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A very neat WordPress plugin

Benny Chew — Thu, 17 May 2007 09:40:27 +0000

As stated in the WordPress’s Codex, one of the steps in doing a proper upgrade of WordPress is deactivating all plugins beforehand (and reactivating upon successful upgrade). Since I’m managing a number of WordPress sites, and each WordPress install has a fair bit amount of active plugins, doing this is a considerably arduous task and annoying (especially so since updates/upgrades get released often).

I was googling around for a quick fix for this and found this plugin which works a treat. :)

Now if only that can be added to my shell script which currently automatically grabs the latest.tar.gz and rsyncs all the separate installs to promote further efficiency and laziness..

Remove truncation of feed feature after more tag in WordPress 2.1

Benny Chew — Sat, 12 May 2007 14:27:27 +0000

If you have already upgraded to WordPress 2.1 and have the syndication feeds options set to ‘full text’, you might’ve noticed that the RSS feed for your blog post gets truncated after the use of the tag. This is a change in behaviour as compared to previous version of WordPress (2.0 and below) which would show the whole post in an RSS feed if the feed option was set to full text.

Without going into the debate of full vs. partial feeds (I’m on the full feeds side though ;)), there’s a WordPress plugin which does not require any additional configuration apart from just dropping it into your WordPress’s plugins directory and activating it. Get it from here.

Combating comment spam

Benny Chew — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 11:05:39 +0000

After the major upgrade by my webhost, there was a sudden surge in spam on the blogs on spherebox, with a lot bypassing Akismet‘s filtering. Apparently he did not configure the ModSecurity Apache module (which did an excellent job previously) and was too lazy to do so as the new version he had installed had supposedly different configuration settings. :(

Since I got sick of getting the incessant email notifications of spam held in moderation queue, I decided to go looking around for fixes and came across this at WordPress’s Codex which helped cut down the crazy amount of spam that kept going through by heaps. Basically it adds rules to the .htaccess file which will check that any comments being submitted to wp-comments-post.php come from the comments page of the WordPress installation and not directly injected by spam bots.

Note that this did not stop the spam completely, but managed to reduce the volume enough so that Akismet could block it off appropriately.

If you’re encountering the same issue as I did, try it out. The instructions are fairly simple and requires few modifications. :)

Sites upgraded to WordPress 2.1

Benny Chew — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 05:55:09 +0000

It’s been a while since my last post, unfortunately have been extremely busy with all kinds of things lately. :( Had some time this weekend, so WordPress 2.1 has been deployed to all hosted sites. Unfortunately, there are some plugins which still have not been fixed to work with 2.1 (e.g. video embedding).

Sites upgraded to WordPress 2.0.6

Benny Chew — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 12:56:10 +0000

Have just upgraded all WordPress installs across spherebox sites with the latest version. :)

Get the latest zip or tar.gz from here, or if you want just the changes files and/or diff, have a look here.

WordPress 2.0.5 released

Benny Chew — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 14:47:04 +0000

Was released earlier today, and have just upgraded all spherebox hosted blogs. :) You can get the changed files zip only here.

WordPress 2.0.4

Benny Chew — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 15:18:17 +0000

It was released earlier today and is noted to have fixed a lot of security vulnerabilities, so I those who are running WordPress blogs themselves should update soon.

Have just updated blogs hosted on spherebox. :)

Edit: You can get only the changed files in a zip which would save the time needed in uploading here.