Wordpress

If you can see this, all has gone well – if you can’t I’m probably talking to myself (nothing unusual there!!).

My current permalink structure has not sat well with me for the last year or so, it’s kind of thrown together and doesn’t look particularly nice… I’ve been itching to change it, but never dared (after all this blog has a reasonable PageRank and gets a decent amount of traffic!). The time has come to bite the bullet.

I know what you’re saying:

“Just go ahead – change the damned things – why should we care?”

Well it’s not quite that simple, changing them has a few knock on effects:

1. All my internal links to older posts referencing them will be broken.
2. All links by other people to my older posts will be broken (this is really bad in my opinion as I can’t contact them all to fix them!).
3. The search engines probably won’t like me much any more (and I quite like them, so this is also quite bad!).

Solutions

Well I put out my request on Twitter and got all of two responses (and one retweet), the first didn’t understand the question at all and suggested I just change them and install All-in-one SEO. The second was more useful and suggested the Platinum SEO plugin (my concern with this is how it might react with my already install All-in-one SEO).

This really leaves me with the Permalink Redirect plugin which sounds like it might do exactly what I want through 301 redirects. I’ve heard good things about Dean Lee’s Permalink Migration plugin, so I think we’ll give that one a go!

Well it seems to have worked – but I’m convinced that the databae should be updated – that would make more sense to me than a permanent 301 redirect… Is that possible?

I normally login to my admin site to find “Spam: 3,472” comments (or some such other high and random number!!).

Confession time. I broke my blog last week whilst doing an upgrade (trying to auto-upgrade post suPHP being activated may have been a mistake) and it forced me to audit my plugins.

I’ve always like the idea of Akismet, group filtering etc. However I spotted some of the comments over at the WP-SpamFree plugin page and decided I’d got nothing to lose (other than a lot of time wasted looking at comment spam!

Installed earlier in the week and 3 days later I have JUST 3 Spam comments…

Elizabeth: The Golden Age psp I’m a happy man – Matt you should think about this plugin!

You may remember many moons ago, I posted about what a bind it could be to put YouTube videos into Wordpress Blogs (because Wordpress got all excitable and corrected the HTML).

Today I discovered a post from Caroline about a plugin that does the job!

YouTube Brackets means that to insert a video I now do this:

[ youtube=xxxxx]

Where xxxxx is the URL of the video!

This is the video posted yesterday about RFID cloning and how it was tagged!

[ youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9isKnDiJNPk]

And I can now insert this video that made me laugh yesterday:

I’m a big fan of Auntie Spam for cleaning out all the rubbish that Akismet collects, but this appears to be something that no longer works in the 2.7 upgrade – I just hope someone updates the greasemonkey script Tales of Terror rip

Sonny hd
download Unrelated

!

I’m incredibly lucky to have WPAU on my blog which has made the upgrade to Wordpress 2.7 (Coltrane) relatively painless..

The Great Dictator divx

This is probably the most talked about release in the Wordpress history, with blog after blog discussing it. So here goes:

1. Logging in Wordpress I see the familiar:
   

   WordPress 2.7 is available! Please update now.

   Luckily because of WPAU I also see….

   Click Here to Automatically Upgrade WordPress to latest Version.

2. Clicking the Auto Upgrade, I do the usual things:
   • Fill in my FTP details
   • Backup files
   • Backup Database (all my tables – why is there not a check all option in WPAU?)
   • Fetch the latest version.
   • Put the site in maintenance mode
   • Deactivates the plugins
   • Upgrades the installation files
   • Upgrade the database (we haven’t had to do that for a long while!)
   • Reactivate plugins (One plugin didn’t reactivate dofollow.php – but it never does!!)
   • Takes the site out of maintenance mode.

Well it doesn’t seem to have broken anything externally and does look quite neat and tidy inside the admin area!

I don’t particularly like my current Permalink structure, has anybody had any success with Dean Lee’s Permalink Migration Plugin?

I’m always loathed to just click the “Delete All” in my Akismet Spam box – just in case there’s something there I really would like to read, or even edit to make into quality content. However I really can’t face piling through pages and pages of spam with links to all manner of things…

Then I found Auntie Spam, a script that works with GreaseMonkey in Firefox (you should already have GreaseMonkey installed if you’re using the Google Reader timesaving preview.

Apparently:

Akismet Auntie Spam is a kind old lady who will come to your house and give it a thorough cleaning. She’s not afraid of the dark corners, particularly the spam inbox because she knows exactly how to handle the creepy crawlies hiding out of sight.

Auntie Spam has just deleted all 104 spam comments that Akismet spotted, and I’m 100% sure that none of them were false positives! Job done in a matter of seconds!