Archive for the 'blog' Category
Heaps of praise for WP-Cache
Posted by: Owen on Tuesday, 6th May, 2008
I’ve been using WP-Cache for a few days now and I’m impressed with the difference it’s making. I’m on a shared service here, so I don’t really have access to server stats for load analysis, but just the fact that the user experience browsing my site has improved so much is just awesome!
Before my experience, [...]
Time to tweak the Honeypot
Posted by: Owen on Thursday, 1st May, 2008
Well, I took advantage of the fact that I had nowhere to go for my break today and spent some time optimising this blog. You’ll notice it’s much zippier now and that’s thanks to some caching I’ve added. Here are some new plugins I’m using:
Bad Behaviour: Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site.
Google [...]
Viagra, free sex and other animals
Posted by: Owen on Wednesday, 30th Apr, 2008
I’ve hit another threshold on my spam count on this blog, with an excess of 80,000 spam comment having been captured by Akismet. It’s pretty spectacular how efficient that plugin in with really only a couple of spam comments a fortnight getting through it’s defenses. And it’s quite easy to spot keywords like viagra sticking [...]
Upgrade to WordPress 2.5.1 - Now!
Posted by: Owen on Friday, 25th Apr, 2008
Just upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.5.1 as I’ve only just spotted that it’s available. Probably the most important feature is a security fix that is pretty ugly:
An attacker, who is able to register a specially crafted username on a Wordpress 2.5 installation, is able to generate authentication cookies for other chosen accounts. This vulnerability [...]
Video Comment? Not for me thanks!
Posted by: Owen on Friday, 25th Apr, 2008
You may have noticed that some blogs around the Web, particularly TechCrunch have added a video commenting service provided by Seesmic who have recently come to market with this novel service. While I quite like the technology behind it, I’m not convinced video comments work for this medium. Any my concerns are also voiced by others around [...]
Time for the big move
Posted by: Owen on Saturday, 19th Apr, 2008
Ok .. it’s time for the big move! I’ve already imported all my dasBlog posts to WordPress (bringing my total posts to around 1800 posts dating back from June 2003! Now the time has come to turn OFF dasBlog and hope all my traffic switches over to the new blog.
In order to help this I’ll [...]
Imported dasBlog Posts
Posted by: Owen on Friday, 18th Apr, 2008
I’ve finally got round to importing my old blog posts from my old dasBlog blog. I’ve had my old blog running in .Net alongside this blog running in PHP ever since I switched to WordPress. However the time has come for me to switch dasBlog off and consolidate everything on WordPress.
The process wasn’t straightforward as [...]
Do you validate?
Posted by: Owen on Tuesday, 15th Apr, 2008
A friend pointed out that my blog doesn’t pass the W3C validation test, so I popped down to take a look and sure enough I had 222 failures. I’ve sorted out a lot of them, but now I’ve hit a bunch of errors caused by 3rd party widgets I’m running on the site.
So, the question [...]
New Twitter Widget
Posted by: Owen on Sunday, 13th Apr, 2008
I’ve added a new section to my sidebar that shows the most recent Tweets that my friends and I have Twittered. I don’t know if you’re into this whole micro-blogging thing, but this new widget should have get more people dragged in, as they see all the fun we’re having
You’ll notice a whole [...]
10 Ways to Improve Blog Traffic
Posted by: Owen on Saturday, 12th Apr, 2008
Great post down at ProBlogger with some great tips on how you can improve traffic to your blog. Here they are in a nutshell:
Create link clusters within your blog
Rework HTML title tags of trafficked posts
Invite your readers to connect with you on StumbleUpon and Facebook
Save your best posts for the best times of the week
Edit [...]
Upgraded to WordPress 2.5
Posted by: Owen on Friday, 4th Apr, 2008
I’ve just pushed this blog up to WordPress 2.5. I’ve already rolled it out onto a number of other blogs and have had absolutely no problems. I’ve reactivated all plugins, but if you find any problems, just let me know.
There’s some amazing stuff in this drop. Here are some of the new enhancements:
Cleaner, faster, less [...]
Giving Zemanta a spin
Posted by: Owen on Thursday, 27th Mar, 2008
Sherrilynne sent me a link to a plugin for Firefox called Zemanta. It sits in your browser and waits for you to start typing out a new blog post. Once you have typed in a few sentences it’s supposed to come up with a collection of different links and photos that can be used to [...]
WordPress v2.5 Sneak Peak
Posted by: Owen on Tuesday, 18th Mar, 2008
I’ve noticed that WordPress v2.5 has gone to RC1 and is available as for sneak preview. It’s a bit later than originally planned but I can understand how the development team are being a bit more cautious about this one as it’s a pretty fundamental change to parts of WordPress, particularly the admin backend. Here’s [...]
PhotoDropper - Essential plugin for Wordpress
Posted by: Owen on Thursday, 28th Feb, 2008
It’s not always that I feel the need to drop everything I’m doing to try out some new software (ok, maybe it’s more common with me than with most people), but when I read about a plugin called PhotoDropper on BloggingCents, I just had to run off and try it. It’s an awesome plugin [...]
Spam Policy Update
Posted by: Owen on Monday, 11th Feb, 2008
Wow, this blog has received almost 64k spam comments since I’ve started running WordPress. That’s a substantial number, but I’m pleased to say that Akismet seems to be trapping 99.99% of them. I’ve be happy to give them the award for the best software available this year! My comment spam ranges from advertising websites, encouraging [...]
