuhosting.

Russell Coker, SELinux developer, Bonnie++ maintainer and fellow LUV person has now switched from Blogger to his own Wordpress installation, which makes leaving comments a hell of a lot easier!

He’s also now got a blog on “random things that are large or of limited interest“, though why that isn’t just a category on his main site (and using Wordpress’s handy “more” marker to stop the whole thing showing up on the front page) I’m not sure.

Anyway, welcome to Wordpress Russell!