Category Archives: WordPress

WordCamp Pictures and Words

WordCamp went really well yesterday. I’m a little hungover today so I’ll point you in the direction of others who blogged the event:

Later – I uploaded my images to Zooomr and created a smart set there. That was a nice experience, the uploader is slightly better than a regular HTTP upload and the smart set feature is like virtual folders in Thunderbird. If they had upload by email I’d be there every day!

WordPress.com Paid Services

We finally launched the store to the public at large after what seems like an eternity in development! Andy's Custom CSS Editor is the first product there, and priced at $15/year it's very reasonable. Feedback has been positive mostly, although mixed at times.

There does seem to be some confusion about the CSS Editor, you can modify the css of any of the existing themes by taking advantage of the "cascading" feature of CSS. The styles you define in the editor override those in the theme's stylesheet.

I can't wait to see what people do with this. I hope to see a lot of talent come out of the woodwork and make their blogs prettier and unique!

Holy Shmoly, it lives!

This site has moved. It's now at ocaoimh.ie where I can play with a more up to date version of WordPress.

Upgrading was a breeze:

  1. I dumped the old database tables and copied them over here.
  2. I installed this site with the usual defaults included near-empty tables.
  3. Then I fed my old db tables back in, changed the prefix in wp_config.php to point at those old tables.
  4. I changed the siteurl and home in the options table to point at the new url.
  5. Finally, I visited the upgrade url which magically brought the db up to date!

I decided on using K2, and modified the default theme slightly to match my old theme somewhat. Unfortunately I had to edit index.php so I have to watch out when I'm upgrading.

I decided I needed a related posts plugin as well as one to display the latest comments. Both required a little bit of massaging to work with the development WP 2.1 which I'll update this post with later. Next in line is something to resurrect my "popular posts" list using data from my referrer plugin!

What about my old site? I used some rewrite magic to bring you here didn't I? 🙂

2006-07-21__mg_7940-sm.jpg

Damien had a nice lunch, I had sandwiches. Thought you'd like to know!

WordPress Gathering in San Francisco!

I’m off to San Francisco at the end of the month! Matt is organising WordCamp, a free WordPress conference on August 5th in San Francisco and I’ll be there along with the rest of the Automattic guys.

I’m really looking forward to it, meeting people I talk to every day online, hacking on WordPress stuff and taking lots and lots of photos. I’m not the only one making the trip across the Atlantic either; Podz is flying over too!

Corporate WordPress support is evil?

Toni announced yesterday the launch of the Automattic Support Network. This has of course attracted the attention of many blogs who have discussed the business implications but Peter Chris wonders if WordPress.org support will suffer. Here’s another post on the same issue but Matt replies with an excellent rebuttal.

I very much doubt the support network will have any immediate effect on the level of support offered to non-paying users. The number of non-paying users will always vastly outnumber those who pay for support. What happens if commercial support adversely affects the time spent on non-paying users? Guess what? There’ll be money in the bank to hire somebody else from the community to help out!

This can only be a win-win situation for all involved.

If you want to see what all the fuss is about, then give WordPress MU a spin. It’s come a long way recently, and if you’re looking for more, then visit wpmudev for older releases, some plugins, a theme pack and other stuff.

The Akismet Worst Offenders

Rich Boakes has written an extension to Akismet that makes deleting all the spam comments much easier. His extension adds a “Worst Offenders” list at the top of the Akismet page. The list is ordered by hits from IP address and helped me delete 2,407 comments with 3 or 4 clicks and saved me scrolling through an endless list of spams.

To make things load faster, look for “LIMIT 150” in akismet.php and change 150 to 10. Your Akismet review page will only display 10 spam comments now, which is more convenient.

Using another mod he wrote he has also hooked Akismet up to Apache’s deny/allow capilibities. It updates his .htaccess to deny requests from the worst offenders on his Akismet page. If your server isn’t particularly powerful this would be a great way of stopping those spammers eating all your precious server resources.

The best anti-comment-spam engine just got a great UI overhaul!

UCC students blogging

Damien Mulley has the scoop about the latest development at University College Cork. All students will be given blogs!

While that’s great news for blogging in Ireland, I’m disappointed that they didn’t choose WordPress Mu. I had a quick look around a few blogs and noticed a few things:

  • They do have permanent links, but links to articles are only in the sidebar “Recent Posts” block. The title of each post is not linked, and neither is the timestamp.
  • Permanent links aren’t very descriptive being of the form “/blogs/Username/item_x.htm” where x is a number.
  • It looks like trackbacks and pings aren’t supported so it will be just a little harder for blog owners to participate in blog conversations with others.
  • What will happen when a student finishes college? Will they be able to export their work? On another level, who owns the work? Student or College?

I have to disagree with Bernie’s comment about what value for money colleges get from hosting blogs. Bebo and MySpace are only two of the many companies offering their own proprietary website platforms. A college weblog has an unbreakable link to that institution. Colleges are places for learning which is quite different from the profit motive of any and every commercial company out there. The more exposure students get to blogging the better they will be at dealing with this phenomenon in the future. Not to mention the older students who are not in the demographic targeted by commercial interests.

Flocking Fast!

Wow, Flock is fast! I wonder if it chews memory like FF 1.5 too?
It’s also a lot more polished than when I tried it a few months back while debugging their sign up page on WordPress.com: preferences, cookies and form data were all imported from Firefox. The little Greasemonkey face isn’t showing in the status bar so I’ll have to install that again.

Oh, and it doesn’t spew out a ton of debug messages to the console any more! 🙂

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