The Musings of Chris Samuel

I’ve just spent a bit of time fixing up a fairly simple bug that was preventing Rich Boakes’s “Worst Offenders” plugin¹ from working in current WordPress versions (basically it was assuming it had created a submenu somewhere it wasn’t) and merged my branch back into trunk to check the content of comments for a list of bad words. No release yet, this is just in trunk, but if you are feeling adventurous you can go into your WordPress’s wp-content/plugins directory and do:

svn co http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/worst-offenders/trunk/ worst-offenders

Of course make sure you’ve nuked any earlier version of Worst Offenders first!

1. This plugin classifies your Akismet spam queue by various criteria to let you do bulk deletes for comments matching various criteria [back]

Taken the plunge and upgraded from Wordpress 2.8.6 to 2.9.1, so if you’re seeing issues with the site leave a comment here, or if that doesn’t work catch me on Twitter.

Wordpress 2.8.5 has just been released:

As you know over the past couple of months we have been working on the new features for WordPress 2.9. We have also been working on trying to make WordPress as secure as possible and during this process we have identified a number of security hardening changes that we thought were worth back-porting to the 2.8 branch so as to get these improvements out there and make all your sites as secure as possible.

It includes a fix for a trackback DoS attack that’s apparently going on at the moment. I’ve updated the 3 blogs I look after with a quick svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.8.5.

Just upgrade to 2.8.1 and managed to make the SVN version work with judicious use of svn revert and svn switch.

Let me know if anything is broken (email chris at csamuel.org or send me a message on Twitter)!

Just had a rather nasty experience trying to upgrade to WP 2.8 using svn switch to move to the 2.8 tag – it resulted in the whole thing going pear shaped during the upgrade process and complaining about:

Fatal error: Class ‘WP_Widget’ not found in $wordpress/wp-includes/default-widgets.php on line 15

Turns out that the files in SVN don’t match what’s in the 2.8 tarball, and the 2.8 tag in SVN doesn’t work. The fix was to rsync the files from the tarball over SVN. Very very weird (and the first time I’ve had such problems!).

I’ve swapped to a new theme called Atahualpa which looks quite nice and has a lot of configuration settings to tweak, as well as being a variable width three column theme. As usual if you spot any problems please let me know!

An unfortunate clash between some old .htaccess rules for the WPG2 plugin and WordPress resulted in all subpages of this blog being unavailable for over a day!

It’s fixed now, but apologies for the inconvenience..

So WordPress 2.6 is now out, and so I’ve just done another painless Wordpress upgrade, from 2.5 to 2.6.

As ever, please report any problems and if you can’t leave a comment email me at chris at the domain csamuel.org !

The ABC news is reporting that Olive Riley, born in 1899, has died in Broken Hill. She’s been having her reminiscences put up on her blog for a while now and I’m sorry that I’ve only heard about her because of this.

Her site is down now, but the ABC News has a video report of her exploits.

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.