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:
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

This works fine with any aliases defined in apache, but the mod_status handler was going to the rewrite rules first, hence the problem. This is not a wordpress problem, and should happen with any other application (like zend framework is one other example that comes to my mind right now) that uses the same type of catch-all rewrite rules to handle all the urls inside the application. The solution in this case is to specifically add a rewrite rule to not have the server-status url processed and sent to the default rule:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !=/server-status
and the wordpress rewrite rules should look like this:
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !=/server-status
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

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/

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/

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

This means that any commenter that has a gravatar (you just have to register your email address and upload your image) will have it displayed on my blog also. Finally .

ps. I tried out also the WP-Gravatar plugin that works with more services (Gravatar, MyBlogLog, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID or Favico.ico), but I am not really sure if this is really needed. For now I will settle with gravatars only, but maybe in the future I will enable the wp-gravatar plugin and disable the default wp function.

In case you missed this new feature check it out, as it looks nice…

Source: Akismet Blog

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.

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/

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

Note: I must say that I am very happy since I’ve switched to the subversion method to update wordpress. This is indeed very easy, and if you are managing several wordpress installations this should help a lot in the process to keep them updated:

svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.3.3/
U wp-includes/gettext.php
U wp-includes/gettext.php
U wp-includes/version.php
U wp-includes/pluggable.php
U xmlrpc.php
U wp-admin/install-helper.php
Updated to revision 6730.

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