/dev/random

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.
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “@Feed Plugin”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2008/03/08/feed-plugin/” });

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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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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.
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “One comment spammer shut down”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2008/02/24/one-comment-spammer-shut-down/” });

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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.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “New Theme”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2008/02/05/new-theme-2/” });

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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.

SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Manage a WordPress blog from your phone”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2008/02/02/manage-a-wordpress-blog-from-your-phone/” });

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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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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 [...]

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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.

SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “iPhone theme”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2007/07/07/iphone-theme/” });

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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.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Switched to Subversion”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2007/06/22/switched-to-subversion/” });

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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.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Upgraded to WordPress 2.2″, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2007/05/17/upgraded-to-wordpress-22/” });

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WordPress 2.2 was released today! I’ll probably try it out on one of my machines this weekend before I decide whether to update this site.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “WordPress 2.2″, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2007/05/15/wordpress-22/” });

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As you probably notice, I made a slight change to the theme for this site. I’ve been using the Barthelme theme, which I also use at XpressLinux.com, because I like the clean design. However I didn’t want this site to look exactly like XpressLinux.com so I made a slight change to the CSS.
Note the narrow [...]

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For a while I’ve been having a problem with this site where the theme would spontaneously switch to the default theme at random times. Since it started happening around the same time I switched to DreamHost’s one-click install, I attributed it to some monitoring process they were using or the WP-Cache plugin, which was also [...]

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I’ve converted my old WordPress installation to a DreamHost one-click installation so I can manage it through their control panel. I’ve also been trying out different themes since I’ve been getting tired of the old one.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Site Change”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2007/03/01/site-change/” });

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I’ve upgraded this site to WordPress 2.1. The upgrade was quick & painless.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “WordPress 2.1″, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2007/01/26/wordpress-21/” });

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