theBartels.de » Wordpress

WP-Gallery-Remote 1.5.1 available

CB — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 02:08:14 +0000

I just uploaded WP-Gallery-Remote 1.5.1 to WordPress.org. This is probably the last version, as I switched from a self-hosted blog to wordpress.com, for which custom plugins cannot be used. 1.5.1 worked for me with WordPress 2.5 and WordPress 2.6.

The current version also includes a migration script to migrate your pictures from Gallery to Picasa Webalbums and updating all wordpress blog posts containing wp-gallery-remote tags with links to picasa.

Moved Blog to WordPress.com

CB — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 06:51:03 +0000

I just moved this blog from my own server to wordpress.com. Reason: I plan to get rid of the server. I don’t have time to really do anything fancy with it and it basically just costs money and time for maintenance.
Any kind of photos are now hosted on picasa webalbums. For the migration, I wrote a php script which reads out an existing wordpress blog (self-hosted or wordpress.com), searches for wp-gallery-remote tags, downloads the respective photos from the gallery, uploads them to picasa webalbums and updates the blog post again. That made migrating around 60 albums and almost 200 blog posts quiet easy.

I am not sure yet, whether the old RSS link (via feedburner) is still working. Well, I’ll see after pressing the publish button for this post.

So far…

Spam, Spam, Spam

CB — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 22:19:41 +0000

Unbelievable…just noticed, that the anti-spam plugin of my blog (Akismet) filtered 25,002 spam comments in the last 2 years. That are more than 34 spam comments per day.

After that number got my attention, I checked my mail account. After the switch around a month ago from my own mail server to Google Apps for you Domain, which now lets me use Google’s Gmail infrastructure for my primary mail adress (first name (at) this domain), I received over 5000 spam mails. Fortunately, only 3 spam messages were not recognized by Gmail’s spam filter and I had no false-positives. (Which is very impressive)

On my own mailserver, I had collected spam mails for some time to train the spam filter software. Around 10,000 spam mails had the size of 65 megabytes. That means, that getting right now 5000 spam mails per month (approximately), I get currently around 60,000 spam mails per year which have a total size of 400 megabytes.

If you are interested in the topic spam, Wikipedia has a good article as a starting point.

WP-Gallery-Remote 1.4 available

CB — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 08:57:42 +0000

WP-Gallery-Remote 1.4 is available.
Changelog:

switched from fopen to CURL for accessing Gallery; libcurlemu is used to support environments without CURL support
bugfix: image cache was not resetted after timeout (thanks Kerri!)

WP-Gallery-Remote 1.3

CB — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 11:12:00 +0000

A new version of WP-Gallery-Remote is available.

Changelog:

v1.3
- added check for allow_url_fopen on admin page
- added option to open Gallery album by clicking the album’s title
- album chooser now adds now only those parameters to the wpgr tag, which have been changed – allows global change of settings for older posts
- added support for multi-language via gettext/pot files (feel free to translate and to send me the translation files for inclusion)
- added per album and per tag option to choose what happens, if the user clicks on a thumbnail
  - open via lightbox effect
  - open image in new window
  - open image in Gallery in new window
- bugfix: rewrote Gallery data parsing method – speedup + fix of potential security risk
- bugfix: post specific parameters were used for following posts as well

Download

blog.thebartels.de optimized for iPhone

CB — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 23:58:55 +0000

I just installed the iWPhone WordPress plugin.

The iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme automatically reformats your blog’s content for optimized viewing on Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch. It detects the iPhone/iPod touch’s User Agent and serves up the content with the special theme only to iPhone and iPod touch visitors, all other browsers will view your WordPress blog with your current theme.

Feedback is appreciated, especially from iPhone users. (And there are some according to the webserver logs…)

New Theme Style

CB — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 06:29:43 +0000

I found a very pretty style for the K2 theme, called TrueBlue, so this blog looks a little bit different again. (Yes, you have to visit the website, if you read the blog via rss feed… ) Furthermore, I installed Date-Stamp, a WordPress plugin by the same author as TrueBlue. But I am not yet quite sure, whether I really like Date-Stamp. If you have an opinion, drop me a comment…

Update: And I could finally activate successfully the AJAX navigation feature at the top. Try it know.

Anti-Spam-Rename is doing its job

CB — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 07:04:14 +0000

I have been running Anti-Spam-Rename for the last 6 days now and it seems, that it does a really good job. I still get some spam (54 spam comments in that timeframe), but compared to over 100 spam comments per day before, it is a reduction of over 1111%.

So, if anyone was fearless enough to test the plugin, it would be great, if you would comment on it.

Anti-Spam-Rename – My first WordPress plugin

CB — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 12:46:26 +0000

In the last weeks the amount of comment and trackback spam in my blog significantly increased from just a few to over 100 entries per day. Although Akismet does a very good job, sometimes there are false-positives so that you have to go reguarly through the list of marked spam to filter these.
On discobeats.de I read about an easy way to prevent spam. As the described method of manually renaming and updating certain files of your wordpress installation, is annoying after some time, I created a WordPress plugin.

Although it is still a feature-incomplete version, perhaps anyone likes to try it (on his/her own risk ):
WordPress Plugin: Anti-Spam-Rename

Random header images

CB — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 22:25:07 +0000

Just a simple site update. The header image is now chosen on random basis (Using this PHP script). So enjoy some new images, if you are realoading the page.