Random musings of a Southern geek

Now on Slicehost: Me!

4/21/2008 – 11:03 pm

If you are seeing this post, then you are getting pages served from my new server at Slicehost. I still have to migrate my other web sites, and figure out how I’m going to mange email, but this was a big hurdle, and I’m glad to say that it went pretty smoothly. There are still some old files that I haven’t put back in place yet, so if anything seems awry, don’t be too surprised. I know of a couple of things I need to take care of, but I’m sure there are others that haven’t crossed my mind yet. So feel free to contact me if you see anything wrong on the site (dead links, missing images, etc.).

When I was shopping for a hosting company, there were a few final contenders in consideration. But Slicehost hit a sweet-spot in the variables of price, host stats, and that certain je ne sais quoi that tells you that a company seems to Get It. “Built for Developers” — that’s a good start right there. You want Plesk or Webmin? They don’t give it to you. But you can install it yourself if you really want it. Yeah, baby — that’s my kind of hosting.

By Dougal | Posted in Announcements, General, Servers, Services | Tagged hosting, self, Servers, slicehost, webhosting | Comments (1)

Upgrade or else!

4/8/2008 – 12:48 pm

UPDATE 2008-04-16: Well crud. I was just re-reading the WP 2.5 announcement post for something else, and spotted a bit about security updates between 2.3.3 and 2.5. So my previous advice about 2.3.3 being okay was incorrect. This is one of the areas where I disagree with the core developement team — if it was up to me, there would be a 2.3.4 security release for those who have good reasons why they can’t upgrade to 2.5 right now.

Okay, people, if you are running any version of WordPress older than ~~2.3.3~~ 2.5*, you need to upgrade now. Seriously. WordPress 2.3.3 and older have security holes that are being actively exploited by hackers to inject spam links into blogs which are not maintained. And search engines like Technorati are de-listing hacked blogs. Are you listening now? Do I have your attention? Upgrade your web apps before you get hacked and your site drops off the search-engine radar.

While the Technorati article specifically talks about WordPress sites, this goes for any web application. You need to pay attention to updates which are released, and upgrade whenever a security probem is fixed. WordPress gets particular attention due to its popularity and the sheer number of installed sites out in the wild. But it is no more or less secure than any other similar web application. So whatever you’re running, keep it up-to-date.

And the same goes for any add-ons — if you install third-part plugins or themes, make sure you keep up with updates. WordPress 2.5 makes updating plugins easier than ever. Review your Plugins page from time to time, and pay attention when it tells you that a newer version of a plugin is available.

I see comments from people all the time saying that they don’t want to upgrade because it might break this theme or that plugin that they have installed. To those people, I say, GET OVER IT. The security of your site is important. If some theme or plugin is not compatible with a newer version of WordPress, ask the author politely to update it. Or find a replacement. Or live without it. I have in excess of 25 plugins active here. But there’s not one of them that I would hesitate to deactivate when it comes to security of my site.

There are several ways to keep up with new WordPress releases. The Dashboard shows you all sorts of news from the WP community, including announcements from the Development Blog. There are several mailing lists. If those lists are too noisy for you, you can get just release announcements by signing up on Freshmeat.net and subscribing to the WordPress Project. I normally submit the Freshmeat update within 24 hours of an official release.

* One exception is WordPress version 2.0.11 (or the 2.0 svn branch, more generally), which is maintained with security updates for the Debian package.

By Dougal | Posted in Blogs, Search, Security, WordPress | Tagged payattention, Plugins, Search, Security, Spam, Technorati, Themes, upgrade, Upgrades, WordPress | Comments (83)

Atlanta PHP

4/2/2008 – 11:42 am

Tomorrow night, I will be attending the April Atlanta PHP meeting. My friend Glen Gordon will be giving a presentation titled, “Iâ€™m a PHP dev! Why should I care about Microsoft?”

There are a host of technologies and tools from Microsoft that can add value to your PHP solutions, save you time, and are just plain cool. This presentation will cover server technologies like FastCGI, IIS and the PHP SQL Server Driver, client technologies like the ASP.NET AJAX Library and Silverlight, as well as developer tools. This is not a sales pitch â€“ itâ€™s a technical walkthrough with demos, and will give you pointers to lots of resources for digging deeper.

I’m sure Glen’s talk will be interesting, and I’m looking forward to a chance to catch up on the current state of web servers in Microsoft-land. While I tend to use unix-based systems for most of my own work, there are plenty of organizations who are standardized on Microsoft products, and you have to be able to be able to work with what they have. Case in point, my wife is hoping to set up a WordPress website for her department at work, and they’ll probably set it up on a Windows-based server.

If anybody reading this is planning to attend, please introduce yourself. I’ll be wearing a WordPress shirt.

By Dougal | Posted in Community, Development, Operating Systems, Servers, Tech, WordPress | Tagged .net, Ajax, Atlanta, fastcgi, iis, Microsoft, PHP, silverlight, WordPress | Comments (2)

WordPress 2.5 Released

3/29/2008 – 11:09 pm

If you already run WordPress, then you’ve probably seen the other announcements in your Dashboard about the release of WordPress 2.5. There are plenty of details in the Development Blog posting, so I won’t rehash the feature list here. I’ll just point out a few important details.

First of all, in my post about Release Candidate 1, I mentioned that I had problems with the plugin updater. Since that time, I have been able to upgrade complex plugins with out a problem. I didn’t do extensive testing, but I feel like this is probably safer now. Other folks on the wp-testers mailing list have reported observed improvements similar to mine.

Next, I’ll point out that since the introduction of the WYSIWYG editor back in version 2.0, I have always stuck to the “Code” editor. And on top of that, I have disabled the auto-formatting (wptexturize and wpautop) filters. I’ve always entered every bit of HTML within my posts by hand. Starting with version 2.5, I’m going to relax my grip and hand the reigns back over to the system. I’ve disabled my “untexturize” plugin, and switched to the “Visual” editor as my default. The Visual editor should be just fine for most of the posts that I write. And on those occassions when I need to do something advanced (like <code>, <ins> or <del> tags, my standard “pull-quote” div for images, etc), I can seamlessly switch to the HTML view and back, without worrying about the Visual editor messing with my manual edits later.

And for those of you who might wonder, but haven’t seen it mentioned, the new improvements will be filtering into WordPress.com and the WordPress-MU codebase very soon.

By Dougal | Posted in Announcements, WordPress | Tagged announcement, Plugins, Release, WordPress, wp25, wysiwyg | Comments (24)

WordPress 2.5 RC1

3/18/2008 – 9:24 am

The first release candidate for WordPress 2.5 was announced last night. The adventurous among you can download it for testing. New features include:

Faster load times.
Multi-file uploads.
New “Media Manager” for images, audio, video, etc.
Built-in gallery function.
Built-in (and pluggable) Gravatars support.
New backend design.
One-click auto-update for plugins.
Reactivate plugins after a ‘Deactivate All Plugins’ action. (my feature! )

As a long-time WordPress user and developer, the new design for the back-end admin screens threw me at first. I had the same questions that I saw many others post to the mailing lists. “Why did they clump these links together, and move these other ones to a different spot on the page?” But the more I’ve used it, it became obvious that the new menu layout made sense. The most frequently used items are prominent. The less-often needed ones are moved out of the way, but still easily accessible. I’m still not totally thrilled with the color choices (some elements don’t have enough contrast, to my eyes), but it turns out the the admin screen colors are pluggable, as well.

One of the more exciting features (IMO) is the one-click plugin updater. When you see a notification that a new version of a plugin is available, you’ll also see an ‘upgrade automatically’ link. If your server supports all the functions needed, clicking the link will download and install the new version for you. I will note that on my server, this feature does not always work flawlessly, and I’ve sometimes had to quickly download and install a plugin manually to fix a broken plugin. I’ve shared my observations on this, and I hope that they’ll be able to make this feature more robust before final release. My advice is to use this feature with caution for now. But I’m hoping that my problems with it are due to my server, and that I’ll have better luck when I get things moved to my new host.

Overall, I’m liking the new release. I haven’t had a chance to play with the media management and gallery features yet, but I’m looking forward to giving them a try. I think the new admin arrangement will be easier for new users, and I think most established users will come to appreciate it, too (and for those looking for something even more different, there’s the Fluency Admin theme).

As always, when toying with pre-release code, don’t forget to back up your database and files before you upgrade! Give it a spin, kick the tires, and let us know what you think.

By Dougal | Posted in Announcements, WordPress | Tagged avatars, Beta, cms, contentmanagement, Gallery, gravatars, rc1, releasecandidate, testing, Upgrades, WordPress, wp25 | Comments (38)

Roadwork Next 15 Miles

3/13/2008 – 7:20 pm

I am preparing to move all of my web and email hosting to a new server. I’ve been fortunate to have an in-trade hosting arrangement for many years now (thanks to Jeff at Iguanasoft!). But my host’s owner is winding down some of his equipment, and I had outgrown the server I was on. I’ve secured a new server at Slicehost (a 1024slice running Ubuntu), and I’ll be transitioning my data over the next couple of weeks, as time allows.

I mainly mention this as warning that if my site appears to be down, email bounces, or any other strangeness occurs, it might be because I’m in the middle of moving things around. It will probably be another couple of days before I start shaking things up. While I’m moving thing around, I might try consolidating some of my stand-alone WordPress sites into a WordPress-MU setup. That would make upgrades and other site management tasks a bit easier, I think.

With a little luck, and a lot of attention to detail, you might never know that I’ve changed anything. Yeah, right! Watch this space for further announcements.

By Dougal | Posted in Announcements, Blogs, Personal, Servers, Tech, WordPress | Tagged 1024slice, app, hosting, Linux, moving, Servers, Services, slice, slicehost, Ubuntu, WordPress, wordpressmu, wpmu | Comments (21)

Easy Gravatars 1.2

3/6/2008 – 4:52 pm

Earlier today, I released Easy Gravatars version 1.2. The only change (besides confirming that works in WordPress 2.5, currently in beta, due out next week) is that when installed under WordPress 2.5 or newer, it will use the new core get_avatar() function to generate the image tag. And since get_avatar() is a pluggable function, other plugins could conceivably use it to generate avatar icons from other services, and Easy Gravatars would then use the new service too.

If that doesn’t make sense to you, don’t sweat it. You can upgrade and it will work fine (on both older versions of WP and the upcoming version 2.5). Or you can keep the previous version, and it will continue to work fine, too. The only way things would work any different is if you are running WordPress 2.5 (or later, one day), and if you had an additional plugin which defined a new get_avatar() function.

By Dougal | Posted in Plugins, WordPress | Tagged avatar, avatars, CSS, gravatar, gravatars, images, personalization, plugin, Plugins, WordPress | Comments (27)

Internet Explorer 8: Progress!

3/6/2008 – 10:35 am

It seems that Microsoft has reversed their previous decision to make Internet Explorer 8 crippled by default. They will be enabling the standards compliant mode by default in IE8, and webmasters will have to use the X-UA-Compatible header to force it into IE7 mode, for sites that can’t be updated immediately. Huzzah for progress!

And on that note, I’ll mention that Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is available for download. Go break the web!

By Dougal | Posted in Browsers, CSS, Community, Design, Development, Standards, Tech, Web Design | Tagged Browsers, CSS, forwardcompatibility, futureproof, ie8 ie7, InternetExplorer, Microsoft, pleasesirmayihaveanother, Standards, webstandards | Comments (4)

WordPress 2.5 Beta

3/2/2008 – 9:49 pm

I just upgraded this site to WordPress 2.5 Beta. So far, everything appears to be working just fine.

And since I know lots of people will ask, I checked my plugins, and most of them (HeadMeta, Text Filter Suite, and Easy Gravatars), work just fine. The one that doesn’t work is Theme Preview. When I can find time, I’ll try to figure out why.

The official WP release is slated for March 10.

Update 2008-03-29: Something must have gotten fixed, because my Theme Preview plugin does indeed work in the release version of Wordpress 2.5.

By Dougal | Posted in Blogging, Plugins, WordPress | Tagged app, avatar, avatars, Beta, easy-gravatars, gravatar, gravatars, headmeta, plugin, Plugins, text-filter-suite, theme-preview, WordPress | Comments (26)

Internet Explorer 8: This is progress?

1/23/2008 – 9:25 am

Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid2 test. Huzzah!

But waitaminnit… What’s this stuff about forward compatibility by adding some new X-UA-Compatible header to my pages or my server? Am I reading this right? Are you telling me that in order for IE8 to use its fully compliant rendering, we have to add something new to our pages? And that if we don’t, it will fall back to rendering pages just like IE7? Is that what this means?

That’s just dumb.

Screw their stupid “don’t break the web” motto. Break it! Break the web in the name of progress! How will we ever move forward if you keep dragging us back? And while you’re at it, quit trying to misdirect us with that “don’t break the web” nonsense. Putting out a browser with excellent CSS support is not “breaking the web”, it’s fixing it! There’s no real shame in putting out a better product, and admitting that the previous versions had flaws. This is a concept called “continuous incremental improvement”.

There has already been a lot of reaction from the web development community. There are several big names behind the idea. There are several big names against it. I’m not a big name, but I fall in the latter camp. This is not “forward compatibility”, it’s not “forward” anything. This is keeping progress of the Internet Explorer browser and adoption of better standards at a crawl instead of letting them make an evolutionary jump.

Oh, and unless I’m missing something here, there was already a mechanism in place that the IE team has already encouraged web developers to use, which could do the same job: conditional comments. What’s that? Oh yeah, there are problems with that, too.

If you need more reading material on this subject, check out Mark Pilgrim’s links. At the time of this writing, he has pointers to 29 articles, and I’m sure there will be more.