Switching... » Wordpress

WordPress release 2.1.0

Richard5 — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 20:05:03 +0000

The boys and girls working on WordPress have made some serious new years resolutions by pumping out these new versions every couple of weeks. 2.1 is a big step in improvements and new features which will make future development, plugins, themes and widgets a lot easier.

The new release is called “Ella” after the famous jazz-singer. You can read more about the release in the wordpress dev log, Dougal’s weblog and this one.

I’ve upgraded again and it went without a problem, well almost. I got a warning when upgrading. I usually restrict database users to what I think they need and try to keep that to a minimum. My wordpress database user was not allowed to drop tables, never thought that was going to happen. The upgrade script was unable to drop the table “wp_linkcategories” now it is no longer needed. So I have done that manually.

WordPress updated to 2.0.7

Richard5 — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 20:23:32 +0000

This is a very quick release after the previous one but that was because some bugs sneaked past and there are some scurity patches included in this release. Read all about it on the WordPress development blog. Off course I upgraded my blog asap and didn’t have any problems… yet

WordPress got updated to 2.0.6

Richard5 — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 15:01:57 +0000

I’ve just upgraded this blog to run the latest release of WordPress, it was announced a few days ago and finally had some time to kill today to run the upgrade. It was rather painless as usual. If you run WordPress on your system please upgrade as well as there are some inportant security fixes in this release, besides that, other updates to 2.0.6 include:

HTML quicktags now work in Safari browsers
Comments are filtered to prevent them from messing up your blog layout
Compatibility with PHP/FastCGI setups
New anti-XSS function called attribute_escape(), and a new filter called “query” which allows you filter any SQL at runtime

There was however a small bug which affected users who use feedburner, the bug got solved and here’s how to do it yourself. It will be included in the 2.0.7 release which as it looks like, will be released soon. 2.1 is scheduled to be released pretty soon as well. The first beta is already available.

WordPress got updated to 2.0.5

Richard5 — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 20:38:10 +0000

Just upgraded my production blogs to this new release without a problem. It’s easy and painless as every upgrade of WordPress is. You can read Mark’s blog on the biggest bug fixes. Mark has also provided a zip file with all the changed files so you don’t have to upload the whole distribution, which makes it a lot easier. This release was called Ronan in honor of Ryan Boren’s new son. I guess I’ll call my next release of the documents Anna

If you run WordPress on your server you should upgrade as well…

WordPress got updated to 2.0.4

Richard5 — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 16:34:14 +0000

When checking the comments and spam in my wordpress administrator I saw that WordPress got an update a few hours ago. The new 2.0.4 release contains several important security updates, so you are strongly advised to upgrade. In addition to the security enhancements, there are many other small bug fixes, as well.

I first upgraded a test/development site to check the upgrade procedure was working and then went forward and upgraded my production blog. It was very painless, I hope it is the same for you.

WordPress got updated to 2.0.3

Richard5 — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 20:31:35 +0000

As an avid user of WordPress I just found out (because I spend some days not being behind a computer) that WordPress has had an update a couple of days ago. The major drive for me to upgrade it that there was a security issue with the administration tool. Besides that there are some small performance enhancements as well. Read all about it in the announcement at the WordPress site. I’ve just updated my instalment and may I suggest you do it as well as quickly as possible.

Updates on Courier IMAP and Akismet anti spam plugin.

Richard5 — Thu, 25 May 2006 12:14:39 +0000

Just a small post to let you know about some updates that where released today. First the Courier IMAP server has had a minor upgrade which solves some minor issues (which hadn’t troubled me yet). But it’s good to know and I’ll be upgrading later this evening. You can get the new version 4.1.1 from http://www.courier-mta.org/download.php.

Second update is a new update of the Akismet plug-in for WordPress. This plug-in is a real time saver as is keeps 99% of all spam from showing up in my blog as you might have noticed. It’s up to version 1.15 and the changes are more cosmetical than functional and you can get it here. If you are running a WordPress blog you really can’t do without.

Security update for OS X and WordPress

Richard5 — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 21:49:42 +0000

It looks like security is the big thing in 2006. I don’t mind because if everybody takes this seriously then we eventually will have less problems. It just takes a for us to read the release notices and upgrade our software and test to see if nothing important has broken.
Apple has released a new security update called: OS X Security Update 2006-002 it’s only 13 days after the previous one. Most of the updates have to do with the problems discovered lately. I mention the update because of the mentioning of apache_mod_php, but you don’t have to worry as our setup isn’t touched and you can update without any problem.

I’ve also had to upgraded my Blog to WordPress 2.0.2 as there where some XSS security issues in version 2.0.1 I just installed two weeks ago. You can read more about it on the WordPress blog. Upgrading was as easy as before and I think not many of you noticed anything.

Security Update OS X, WordPress update and Roundcube patches

Richard5 — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 22:14:13 +0000

Just a quick word. I wanted to let you know that the OS X Security Update 2006-001
won’t be any problem and you can apply it to your server setup (if you followed my instructions). Although there is an update in it where the apache_mod_php is replaced, we are using another PHP module which is located in a different place. The server logistics package is still at 4.3.9 and is still a security issue. I’m looking into compiling a version myself and help you compile it yourself without to much problems.

I’ve also upgraded my Blog to WordPress 2.0.1 last night, I was still using 1.5 and felt that I needed to upgrade. You might have noticed postings disappearing and appearing double in the RSS feed. Something went wrong during the upgrade but I made a backup !!! Which enabled me to try again successfully…
The Roundcube webmail project has made 2 patches available that solve two ugly bugs. One prevented from saving the language selection in the user preferences and the other completely omitted mail headers when having no smtp server configured.

Spam, not just email but also via comments

Richard5 — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 16:14:59 +0000

You might have noticed the last few days that some comments where unrelated and where having links to other web-sites in them. They were put there wuth a spamming purpose. To get a higher rating at Google or to get you to click on the link. I don’t know how I suddenly became a target, I must have been put on a list somewhere ? Luckily WordPress held back most of the spam by not allowing more than 3 links in a comment. It’s very annoying to have to check and delete the comments made in your blog and I started looking for a method to prevent spam.

The easiest method to extend the functionality of WordPress is using plug-ins and I went checking in the plugin repository to see what’s available.

I was a bit overwhelmed by the amount of spam related plugins, and after some reputation checking I went for the Akismet plug-in written by Matthew Mullenweg, yes the same one who wrote WordPress. It’s been running for a day now and didn’t get any spam yet. But it’s to short to really call it a success, if don’t get any spam after a week I will.

The installation was pretty simple, just upload a .php file to the wp-plugin directory on the server and activate it. But there was a twist, I had to sign-up at WordPress.com to get an API key ? This means that there will be people just creating empty blogs at WordPress.com. Mine is at: http://richard5.wordpress.com/ which is a useless waste of resources at WordPress.

While I was busy with this plugin I also uploaded another one to enable links to related entries after every post. It’s just called Related Posts, I hope you like it.