Archive for the ‘wordpress’ Category
Now Proudly Powered by WP 2.0.3, Hooray!
Wednesday, July 26th, 2006There was no point continuing to wait on the CodeHighlight guy. Upgraded to WP 2.0.3. Changed to use iG:Syntax Hiliter for all the syntax highlighting. Had to manually correct all the [code lang="java"] tags, but it took less time than I thought.
WP 2.0 Upgrade On Hold
Sunday, January 22nd, 2006It seems that I’ll have to put it on hold for a while before starting to upgrade this blog to Wordpress 2.0, mainly because the Code Highlight doesn’t work with 2.0 (according to the author. I have seen people reporting it working with their 2.0 installation but if the author himself has cautioned the odds seem to be against).
The Hurdle In Upgrading
Sunday, May 15th, 2005This happened when I tried to upgrade to WordPress 1.5.1 which came out a few days ago. Upgrading my local sandbox server was pretty straightforward. Everything up and running in 10 minutes. So I happily headed to the real deal and uploaded everything from the local sandbox. Only to get this scary (because it was all happy in the sandbox!) error whichever page I tried to access:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: get_bloginfo()
wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 304.
After a few grep’s into the source code and some hair pulling, here is the ‘why, why, why!’ that is so seemingly innocent - when uploading the files, I accidentally overwrote wp-config.php with the DB settings for the sandbox. Obviously WP would fail to connect to the real DB with those. What’s not so obvious is the error message, which neither shows what really went wrong, nor where it actually did.
Out of curiosity, I googled a bit, and found a lot of folks actually ran into this error. Perhaps the WP developer team might consider explicitly testing the DB connection and giving an error message in a fail-fast manner in next release?
WP GateKeeper
Sunday, April 24th, 2005I am looking for a comment spam blocker to use with this WordPress installation. I looked at Spam Karma, but can’t get it running on my server. Some other people were asking about the same errors I got on the WP forum, but didn’t get any answer. Not wanting to spend time hacking into php code, I decided to look further, and found WP GateKeeper.
It took me 2 minutes to install. The way it works is to add a question to the comment posting form. The answer to the question is very obvious to a human - “what color is an orange?”, but not so much to a spambot. The question is randomly selected from a set which can be modified to your own taste. I figure one of two things would have to happen before the GateKeeper can be fooled: either a spambot that has the ability to parse natural language, or someone’s got hell of some computing power to crack the hashed question key in the form page.
Of course, I have heard of the trick to have some other site viewers (porn?) solving these questions (or images) in real-time…
