For the last few days I’ve been searching all over the place for a plugin to do inline trackbacks. I’ve got em now, you’ll see what I’m talking about at the end of a few posts here on the main page.
Simply Kimberly had a plugin, but a 404 is recieved upon trying to download. Luckily, Slobokan came to fill the 404 void. Actually, Slobokan noticed Kimberly’s original plugin wasn’t counting pingbacks, only trackbacks. He took it upon himself, much to my pleasure, to fix the plugin to include pingbacks and trackbacks. Now, that’s something I could have done, but I wouldn’t have written a plugin. I’d have just hacked some PHP into my index.php file. The problem with me doing that is I’ll forget what I’d done eventually and would just confuse myself.
I hacked inline trackbacks into the last WordPress theme I was using, it was dirty and I don’t want to do it again. I don’t see a point in re-inventing the wheel when numerous people probably already have re-invented “the wheel”.
So, all you WordPress folks out there that’ve been wanting inline trackbacks, hit up Slobokan’s site and download. If you’re not familiar with PHP, don’t worry. Installation is extremely easy.
Perhaps I’ll throw a couple trackback parties soon. Not sure though, the amount of traffic that seems to be generated by those makes me a little nervous. Bandwidth is an issue for me unfortunately.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Published .
Tags: apache, blog, blogs, firefox, flock, invite, mozilla, ning, plugin, web, WordPress, www.
This site had been experiencing horrible lag over the last few days. I sat down lastnight and got it all figured out. First, I thought it must somehow be related to the new apache httpd server I installed, not the case. After determining that it wasn’t an apache config problem or something, I started into WordPress. The lag didn’t come from WordPress itself, but a plugin I was using. Said plugin was wp-shortstat.
After disabling wp-shortstat, the page loads much quicker without the lag when loading the end of the page. It’s almost like my web server would get to the bottom of the page and then just stop sending the rest of the data to the browser. The browser would get to the very end of the page and just stop loading. If I’d view the rendered HTML in IE or FireFox, the the trailing “body” and “html” tags would be missing. It’s all better now though.
I also downloaded Flock lastnight at home. It’s pretty interesting, all sorts of feature for blogs and other services like del.icio.us. Flock is built on FireFox 1.0. And if you’d like a Wordpress.com blog, download flock and you can get one without an invite (H/T IO ERROR).
Popularity: 3% [?]
Published .
Tags: ajax, blog, blogpulse, blogs, broken, PHP, plugin, web-2.0, web2, web2.0, WordPress.
I noticed last month that my Blogpulse Profile page was no longer staying up to date. According to them, my last post was on August 25th. I sent an e-mail asking if something was up on their end or if there was some problem on my end.
I finally got an e-mail back yesterday. It seems some code on this site was preventing their crawler from indexing anything. I’m not gonna post the code, who knows what it’ll do if I try posting it. The code basically looked like an HTML comment and contained the text “CDATA”.
Sure enough, the offending code in the e-mail was easily found when viewing the source at this site. I was sure something was wrong on the Blogpulse side of things, I couldn’t think of any changes I had made that would affect their ability to index this site. I was wrong.
I had switched the contact form over from WP-ContactForm to Intouch. I wanted to give Intouch a shot because it made use of AJAX mostly. It worked well so I stuck with it. Turns out Intouch was the source of the bad code that prevented the blogpulse crawlers from indexing me.
After reverting back to using the WP-ContactForm plugin, everything looks good. The offending code can no longer be found here. Still waiting for my Blogpulse Profile page to update though. I’d expect it to be back in sync by the end of the weekend.
I wonder what other blog services have been unable to crawl this site due to that code.
Linked @ California Conservative, Cao’s Blog, The Political Teen, Outside The Beltway, Mudville Gazette, Jo’s Cafe and MacStansbury.
Popularity: 2% [?]
I’ve been using the Spam Karma 2 plugin for WordPress to battle comment and trackback spam. Before deploying Spam Karma 2, I’d awake every morning to roughly 100 comment and trackback spams.
Since I’ve been using Spam Karma 2, I haven’t had to manually delete a single piece of spam or even moderate any. This piece of software should come bundled with WordPress, it’s that good. As of my writing this, Spam Karma 2 has caught 415 seperate pieces of spam.
I can’t even explain how it goes about determining whats spam and what isn’t. You’ll just have to read the website if you’re interested in that. It’s a really well written piece of software and well thought out. The author did an extremely good job with it.
I’ve also got a major referer spam problem. Referer Karma, from the same author, will be put in use here shortly. I had been using a very simple method for blocking referer spam. The method I currently use is another WordPress plugin, but I constantly have to edit it’s data file to keep up with spamming referer hostnames. Referer Karma should eliminate this need. I may just see if I can’t hack the current referer spam plugin to use the domain blacklist that Spam Karma 2 keeps. Spam Karma 2 adds all the domains I want to block as referers to it’s domain blacklist. It’s really a wonderful plugin.
Popularity: 2% [?]
So, I just upgraded this server to PHP 5.0.5 with the 0.4.2 hardening patch. All seemed to be going well until I tried to look at my WordPress ShortStat page. It no longer loads from within my WordPress dashboard. WP-ShortStat is a plugin for WordPress that’s based on ShortStat by Shaun Inman. When I say ShortStat I mean the WordPress plugin, WP-ShortStat.
The table that stores ShortStat data has roughly 150,000 records. ShortStat is still logging statistics to the database table, it’s method for displaying the data within the WordPress dashboard is just broken. Very annoying as I very much enjoy watching the ShortStat page for this blog. I’ll either fix it tonight or find some othe
r method for tracking visitor stats.
The end user shouldn’t notice anything different in the functionality of the site.
UPDATE: After commenting out the following piece of code on line 605 of wp-shortstat.php everything works fine.
gmdate("g:i a j M Y",$wpss->getFirstHit()+(((gmdate('I'))?
($wpss->$tz_offset+1):$wpss->$tz_offset)*3600));
Take not that if you remove the code listed above from line 605 of wp-shortstat.php, the date will no longer display at the top of the “Hits/Uniques” section. The date displayed there is the very first date WP-ShortStat started logging. So that’s the only adverse effect you should notice from removing that line.
Popularity: 2% [?]
