Website Scripts

I’ve installed CommentLuv here today, to reward my comment authors more (particularly now the comment policy is in force and I feel perfectly happy about blowing away any comments that are spammy or I don’t like! )

We all love comments, but CommentLuv takes this one step further and places a direct link to the comment authors latest post - underneath the comment.

They promote both their site (using the URL field of the comment), and their latest post - now that is quite a reward for engaging with you!

It will automatically fetch your latest post from your feed to display it and in the latest version the comment author can specify their feed by putting their feed url in between [feed] and [/feed] at the end of their comment.

What are you waiting for? Try it now!

photo credit: ¥§•ªˆ¨ˇ© LOVE © ˇ¨ˆª•§¥

A while back Michael Gray posted some suggestions about how to improve the Yahoo Shortcuts Wordpress Plugin, I’ve been posting about some tools I liked for getting Flickr images into Wordpress - and how I’d love a plugin to do this (and discussing it with Anne).

I was overjoyed today to see a post by Michael about Photo Dropper. This plugin does exactly what I need I think! I would make a few minor improvements - but they are few and far between. The image at the top was inserted via a quik search for “celebration”.

And just because I can, let’s have a picture of a hamster!

photo credit: annia316 ღ

Photo by jimmyroq

My blog posts used to look a little boring, or at least in some people’s eyes - in my eyes they were a thing of glory, a product of my creativity, a……. bunch of text in web browser I guess!

I needed some pictures to illustrate the posts, and I wasn’t about to (in the previous post) rush out and buy a hamster just for a blog post!

Then I read a post over at SkellieWag, about using Flickr images licensed under the Creative Commons license to find great images to illustrate my posts. Check it out before going any further as it will make a great deal more sense if you do…

I started out with a few posts where I’d download the image, upload it into Wordpress and then link to it, along with a link back to the photographer (almost all images have at the bare minimum an attribution license). This is both tedious time consuming, and I’m not sure I necessarily need all of these peoples images in my hosting all the time?

I’ve since gone on the hunt for a Wordpress plugin that will do this job for me, unfortunately almost everything I’ve found so far is for adding your own photo’s to your own blog - and no - I’m still not going to go out and buy a hamster!!! Now whilst these plugins are quite useful, you’ll also find that if it’s your own image a HTML box appears under the image in Flickr (when you view it at different sizes!) with the code in it to link it back, I need this piece of code for images I’ve searched for under the Creative Commons Licenses….

I’m going to have to resort to:

• Messing with the code for one of these other plugins,
• Talking very nicely to J @ The Glass is Too Big, to get his prototype converted into a plugin - how about it J?
• Or talking nicely to the guys at EmoRate to see if they can convert their photo-comment-tool to do something similar.

Does anyone have any better ideas?

I’ve held off from this for a while but I’ve got a few blogs I need to do it with so I’m writing this guide more for myself than anything.

• Install the “Maintenance Mode” plugin - it really is quite good, activate it and put the blog into maintenance mode.
• As my database is probably quite large I’m not going to use PHPMyAdmin to back it up, I shall use SSH.mysqldump –add-drop-table -h mysqlhostserver -u mysqlusername -p databasename

  And then entering my MySQL password, I was correct my database is almost 13MB.

• Wordpress always recommend you deactivate plugins, as they may not be compatible after the upgrade. I’ve never done this for a single upgrade, but it appears there is a first time for everything with the upgrade to Wordpress 2.3+ Universal Tag Warrior isn’t compatible (Wordpress 2.3 has built in tag support), so be sure to deactivate UTW first - I didn’t and had to work around it!
• Download the latest and greatest Wordpress, I’ve downloaded it using wget, directly to a folder on the server and unpacked it.
• I’ve then moved the wp-content folder out of that folder purely because I know it needs special care, before copying the rest of the unpacked files straight over my original installation (making sure it doesn’t overwrite wp-config.php).
• I’m not particularly interested in the themes, but I do know that akismet is slightly different so I’ve also copied the akismet.php over the top of my original one.
• Visit your upgrade page http://domain.com/folder/wp-admin/upgrade.php, and step through the upgrade.
• If you deactivated Ultimate Tag Warrior earlier then you’ll probably want to import your tags now, do this following this tutorial.
• Deactivate maintenance mode and tinker with your theme as necessary (you’ll probably want to read this tutorial on adding Wordpress 2.3 tags to your theme) - Enjoy!

I hate phishing, actually I hate what people are trying to achieve when they go phishing, but I do in a (geeky “that’s kind of clever”)  way quite admire their ingenuity when writing these spoof websites, that look exactly like the real thing to fool you into entering your username and password! Techie Zone recently discussed a few methods of phishing and how to spot a phishing email that is certainly worth a read if you don’t know what you are up against!

We’ve seen the first of these in the last few weeks for Gmail users, trying to fool them into entering their details so people can get into their account and find their passwords. This first one took the form of trying to fool you into entering your details on gmailupgrades.com (details and example of Gmail phishing from Derek @ 5ThirtyOne) to get in, and as Google of have announced paid storage upgrades, I suspect this type of phishing will go on for some time! Beware!

Now I know that I don’t have “THAT” many readers, but I’ve always found it quite nice when I leave a comment on a site, to be notified by email when someone else has replied, whether that be another user engaging in discussion or the site owner!

To this end I went hunting for a subscribe to comments system, and found exactly that in Subscribe to Comments 2.1 as recommended by Derek Punsalan (who also explains a little bit of customisation of the script).

So if you do leave a comment going forward, you should - hopefully - get notified of responses, if you don’t then let me know!

I love some of Chris Pearson’s work, particularly his Celebrity Hack Workspace ()

Anyway Chris designed the theme for CopyBlogger, again! Part of the new developments over at CopyBlogger is to release the old theme after Chris has made some tweaks to it!

As most people know I’m always on the look out for a new theme, so I’ve installed this one for a day or so to see if it feels “right”, it probably won’t and I’ll come up with some half baked modification to it, combining it with some other theme. Which will result in it looking terrible and again me searching for an even bigger and better theme

Update: Thought I’d use my Amazon plugin to see if there are any Wordpress books (for people looking to start with Wordpress).