Tag Archives: Blog software

Bandinage in Robin Hood’s Barn

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HexedWow, what a long strange trip that was! I’ve got a lot of my amateur photography and I’ve been kicking around the notion of placing it all on my host and sharing it through my blog somehow. I started this sad trip with Pixelpost, then looked around for other LAMP scripts that could work after Pixelpost belly-flopped and died on impact. The issue I had with Pixelpost was trying to mass-import 218 pictures of my two cats. The software just couldn’t cope. So after a while trying to hammer a square peg in a round hole I just gave up altogether.

Then it struck me that I could use my WordPress blog maybe. I had a dim memory about something about Galleries. I can store as much as I like on my host and there’s no bandwidth issues so why not? So I did some reading in the Codex and well, there you go! Create a new Page, add Media, create a new Gallery and it’s EXACTLY WHAT I WANTED. Then I happened to notice JetPack and looked in there and it has Carousel feature which improves the standard Gallery control for WordPress. WOW! It was everything I wanted and it ate all 218 files without blinking and making new pages is a snap! Adding and removing pictures from the Galleries is just as easy.

So all that way and all that time blown out trying to get a weak system to behave itself and the answer was just under the covers in WordPress all along! I am exceptionally pleased. 🙂 Thanks all you wonderful ladies and gentlemen at Automattic! Thankee-sai!

You can find these galleries on the main menu of my Blog, under the title of Photo Galleries. I hope you enjoy them!

photo by: Nicholas_T

Limit Login Attempts Plugin

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IMG_0025I recently added to my WordPress blog security now that blogs like these are being targeted by botnets. I’ve found a great plugin called “Limit Login Attempts” which allows me to set lockout values to people who try to guess what the ‘admin’ account password is.

First, lets just say that the level of entropy in my admin accounts is so high that there isn’t enough time left in the Universe to try every combination – but that being said, my values for this plugin would make this a non-issue. I give people 4 attempts to try the ‘admin’ account, after that they are locked out for 1440 minutes, a day. If they lockout twice, the lockout penalty goes to 720 hours, or a month. There is 4320 hour span until retries are reset, that’s 6 months.

Of course, the filter also captures the IP address, so I’m going to look into getting a IP blacklist plugin and adding these captured IP addresses to that blacklist. They’ll never be allowed to my blog. This line of reasoning led me to think about an immune system for the Internet. If an IP does something wrong, it is blacklisted and that fact is then sent to every other site and they blacklist it as well. One false move and you are suddenly banished from the network. I think this would radically change how people behave online. There would definitely be a lot of noise raised when people are suddenly unable to communicate with any host whatsoever because their systems were filthy, compromised, or malevolent. That would add a certain value of responsibility. It would only be a little bit more to establish a site like Digg where people vote on the malevolence of comment traffic, putting trolls right along with botnets and black-hats, out in the cold, banished where they all belong.

I can smell an RFC forming. 🙂

photo by: katerha

WordPress Security

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Bank vault doorI run a gaggle of WordPress blogs, both for personal reasons and for work reasons. My SupportPress site runs on WordPress.org and the host I’ve been using all along, iPage sent me an email informing me that they have detected a botnet-sourced cyberattack directed at the login pages of WordPress.org installations. They also informed all their customers that they have installed network limits on these attacks, but that even though the attacks have been greatly reduced, that it shouldn’t lead to a flagging of security vigilance.

No time like the present to get things installed on all my WordPress blogs. The first thing I can think of since all my passwords are 16 to 20 characters long, randomized, stored for me in 1Password, and stored in such a way that even I don’t know them – is to install a plugin called Limit Login Attempts to all the WordPress blogs I manage. This will prevent people from screwing up their login attempts and it will email me when they try. So far this blog is covered and I don’t really expect any problems here.

Thanks to social networking, especially Twitter and my good friend @wyrdsmyth, and my hosting provider iPage I have been protected all along. More security is usually a good thing and in this case, warranted with this extra plugin. Next stop are all the other blogs I manage.

photo by: walla2chick

WordPress Jetpack 2.2.1 Success

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SparklerAt least JetPack for WordPress 2.2.1 upgraded without any fanfare. Everything still works too! For the blogs that I manage that had it, it’s updated. Wheee!

P.S. If anyone would like their own blog on our domain just let me know. I can set it up for you lickety-split and even manage it for you if you like. For free. Yes-suh. 🙂

photo by: letavua

Pretty As A Picture

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While screwing around with my blog today I did notice something missing that I used to enjoy from the Plinky site that I used to use for blog prompts for interesting things to write about. WIthin Plinky you could put a word down and search Flickr for images you could use in your blog. That was a really cool feature and it made including pictures in my blog very easy. I didn’t have to worry about stealing photography from someone else as it only used pictures that were released under the Creative Commons licensing model. Since I don’t make any money from this blog, the Creative Commons has really helped out.

051 of 365 - Droste Effect [Explored]

So I went looking. I could still futz around with Google Image search which is annoying as you can’t define a default (only Creative Commons licensed) search that I could find – yes, you can go in afterwards and mark up an Advanced Search, but it’s annoying. In fact, I don’t want to ever leave the WordPress interface at all! So, thanks, perhaps, to PhotoDropper Plugin I won’t have to. I’ve seen some people complain about it but so far I haven’t seen any of the damage they have noticed on my blog. If the plugin behaves itself, I’ll enjoy it. Let’s see how it works with this post. 🙂

photo by: Yogesh Mhatre

Tent Flapping

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Spam wall
Went back and forth just now on IntenseDebate plugin for WordPress.org. I thought it might be useful and add some features to my blog that would be nice to have, like After-The-Deadline plugin for comments and such. Everything was going well until I noticed that my Akismet Spam queue was at 74 comments. I tried to open the queue and couldn’t as IntenseDebate had replaced that part of my blog with its own controls. So, with no way to look at my Akismet Spam queue I decided that the pros for the IntenseDebate plugin couldn’t compensate for the way it broke my blog when it came to Akismet Spam queue access. So, there was for a brief time a new comment system, and then there wasn’t.

Which doesn’t mean a lot because people aren’t actually commenting on my blog, they are commenting on Facebook. I do get the one-off Twitter retweet or favorite, but that’s it.

Drafts Changes Workflow

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The more I use the Drafts app for my iPad and iPhone the more I love it and the more I want to use it. It’s actually changed the workflow for my “Post-a-Day” WordPress blogging as well as my regular blogging in general. What I used to do was copy the Post-a-Day prompt emails over to my WordPress blog and set the post type to Drafts and let them sit there. I’ve never been a huge fan of the editor built-in to WordPress, but copying the emails to Drafts and storing them there, syncing them to Simperium which then synchronizes them across all my devices that have Drafts loaded on them, which is now just my iPhone.

The app itself has so many neat features, being able to store multiple drafts and have them swipe-accessible from the left makes switching files a breeze and then when the post is done and ready to be published I can swipe from the right and select as many services as I want to send my drafts off to. It’s the perfect promontory to launch Day One, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and WordPress. Generally speaking, the drafts themselves almost always follow a certain path, first to Day One then to WordPress because then WordPress sends links to Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr on my behalf with the publicize feature. But sometimes I write things that don’t go to my blog, in that case I can send to Day One and Facebook. I have configured the apps representation in Facebook to conform to my “Sharing” security group, so even if I tap the Facebook option I don’t have to worry about my private sharing thoughts leaking out where they don’t belong.

The only thing (yes, there is one of these for every user) that I would really love is a Drafts app for Mac OSX. That would let me hack away on Drafts entries on my iMac without having to clear off workplace desktop space to set up my iPad. I think it’ll just be a matter of time before we see those options start to become available. I would pay $15 for an app like that without even batting an eye.

WordPress Jetpack and Post By Email

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Several days ago, when I had all that trouble working with Jetpack for my WordPress.org blog I couldn’t get stats to work. I sent a support ticket to the developer of Jetpack and it turned out that it was a problem with my web host, iPage. Once they fixed the problem on their side, the stats worked again. There was another problem, one that hasn’t worked for a very long time and I gave up hope almost. There is a feature of Jetpack called “Post By Email” and this feature should work, but never has. I once again opened a support ticket with the developer of Jetpack and told them what was wrong.

Late last night I got an email from a WordPress.org Forum [Post](http://wordpress.org/support/topic/jetpack-post-by-email?replies=13#post-3952121) that I’ve been commenting on stating that the issue is solved if you upgrade your installation of PHP to 5.3 on your web host. So I logged into iPage, found the PHP settings, pushed them to 5.3 and then tried again. My test post worked like a charm!

So much so that I am sending this post via email. It should arrive in moments and then I’ll publish it. Hooray! I love a fix. What a great way to start the day!

Jetpack Failure

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I recently upgraded my installation of Jetpack for WordPress.org on my blog here and right after I did that the damn thing stopped working. Verison 2.2 with WordPress 3.5.1. Everything should be 5×5 but it isn’t. I’ve contacted Jetpack support and I’m waiting to hear from them what my next steps should be but I figured it made sense to blog about this since it touches on WordPress and well, here we are.

The first thing I did was disconnect my Jetpack from WordPress.com, that went very easy. Then I tried to re-engage with WordPress.com and got an SSL timeout error. I then went onto Google and found a bunch of others who were having this problem. After I engaged with the Jetpack support people they asked me to run the a href=http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/jetpack/branches/jetpack-compatibility-test.zip target=_blankJetpack Compatibility Test plugin/a. I did that, it generated content and I sent it off for analysis.

So I don’t have Jetpack running and I leaned back and wondered if things would be so bad without it. I mean, if an update breaks it perhaps it’s not meant to be used. So, if there is a solution, that’s fine and dandy, and if there isn’t, living without Jetpack is also fine and dandy.

I’ll be updating this post with new details as they unfold. What’s really irking is Jetpack worked for a long long time up until the last update, then poof.

strongUPDATE/strong: I tried to connect to WordPress on a lark and it worked. So, if the Jetpack support fellows did something, then thank you guys for your help!

**UPDATE 2**: Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, the post-by-email bit of Jetpack doesn’t seem to like me. Sent several messages and nothing posted to the blog. Perhaps a sneaky firewall issue, or gnomes. 😉

Tagging

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I’ve been blogging actively on and off for years. Much of it started in LiveJournal and when SixApart, the company that wrote LiveJournal were sold to a russian company it was time for me to leave. I left for a few reasons, one was because I didn’t trust my writings to a company that was owned by a foreign country – the laws get murky once your thoughts and opinions leave the USA; the other reason was a general eroding of english users as more cyrillic users started to appear on LiveJournal. The language barrier between english and russian was the little push that I needed to leave that and get on with WordPress.

My use of WordPress continued a-pace until one of my work blogs was tagged as suspect by a WordPress.com robot and the company deactivated my blog. After explaining what I was using the blog for, they re-enabled it however that identified a problem for me, mostly that my blog was being measured – if not by a person then by an automatic process and as such, it had a definite stink of censorship about it. At work, and in my private life I already had a separate hosting company and that’s when I discovered WordPress.org, the DIY blog platform based on the technology that powers WordPress.com. I installed a constellation of new blogs both for work and for personal use and that had a bunch of added extras – specifically unlimited storage of rich media which I would have otherwise had to pay for with WordPress.com as well as direct control of the content. There were no robots or censors wandering around turning off accounts willy-nilly in this other arrangement. Also, and more to the point of this blog entry, the shift over to WordPress.org also enabled the use of plugins which really extend the WordPress platform even further than the nice presentation that the WordPress.com system provides. I’ve been having a devil of a time remembering to tag my WordPress blog posts. I went fishing for a new plugin to maybe help with tags and I found the WP Calais Auto Tagger and so far I’m quite impressed with it’s quality. Now when I make a post, the post is sent to OpenCalais where it is processed for relevant tags and I get a list of possibilities that I can elect to use or not. I take the category part of my blog posts very seriously and now I can rely on this bit of technology to help me with the tags as well. If you run WordPress blogs, I suggest you look into this.

Generally speaking, if you are a friend of mine and would like a WordPress.org blog for your own, I’m more than happy to help you out. I can set it up quickly and support it even – if you are interested, just drop me a line. Those that know me know how to reach me. I suppose everyone else could leave a comment. This offer isn’t valid for anyone at Western, sorry.