rc3.org Strong opinions weakly held

Posts Tagged ‘WordPress’

Links for September 7

In Commentary on 7 September 2009 tagged business, health care, security, WordPress with no comments

• John Gruber: Regarding WordPress and Security. I think the number of people who should be running and maintaining their own content management system keeps getting smaller. The hosted blog tools are really good, and keeping everything running properly really is a pain.
• Nate Silver: A Trigger — With Teeth? A trigger clause for the public option could be a good idea if the trigger is likely to kick in without real changes on the part of private insurers and if the public option is robust.
• Chris Dixon: Is now a good time to start a company? The economy is not great, but I still don’t see a lot of good programmers out looking for jobs.

Links for September 5

In Commentary on 6 September 2009 tagged food, health care, music, security, WordPress with no comments

• Richard Nixon’s health care reform proposal. I would gladly take this plan.
• Brian Mastenbrook: How I cross-site scripted Twitter in 15 minutes, and why you shouldn’t store important data on 37signals’ applications. Good post on XSS vulnerabilities and best practices for dealing with security researchers.
• New York Times: For Your Health, Froot Loops. Put this in your pocket for when people start yammering about businesses regulating themselves.
• Tim Bray: On Music. A wide ranging look at the future of the music business. For all the complaining about the death of the music industry, an awful lot of really good music is being recorded.
• Matt Mullenweg: How to Keep WordPress Secure. Shorter version: make sure you’re always running the latest release.

XSS and WordPress Themes

In Commentary on 6 July 2009 tagged security, WordPress with 2 comments

Dave Smith just emailed to let me know that the theme I’m using is vulnerable to a cross-site scripting attack. He’s detailed the fix here, which I’ve applied. If you’re using depo-skinny, you’ll want to fix it as well.

Improving my blogging workflow

In Commentary on 7 June 2009 tagged blogging, Twitter, WordPress with no comments

As I’m sure you already know, I’ve created the rc3dotorg Twitter account so that I can let people on Twitter know when I’ve published something. One unfortunate side effect has been that it has complicated my workflow when I write new posts.

Normally I just compose the post in MarsEdit and hit the publish button. I’m sure the process could be greatly simplified, but for two things that complicate the process. The first is that I like to use short URLs that I furnish myself, and the second is that I like to compose the tweets by hand.

I publish this blog using WordPress, and I use the le petite url plugin to create short links. Most of the time I publish updates to Twitter using Tweetie.

So here’s my workflow these days:

1. Compose a post in MarsEdit and publish it.
2. Go to the WordPress application on the server and navigate to the new post so I can copy the short link.
3. Open my Twitter client and write a new tweet, then publish that.

The main inconvenience is opening WordPress in the browser once I’ve already gone to the trouble to write the post somewhere else. What I need is a tool that will allow me to access the internally generated short URL and compose a Tweet from MarsEdit that can be published whenever the blog post itself is published.

It’s looking like I’m going to need to write my own WordPress plugin to do exactly what I want. There are a ton of Twitter plugins, I think I’ll just have to find the right one and adapt it to my needs.

More later.

Links for April 8

In Commentary on 8 April 2008 tagged blogs, food, Google, hosting, links, media, politics, Python, scalability, security, spam, sports, TV, Web development, WordPress with no comments

• gourmet.com: Betting the Farm. Great article on agriculture policy and how one family farm in South Dakota is bucking the trend of cashing in on ethanol money and government subsidies.
• Rogers Cadenhead: Washington Post Wins Another Phony Pulitzer. I loved the Washington Post article about the violinist planted in the DC subway, but Rogers argues that it’s more reality TV than news reporting.
• Ian Kallen: The WordPress Security Cancer. Outdated WordPress installations are being exploited to distribute spam. If you run it, be sure to keep your installation up to date.
• Dave Winer: Early notes on GoogleApps (Scripting News). I have my own thoughts on this but I haven’t gotten around to posting them.
• Ars Technica: Gmail being throttled, blocked by some anti-spam vendors. Now that Google’s CAPTCHA has been cracked, spammers are using bots to sign up for accounts and sending spam through Gmail.
• Freedom to Tinker: Phorm’s Harms Extend Beyond Privacy. Smart take on the many ways the Phorm Internet snooping scheme was hostile to users.
• 2008 NFL Mock Draft Database. I’m a sucker for mock drafts, and this site lists them all.
• FP Passport: The Colbert bump is real. Democratic Congressmen who take their lumps in “Better Know a District” are rewarded with a big jump in contributions.

Links for March 12th

In Commentary on 13 March 2008 tagged browsers, music, security, software development, testing, WordPress with 1 comment

• Jon Udell interviews Ward Cunningham about how the Eclipse portal exposes its innter workings by way of reports on test results, and the advantages the resulting transparency provides. Really, really interesting stuff.
• Bruce Schneier discusses a report on the lack of security in implantable medical devices that provide remote access.
• Wired Compiler links to Prism, a Firefox add-on that makes it easy to treat Web sites like standalone desktop applications. It provides a lightweight approach to creating apps like Mailplane.
• The Morning News: Six-Word Reviews of 763 SXSW MP3s by Paul Ford. This is insane, and I mean that in the best possible way.
• Postalicious is the WordPress plugin I used to produce this post.

WordPress, for now

In Commentary on 19 January 2008 tagged meta, Movable Type, WordPress with 10 comments

Today I reluctantly migrated the blog from Movable Type to WordPress. There are many things I like about Movable Type, especially in version 4.0, but for whatever reason it was very slow and seemed to keep getting slower. I installed FastCGI but wasn’t sure if it ever worked, made sure the database was properly indexed and that it wasn’t slowing things down, and tried to tweak other things where I could. Eventually I decided that I was tired of dealing with slow performance, and didn’t have the energy to take the debugging to the next level.

Anyway, it was relatively easy to move my content into WordPress, so I took the plunge. Right now I’m using a slightly modified version of the Cutline theme, but I expect to make it more my own soon enough.

Getting the old links to blog posts to work was somewhat difficult. When I migrated my posts from Movable Type to WordPress, neither the ID numbers nor the Movable Type basenames made it into the WordPress database. My Movable Type permalinks were based on the basename. I hacked the 404 page in my theme to look up the posts in the Movable Type database by basename, and then use the post title to look up the post in the WordPress database and redirect to the appropriate page. There will be problems with the really old untitled posts, and with any posts that have the same title, but the approach works well enough for now.

I also had to install FeedBurner FeedSmith and PHP Markdown to get things working. Markdown does still work in comments. I’ve also installed WP-OpenID, so you can sign in using your OpenID to comment.

Sadly all of the tags on my posts failed to make it over in the migration. I doubt I’ll go back and tag old posts.

I’m sure there are dozens of other problems that I haven’t found yet, but I’ll iron them out over time. If you see anything obviously broken, please leave a comment and I’ll try to get it fixed.