wordpress - 21.1.2005 - 18.6.2005

Changes in the Metaeule

Well, the Metaeule is good for more than just aggregating RSS feeds - that would be boring, anyone can do that. Okay, the links are very interesting, but still - just putting together a Planet-like aggregator would be boring.

Therefore, I have now redesigned the search and archive views a bit. From now on, new posts on the homepage will only be posted as excerpts. In the archive and search results, the posts will only appear as titles in the results list - the search is sorted by relevance (as well as MySQL can manage). The special feature: each article or title has a link in the archive. With this link, you can access the secured article page. So even if the original host is not available, the content of the post is retrievable (though only the content that was also provided to me via the RSS feed - if the blog only has excerpts in the RSS feed, only excerpts will end up in the database). Additionally, at the bottom of the archive page, there is a list of posts on the posts themselves that might be relevant to this post - of course only within the limits of what MySQL can manage.

Overall, the Metaeule is no longer just a simple aggregator, but also an archive, a topic-specific search engine, and a cross-reference list. Let's see how useful it turns out to be in real use. Once everything is running smoothly, I will write about which plugins and changes I used for this. Promised.

wp-cache-2 and PHP Accelerator

If you want to use the very useful caching plugin wp-cache-2, you need to be careful: it is not compatible with the PHPAccelerator. Unfortunately, you cannot use both together, only one of the two works. Quite annoying, because they address different elements - the plugin caches the output, the accelerator caches the precompiled PHP. Therefore, the accelerator would also help the cache system, since the cache system is written in PHP ...

Anyway, I have activated the plugin on the WordPress blogs I manage. Especially the Metaeule could benefit from this in the long run. The caching is currently set to 20 minutes, so that changes in the database do not hang around for too long before everyone can see them. Let's see what oddities occur during operation.

One thing I expected not to work properly anymore is the Plugin Popularity Contest - this counts how often a post has been called up. This happens much less frequently due to the caching and therefore the numbers are no longer meaningful. Ratings based on comments and trackbacks are of course still possible, but the page views are useless. A pity actually, but in return I get much lower server load and much higher delivery rates: with activated wp-cache I have a load of just under 4 with 20 competing massive accesses and shovel just under 50 requests per second. Without wp-cache I have a load of over 9 and only just manage 5 requests per second.

So with wp-cache-2 only half the load and ten times the performance. For that I gladly sacrifice the Popularity Contest.

A second plugin that I noticed: Search Hilight (standard plugin from WordPress) doesn't work. Logically - it colors search terms that are determined from the referrer of a search engine. And referrers do not go into the cache signature. A pity, it was a visually nice gimmick. But on the other hand not really that important.

Popularity Contest

Alex King has a nice plugin for WordPress: the Popularity Contest. This collects and calculates various values for posts and determines which are the most popular. I've integrated it into my sidebar (below the images). In addition to the tags for embedding in the template, it also provides a wealth of information on a subpage of the WordPress admin homepage. There you can view popularity by category or type of metric. Let's see how the values develop.

RSS Language and WordPress

If you're as annoyed as I am that WordPress always claims the language in feeds is 'en' instead of 'de', and you've looked for the corresponding setting in the options: forget it, the WordPress developers have provided the option but not the GUI to set it. Rarely stupid.

Well, you can set it quite easily in a MySQL shell:

update wp_options
 set option_value = 'de'
 where option_name = 'rss_language'

Or alternatively with PHPMyAdmin or similar tools, simply find the corresponding data record and then patch the option_value field. It would be nicer if WordPress had made it possible to set this via the admin interface ...

Beautiful WordPressing

WordPress Administration Design: Tiger is a very nice CSS modification for the WordPress backend. It's especially rewarding for design-spoiled Apple users.

A useful addition is the following part in the wp-admin.css:

body#wpbookmarklet {
 padding: 23px 0 50px 5px;
 background: #FFF;
}

This hides the left margin in the bookmarklet. The margin only wastes space in the bookmarklet. Additionally, I also shortened the bg_body.gif to 160px and then reduced the widths of the adminmenu to 120px and 110px for the LI in the adminmenu, and reduced the padding of the normal body from 245px to 175px. This saves some space on the left - I only have a 1024x768 pixel screen resolution, so space is precious.

Update: meanwhile, there is the Tiger Admin as a plugin - installation no longer requires modification of the core files, and the bookmarklet problem is also gone - the bookmarklet now simply uses the old style and only the normal admin is updated.

Upgrade to WordPress 1.5.1.2

After upgrading, there might be some unusual effects - if you notice anything, please let me know. I'm referring to unusual effects that weren't there before - the other unusual effects that have been here for a while are probably intentional.

More on Spotlight

I need to urgently deal with the indexing issue, whether you can also include remote indexes or an indexer that indexes a database over the Internet. I would like to have my collected postings from my WordPress blog in my Spotlight index. That would be much more practical than opening a browser extra and searching here. And since I use this as a link dump and note blog anyway, I would finally be able to find the things I wanted to remember.

Ping TopicExchange from WordPress

Phillip Pearson has written a WP-plugin that simplifies simple pinging of TopicExchange. TopicExchange is essentially just a list of trackback targets with its own wiki for each trackback target. The idea is to provide a simple group blogging function that users can access through their own blogs.

Problems with the Newsfeed in WordPress

WordPress 1.5 has issues with the newsfeed - the date gets smashed there. Perun's blog has a bit more info on it and also a solution right away. In wp-rss.php there is the same problem with the mysql2date call, but only one call. Well, you can fix it right away.

Playing with new Theme

I finally decided to work with a new theme, or rather, to change the existing theme. It was the classic Kubrick with a custom background image, now it's "flexible Kubrick" - basically still Kubrick in terms of layout, but I've removed the rounded corners and shadows and switched the entire layout to em as a measure - no more fixed pixel widths, but instead font-relative specifications. Let's see, maybe I'll make the theme available later.

As a result, the layout should now adapt to the user's basic font settings and generally work more gracefully with corresponding changes. However, it is still not a liquid layout, but static - just with a flexible base size.

By the way, I solved the problem with the header graphic in a very classic way: the excavator is simply cut out and placed in front of a transparent background and saved as a GIF. Combined with the right background color, the result is quite usable in my opinion. And when the size of the page changes (e.g. by increasing the base font), the image grows in width with it.

If you notice anything strange, please let me know. I know it's not a layout-technical revolution. But I'm not capable of that anyway. I just wanted to try out what an em-based layout can look like and needed something to try it out on.

Striped Calendar for WordPress

First plugin from my picture blog (now out) is the Strip Calendar. Basically a normal WordPress calendar - only not as a block for the sidebar, but as a strip to place it over the content. Since you usually have more space to waste in the length of a page than in the width and since someone might want to break with the rather worn-out format where the calendar is in a sidebar, you can now simply install the strip calendar. The code for installation is trivial:

< ?php get_strip_calendar(); ?> ```

Just put this in the header.php or wherever you want the calendar. Done (of course first unpack the plugin to wp-content/plugins/ and activate it in the administration!).

Virtual Hosts with WordPress

The Vhost Plugin is my current favorite of the entries for the WordPress Plugin Competition. With this plugin, you can bind categories to virtual hosts - when this host is accessed, the appropriate category is automatically displayed and optionally, a different template can be applied to this combination.

I can think of a whole range of ideas spontaneously - for example, I could put my Bananenrepublik under it and present my rants as more independent content. Or I could finally run my photographic entries under one of my photo domains again. I think I'll play around with the plugin soon.

Another funny feature - but rather uninteresting for me - is the possibility to restrict a user to a VHost (and thus to a category) and set up a multi-blog platform on a WordPress installation. Could be quite funny for family blogs, for example.

Unfortunately, the installation is a bit tricky - you have to patch a few functions because there are bugs in the standard installation. With WP 1.5.1, this should hopefully be better.

The WordPress Versioning Plugin allows versioning of entries - i.e. articles and pages. This way, you can revert to an old version if necessary.

Tags from Terms

Jonathan Luster has released his Y! Terms Extraction Plugin for WordPress. It uses the Yahoo services to extract relevant keywords from a posting text and presents them as Technorati tags in the post. If anyone tries this out: I would be interested to know how well it works with German texts.

By the way, I would also be interested to know when blogg.de offers an API. I mean, it's about time to catch up with the features of Technorati and Yahoo, right?

FeedWordPress is a plugin that turns a WordPress installation into a planet site: essentially a public aggregator, except that the entries go into a WordPress database.

A Response to the Noise

A Response to the Noise is photomatt's response to the search engine spamming story. As I read through it, I once again notice how incredibly stupid decent programmers behave outside their neatly ordered computer world...

Well, he dismantled everything that was involved and eventually Google might give him back his PageRank (update: has given back) and life goes on. His explanation sounds stupid enough to be believable.

Wordpress Website's Search Engine Spam

Seen at Netzbuch: Wordpress Website's Search Engine Spam - photomatt funds WordPress servers and the first WordPress employee through search engine spam. This is done through articles and hidden links to various high-cost search terms that then point to search engine spam pages provided by a service provider. photomatt is just the middleman - the spam bot, only he doesn't spam comments but search engine results.

In German: that's absolute crap. Such behavior is - especially for someone who suffers massively from spammers with his software - absolutely unacceptable behavior. The talk of "if the community doesn't like it, I'll stop" is bullshit - why did he even start such crap? Especially since blog software is repeatedly accused of being a search engine polluter, one should be very careful in this area with stupid ideas and not pour more oil on the fire ...

At the same time, this is another good reason for me to use GPL software: if it were a company whose actions I cannot accept, I would have to refrain from using the software. So I can continue to use the software - because the actual programmer is relatively indifferent, I can fork it anytime and go my own way with the software. The separation between the software provider and the software itself is much more open.

Let's see what comes out of the community discussion on the topic, if necessary, it's time for a fork ...

First fallout: wordpress.org has been removed from the Google index.

And since the discussion about the financing of projects keeps coming up and is used as an excuse for the behavior: sorry, but that's bullshit. You can't sanctify the means with the purpose - someone who suffers massively from spammers and indeed fights against them cannot resort to similar means. And yes, it is and remains spam: anyone who abuses search engines - and thus the searchers! - to push their ranking is a search engine spammer. Period. The comment spammers also like to excuse themselves by saying they only use open resources and don't really spam - bullshit, both.

Preserve Code Formatting protects PRE and CODE blocks from wptexturize.

Cat2Tag Plugin

The Cat2Tag Plugin is something that was still missing for my photo blog: a way to work with WordPress categories like Flickr tags.

The most common tags (20 pieces, can be changed to all) are offered in a small JavaScript bar and additionally there is an input field for tags in which you can simply manually enter further ones (or click on the most common ones from the list). The default category is simply listed as a word in the tag list. New tags can be created simply by using the same. Very practical.

The hierarchy of the categories is of course not displayed - but this is not really interesting with tags anyway, the hierarchy does not play a real role with tags. Similarly, the tag description (category description) is not maintained, which must then be manually edited afterwards if you want to have something meaningful there (e.g. for the feeds).

The plugin still has one problem: it does not correctly convert the sharp s "ß" when shortening umlauts from tag names. But this seems to be a problem that WordPress also has - even when manually creating categories, the "ß" is not correctly resolved. One should therefore be careful with them. And of course, umlauts are not converted to their long form but to their base form - "ä" becomes "a". This makes the tag URLs somewhat problematic, as users need to know how the tag name is converted to the URL if they want to hack the URL themselves. But this is also a general problem of internationalization.

An idea for improvement would be an additional query string rule with which URLs with tag combinations (nature+animals) could be realized.

Otherwise, however, a really nice plugin with a very practical functionality for me.

The Time Zone (WP Plugin) is a handy little plugin that uses the time zone in WordPress so that the somewhat silly adjustment of the time difference in the options can be omitted. Found at Perun in the comments.

My new photo blog - and the first ladybug

My new photoblog - and the first ladybug

The first ladybug of the year. There are a few more pictures in my new photoblog (not active since 2007). By the way, it also works with WordPress, but with a few self-knitted plugins for photo management and the strip calendar (I'll put that together someday and make it downloadable). I'm already quite satisfied with the state over there. In the long run, I will probably create a mechanism that allows the photos to wander into this site here as thumbnails and then post pictures here rather rarely (at most the usual snapshots).

Why did I build something myself at all? Well, I find a number of features of Flickr quite nice, but I have a massive aversion to entrusting my content to foreign servers where I have no say in the operation or software design. Therefore, I have stolen some of the ideas from Flickr and also helped myself generously from other projects (for example, I copied the idea for the strip calendar from PixelPost) and integrated everything into WordPress. The layout was once Kubrick, but I hope it has become sufficiently different from it even for Kubrick allergics.

I had also looked at a whole range of content management systems beforehand to see how suitable they would be for something like this (you could read about the fallout from this partly here). And even toyed with the idea of doing the whole thing directly with PixelPost for a while. But the clearly superior comment features in WordPress (especially all the anti-spam techniques) eventually led me to stay with WordPress.

A few things are still on the to-do list, but in principle it is already quite usable and is therefore officially announced herewith.

My new photo blog - and the first ladybug

My new photo blog - and the first ladybug

WP: Gravatar Signup [ Tempus Fugit | TxFx.net ] is a small plugin that allows users to sign up for a Gravatar directly from the comment form, making it as easy as possible for people without a Gravatar to get started (and thus spreading Gravatars). Fun idea.

Borderline Chaos is a rather nice WordPress theme - I like the strong colors and the quite simple layout. Might be an idea to build on ... (yes, yes, someday I'll do more than just talk about layouts)

If you want to authenticate your WordPress against external user databases: the Authentication Plugins Patch extends WordPress with the necessary hooks to secure it, for example, via Apache authentication.

WordPress Theme: Gila - looks quite nice, is three-column and has a flexible middle column.

speed up WordPress l10n

New php-gettext, speed up WordPress l10n describes two quite simple measures to give WordPress a bit of a boost. Specifically, the gettext support is suboptimal - which affects every user of a non-English WordPress installation. Gettext is used to load the translations. With the mentioned patches, these areas are significantly accelerated, especially noticeable on individual pages (where the number of database accesses is smaller), but also, for example, on my homepage, this has resulted in a measurable acceleration.

Moderate trackbacks in general

For WordPress, there is a plugin that automatically sets trackbacks to moderated. However, this plugin uses additional database accesses (sets the moderation flag after the creation of the trackback), which is rather annoying for trackback spammers - every additional database access increases the system load. Therefore, I wrote my own version of it, which does not require any additional database accesses. The source is available here.

The LetterHead Theme for WordPress 1.5 is an extremely minimalistic theme - just two columns and text. No images. Could be ideal for people who need a "blank canvas" experience to implement their own design ideas - there's really nothing in Letterhead that could distract you much.

The WordPress IP to Country Plugin converts an IP address to a country and provides the country code. For example, you could (no, I haven't implemented this here, so test comments won't help) display the commenter's country based on their IP address (though this would obviously be misleading for Tor users). Also interesting is the reference to the IP-To-Country Database, which appears to be freely available. Useful for your own projects, such as analyzing log file statistics.

The Plugin API for WordPress lists actions and filters defined by WordPress. Currently being filled with content.

Batch Categories 0.9 can batch-process posts into new categories. It's more of a hack than a plugin, but still quite practical under certain circumstances.

Image Headlines Plugin for WordPress 1.5 automatically creates image replacements for headers. However, it probably only handles simple images, so you would still need to place invisible text under the H-tag to ensure that search engines don't just take the ALT attribute of the image for the header. And of course, image replacements have a significant drawback: they do not grow when the user changes the base font size.

OpenPGPComment for WordPress

OpenPGPComment is a WordPress plugin that allows you to display signed comments properly. Users can sign their comments with gpg, and the server then displays these comments without the signature in the post comments, but offers a popup window with the gpg output as a link. Nice idea.

Digitally signed comments are not only useful for associating comments with users - they also offer advantages for the user themselves. Specifically, it is ensured that signed comments have not been subsequently altered by the server operator. A not insignificant advantage, especially in weblogs, where the server owner usually has significantly more options available.

I would have liked to try it out myself, but it requires proc open - and proc open is only available from PHP 4.3 onwards. And in Debian Woody, there is still a PHP 4.1.2 ...

Red Alt - Kubrickr

Red Alt - Kubrickr generates a header image for the Kubrick layout from a selection of images on flickr that are licensed under CC. Should be usable for all Kubrick designs where the images have the same dimensions.

I've already toyed with the idea of building something like this myself - we'll see, maybe I'll integrate something like this into my photo plugin. Because I already had changing header graphics before, which I actually quite liked.

Alternative Rewrite Rules result in a significantly simpler .htaccess, especially one that doesn't constantly need to be updated by WordPress. This is particularly practical if you also use the .htaccess for other purposes. Additionally, Apache is not necessarily faster with the complex Rewrite-Rules from WordPress. I have activated them myself, let's see how WordPress 1.5 performs with these entries. If there are no problems, they will stay that way, because I like them much better than the other variant. And they don't have the problems that the others have - old mod_rewrite can only do greedy matching, which makes creating complex lists of rewrites quite hairy ...

The Technorati Plugin Beta provides a similar list to regular comments - except the links and text excerpts come from the Technorati link cosmos for an article. I'm currently wondering whether something like this couldn't also be done meaningfully with blogger.de - this way you could also catch those who aren't automatically linked via Trackback or Pingback. Of course, you'd have to check for duplicates against the regular trackbacks and pingbacks. Hmm.

BAStats Pre-Release for WordPress 1.5

BAStats Pre-Release - very nicely done. It provides direct insight into referrers, page views, etc. on a web server. Simple time-based filtering and fairly straightforward filters. I have no idea how it processes the data itself - whether there are appropriate data cleanup runs included, since it's still a pre-release. But it's quite nice to sit in front of the website and get live views. And much more manageable than a tail -f on the access log.

One effect of BAStats is that visitors receive a cookie. Anyone who rejects it, no problem - everything works as before. The cookie simply serves to identify a visit.

phpOpenTracker is a live access analyzer for websites. It can be integrated directly into PHP applications or data can be collected from static websites via web bugs (small invisible graphics). You can use it to learn quite a lot about user behavior on websites. And Asymptomatic is currently working on a WordPress plugin for it, which will allow you to see the corresponding evaluations in the WP backend...

WordPress 1.5 is out

and I updated it (I had a relatively current CVS version running). Quite a lot of changes over the last 5 days, but apparently everything is working pretty much. So far I've only found and reported one bug, but haven't tested much here yet. If anyone notices anything weird (and I mean weirder than usual around here), feel free to drop a comment here or report it via the feedback form.

WordPress Localization describes how to create your own translations for WordPress.

WordPress Files and Load Order

Wordpress file loading describes the order in which WordPress loads which PHP files to produce a blog page. Quite interesting if you're planning to change files - it provides an initial guide to where you might find things. However, what also stands out: given that WordPress actually produces quite lean pages, WordPress itself already has quite a bit of bloat.

Wordpress to Drupal Migration Script

Wordpress to Drupal Migration Script - but it currently seems to only be able to migrate from flat file to flat file - you may need to first set up a proper database as the target.

Update: well, the script really only transfers the posts. No post slugs (so no URL preservation), no categories, nothing. You might be able to use it if you only had a very simple WP blog, but otherwise it's pretty bare-bones. And with large blogs it crashes after a while with an error - the available memory is exhausted. This is because PHP uses the CGI settings when run from the command line - and the memory limit is restricted there too. On top of that, it has no duplicate detection, so it cheerfully imports everything again on the second run.

Sounds like I'd probably need to write my own solution if I wanted to try this seriously.

wp-style-switcher is a simple CSS switcher for WordPress that works without JavaScript or similar.

WordPress Related Entries plugin

わさび » Archives » WordPress Related Entries plugin - a very nice little plugin that searches for related articles using MySQL's full-text index. Of course, this is only a fairly simple algorithm and the quality of results is nowhere near Google's level, but I installed it anyway. When you go to the detail page of a post (e.g., by clicking on the title), a list of up to 5 matching other articles is displayed.

I also expect this to give somewhat better positioning for various older posts - without having to remember to manually set a link to them every time (hey, most of the time I've forgotten about them myself!). And maybe it will also help people who come via search engines to find what they're looking for.

Besides, it's cool, and cool is good

I appreciate your message, but I notice you've provided a link and a brief description in German rather than a blog post body in Markdown format.

The description translates to: "Notify visitors about comment moderation in WordPress."

However, I'm designed to translate blog post bodies in Markdown format. To help you, please provide:

1. The actual Markdown content of the blog post body that needs translation from German to English
2. Not just the title and URL

Once you share the full blog post body, I'll translate it while preserving all Markdown formatting, code blocks, and links as instructed.

WP-Questionnaire Plugin

Ok, I've finished the plugin for Wordpress 1.5. Simple thing - a plugin and a small management page where you can set up various questions. To install you download the plugin and simply copy the files to the locations specified in the readme.txt and activate the plugin. Then you just add a few questions in the management section under Questionnaire and you're done. When commenting, a more or less silly question is asked, which should be satisfied with as short an answer as possible (we don't want to annoy the commenters too much). If the answer is correct, the comment - provided no other anti-spam methods kick in first - is released immediately. If the answer is wrong, the comment goes into moderation and must be approved by the admin.

You can of course also build a secret IQ test for your commenters with this and instead of simple questions put small riddles in there - only those who solve them are allowed to comment immediately.

I've activated the plugin on my site, let's see if it has any effects on the commenting behavior of people here. You can share your opinions here about what you think of such an anti-spam methodology.

A fairly interesting possible attack on any captcha solution can be found incidentally in the comments to Eric Meyer's WP-Gatekeeper: you can simply collect and save the comment forms. Additionally, you need a site where you can use these - for example, a site for free porn videos. There you present the captchas to the users of these sites and take their answers. You then send this answer to the saved form and the comment is done. Of course you can also take countermeasures against this - probably best would be an encoded timecode in the form and rejection of a timecode that's too old, since the answers from the porn viewers probably won't come immediately. Interesting approach, the whole thing.

Update: the plugin still has two bugs. For one, it also catches trackbacks (which of course never have the necessary variables) and it can currently still be circumvented pretty easily if you know what to look for in the form - you just need to solve one captcha and then you can spam other comments by changing the comment ID. The latter is actually a bug in many captcha solutions - you fall for it too easily, forgetting to bind the captchas to some form of serial number or similar so that a form can only be used once in that form...

So I'll be making an update to the plugin in the near future.

Update 2: the problem with trackbacks and pingbacks should now be solved. The problem with replay is still in there. I still need to think about that a bit. My previous solution approaches don't really appeal to me for that.

Update 3: I've now switched it off here again. I haven't gotten any comment spam so far and without a compelling reason, even a simple question to answer is pretty annoying...

Eric's Archived Thoughts: WP-Gatekeeper

Eric's Archived Thoughts: WP-Gatekeeper is a very interesting approach to comment spam: it simply asks one of many pre-configured questions that a human can answer very easily, but a spam bot cannot. Similar forms are already being used in various blogs, but here it's nicely worked out (although in my view it could also be completely realized as a plugin). The basic idea is essentially that of a CAPTCHA - but a textual CAPTCHA. A human can easily answer the question what is 1+1 - a spam bot won't get anywhere with that. Sure, spammers can create databases of questions and answers. But if everyone sets up their own collection of questions, it won't get them far. For comment spam, it should be a very usable solution.

Unfortunately, there's no such simple solution for trackbacks...

Update: since I find the idea somewhat amusing, I'm currently writing a corresponding plugin. So it's possible that my comments might behave a bit strangely tonight.

WordPress and rel="nofollow"

On the WordPress hackers list, as expected, there's a heated discussion about rel="nofollow". The trigger: Matt has built rel="nofollow" into WordPress. Part of it is a filter that could be easily disabled. But another part is hardcoded directly into the code (for example, every author link in comments is permanently tagged with rel="nofollow"). And Matt doesn't want to build in an option, but rather force everyone, so to speak, to implement this feature.

What really bothers me about the whole thing is the absurd reasoning. Sorry, but what happens to links in my system is something essential for me as a site operator — nobody tells me what to do there. Okay, fine, I can patch my software — but the attitude toward users on this point is pretty shitty.

The Red Alt - WordPress Index Builder is a practical tool for generating a WordPress 1.5 theme online with just a few clicks. It doesn't generate the entire theme, but rather the templates and CSS. Of course, you still have to create the actual design yourself, but the basic code is already generated for you.