While working on setting up a monitoring solution for a big wordpress installation, I realized that the server-status url was not working as expected even if mod_status was configured correctly:

ExtendedStatus On
<Location /server-status>
SetHandler server-status
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from some_ips
</Location>

The .htaccess wordpress rules were taking over this and the server-status url was returning a page not found error from within wordpress. This was happening because of the way how the rewrite rules are setup to handle all the permalinks on the site, and for any non-existing file send it to index.php: Read the rest of this entry »

This morning WordPress 2.7 “Coltrane” was released as stable after 2 quick RC’s. The most important change is the major admin interface redesign. For full details check the official wp announcement: http://wordpress.org/development/2008/12/coltrane/

As always, you can download the latest wordpress version from: http://wordpress.org/download/
or if you are using an svn install (like me) you just have to run:
svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.7/

WordPress 2.7 beta3 was just released and probably we will see the final release very soon. In the meantime, here is a great article outlining the changes this version will bring (a complete rewrite of the admin interface): 10 Things You Need to Know about WordPress 2.7, by Aaron Brazell.

ps. if you are using svn for your installation and want to test this release, you need to update to the trunk version:
svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk/

“Gravatars are Globally Recognized Avatars. An avatar or gravatar is an icon, or representation, of a user in a shared virtual reality, such as a forum, chat, website, or any other form of online community in which the user(s) wish to have something to distinguish themselves from other users.”

I’ve just finished enabling gravatars on my blog, and this was as simple as adding the gravatar code in my theme. Starting with WordPress 2.5 gravatars are enabled by default without any additional plugin needed, and you only need a compatible theme to start using gravatars. This was not the case with my theme so I had to add a simple code to enable this:
<?php echo get_avatar( $comment, $size = '32' ); ?>
There are other parameters you can use, and they can be found here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Gravatar

Read the rest of this entry »

The latest Akismet version 2.2.1 brings a cool new feature: stats! In the wordpress dashboard we have now some nice stats on Akismet activity (you can find it under the “Akismet Stats” tab in your admin dashboard). What’s cool is that they present the information from the past also. I can see all my data from the time I have started this blog – actually from the time I activated akismet). Nice… I can see now graphically and in text that my blog is averaging about 10,000 spam comments per month.

Read the rest of this entry »

“Akismet has caught 202,526 spam for you since you first installed it…”

Wow… I can’t imagine how my blog commenting would have looked without Akismet. This has saved me from a lot of troubles and as you can see it just went over 200k. It is just unbelievable to see how much commenting spam is going on and I can’t imagine anyone having their blog ‘open’ and manually verifying all the comments.

Akismet has it’s problems, and from time to time I see it timing out and spam going through, but since I don’t get 15,000 spams / day like the big boys, this is not a huge problem.

A few days ago Six Apart launched a new free open source product called TypePad AntiSpam. It’s free (Akismet costs for a commercial license), it has a plugin for WordPress 2.5, it’s open source, and it’s compatible with Akismet (so you can even run them together). I will definitely test this out and if all is ok, start using it on this blog.

WordPress 2.3.3 was released today, and it is an urgent security release. If you have registration enabled a flaw was found in the XML-RPC implementation such that a specially crafted request would allow a user to edit posts of other users on that blog.

Anyone running the 2.3 branch is recommended to upgrade immediately to 2.3.3. Official wp announcement:
http://wordpress.org/development/2008/02/wordpress-233/

Read the rest of this entry »

WordPress 2.2.3 was released yesterday and it is a security and bugfix release. Anyone running the 2.2 branch is recommended to upgrade immediately to 2.2.3. Official wp announcement:
http://wordpress.org/development/2007/09/wordpress-223/

As always, you can download the latest wordpress version from: http://wordpress.org/download/