Less than an hour after I posted my last entry, I checked Akismet and found that it had already been scraped and reposted - with the copyright notice from my feed intact!
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Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Less than half an hour after I posted this item earlier today, I found that it was already scraped and republished in a splog. To prevent this in the future, I’ve installed the ©Feed plugin, which adds a copyright notice to each item in my RSS feeds that will appear in any scraped content saying [...]
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I’ve upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.5.1, which adds several security fixes & performance improvements. This time I used WP Auto Upgrade, which was very quick but had one glitch. When it finished the update, it didn’t re-enable my plugins, so I had to re-enable them manually.
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Checking my Akismet queue, I found several trackbacks from spam blogs scraping and reposting my content. They all seem to be using the same template, usually starting with “(some blog name) wrote an interesting post today…”, always giving it some random name linked to my blog.
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!
I don’t mind my feed being included [...]
I tried the WP Security Scan plugin, which checks the blog for common security problems, such as incorrect file permissions, but unfortunately it causes posting via XMLRPC to fail, so I had to deactivate it. I also tried out some other themes but didn’t really like them, so I went back to the old one.
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I’ve upgraded this site to the final release version of WordPress 2.5. As always, the upgrade was quick & painless.
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I’ve upgraded this site to the WordPress 2.5 release candidate. I had been planning to wait until the release, but Daniel asked me to upgrade his blog a few days ago. When I saw how quick & painless the upgrade was, I decided to upgrade here as well.
The upgrade took less than 5 minutes, including [...]
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Wednesday, March 19, 2008
A friend asked me to upgrade his blog to WordPress 2.5 RC1, which I had decided to avoid until it’s actually released, so I tried it out on a local copy of this site running on my MacBook Pro. Unlike Drupal 6, I found the update was completely painless and didn’t break any of my [...]
WordPress 2.5 will be released soon and I’m planning to upgrade this site. In an attempt to spread FUD, Anil Dash of Six Apart posted a blog entry suggesting that people “upgrade” to Movable Type instead. WordPress developer Matt Mullenweg responded by pointing out that WordPress is 100% open source.
I had originally used Movable Type [...]
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I’ve installed the @feed plugin, which adds a digital fingerprint & copyright notice to my RSS feed. It can also identify stolen content using the digital fingerprint. Hopefully this will cut down on the content scrapers.
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Thursday, February 28, 2008
I’ve implemented Donncha O Caoimh’s steps to fight comment spam here. Two of the plugins, Comment Referrers and Delink Comment Author add links to the comment moderation email I receive that show the referrer, which helps identify spammers, and remove links from the comment.
Lucia’s Linky Love makes this blog less attractive to spammers [...]
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Sunday, February 24, 2008
This morning I got a comment moderation notice, which turned out to be from a spam blog hosted at wordpress.com. I reported them to wordpress.com and here’s the result.
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Tuesday, February 5, 2008
I upgraded this site to WordPress 2.3.3 and changed the theme to veryplaintext, which is the cleanest looking theme that supports widgets. I will probably add a bit of color to the sidebar and make a few tweaks later.
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Saturday, February 2, 2008
The WPhone plugin adds a nice mobile admin interface for WordPress. A Rich version works on the iPhone or other phones that support AJAX, while the Lite version will work on any phone.
As some of you may have noticed, this site was having 500 internal server errors earlier this evening. WordPress was running out of memory, and it seemed to be plugin related. I moved all of the plugins out of the plugin folder and it started working again. By reinstalling plugins one at a time I [...]
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Thursday, January 24, 2008
I switched to a new theme & logo at MacMegasite, and I also de-cluttered the sidebars. I’m still looking at more themes and working on the logo, so I may still change it if I find something I like better.
The last few days I’ve looked at a lot of WordPress & Drupal themes. Almost none [...]
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
I just upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.3 using Subversion. The upgrade was quick and painless, except for an interaction with my server configuration which caused an endless redirect loop. I have my server configured to strip off ‘www’ from the URL, but I had the URL listed as ‘www.mcdevzone.com’ in the blog configuration. Changing [...]
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I’ve installed the iWPhone plugin & theme from ContentRobot, which reformats the page when viewed on an iPhone.
Since DreamHost still doesn’t have the important WordPress 2.2.1 security update available for One-click, I switched to Subversion for upgrades. Thanks to carpeaqua for the pointer.
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I’ve upgraded this site to WordPress 2.2 using DreamHost’s one-click installer. Nothing broke - all of my plugins and themes still work. It now uses the built-in widget feature instead of the sidebar widgets plugin.
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