Place of Stuff

Just a quick post.  Pretty much my favourite plugin here has been Commentluv by Andy Bailey.  Unfortunately, enabling IntenseDebate meant that Commentluv stopped working.  However, our favourite programmer/purveyor of fine food has written a Commentluv plugin for IntenseDebate.  Cool, eh?

So we get threaded comments, single sign and Commentluv all in one place.  If you wish to take advantage, there is an extra field under the comment box for you to put in your site URL.

Enjoy.

I have said this many times before: UPGRADE WORDPRESS WHEN PROMPTED.  This one is in the style of “beating you about the head and body and then caning you across the eyeballs“.  Why?  Because a hack has been discovered that makes your older, more stable, more comfortable WordPress.org install very insecure and really you may as well make the password Pa55w0rd – because your older version can and will be pwned.

Now that I have your attention….  Go to Lorelle’s site, Robert Scoble’s site and the WordPress Dev Blog to see details of this new exploit.  If you have version 2.8.4 (like what I do), you are more secure.  As well as upgrading, remove the default admin account and create a new one (reverse order, is good on that one), check for phantom admin accounts and make sure you are using a strong password.  There are other things to do, but that will keep you going for now.

I regularly get comments such as “if I upgrade it breaks all my plugins”, “my theme doesn’t work if I upgrade now” and so on.  You now get to make a value judgment: if you don’t upgrade you could end up no longer owning your blog vs giving up or changing a few plugins or a theme.  Which of these is the worst case scenario for you?

Upgrade now. You know it makes sense.

I have a Twitter address.  But I really disliked having to either open a new tab to view comments and replies or having to keep returning to the site to see what’s going on.  And I won’t be going into the various merits or demerits of Twitter as a site or function.  There are plenty of sites that are happy to do that for me.  So, being the kind of guy I am, I went hunting for a Twitter client so I didn’t have to use the browser.

There are a number of clients out there, so there’s no shortage whatsoever.  Unfortunately, most are written for Mac or for Windows and I run Linux.  So using my brain I went hunting on the web for a client that I could run.  I was running Spaz, but it became unhappy when I upgraded my distro and started running KDE4 – it just sits in the system tray and won’t actually do anything useful.  More on that later.

So, after the jump, I’ll run down the ones I tested and the one I’m on now.  Incidentally, some of my results are skewed by the fact that I believe KDE to be messing me around – some apps run once and then never again.  I am well aware that this is not the fault of the app itself, so I will not refer to the running (or otherwise) nature of the app.  Also, big thanks to the nice people at Adobe.  Many of the apps tested run on Adobe AIR (get it here).  If you remember Klik, Adobe Air is kinda like that but easier to use.  The BBC iPlayer Desktop app runs through AIR which allows it to be cross-platform.  Jump coming up now…

Continue reading ‘Various Twitter Clients’ »

I have been looking at the dates of posts and noticed how very lazy I have been.  I have been back from honeymoon since the middle of June and haven’t posted anything at all.  So here is the list of things I need to do (just like the Ten Commandments, “in no particular order”):

1. Tidy up my Links list – many of the links are now dead and many of the others need pruning and I need to seriously reorganise the categories – done, let me know if you see any dead links
2. Start to write about the audio adventures of Sapphire & Steel
3. Find some things to get angry about so I can rant about them for your pleasure and delectation
4. Update my LibraryThing library (not blog related, but needs to be done) - done/ongoing
5. Post up the honeymoon photos and videos
6. Organise some posts that I can put up here in the slack times – just general info/fluff/ideas posts
7. Just get more organised in general here – this site has seemed a bit unloved for a while

I’ll cross these off as I do them and maybe add more if I think about them.

Just noticed that the latest WordPress.org update has been out since Thursday.  This time round the update does the following:

• Certain themes were calling get_categories() in such a way that it would fail in 2.8. 2.8.1 works around this so these themes won’t have to change.
• Dashboard memory usage is reduced.  Some people were running out of memory when loading the dashboard, resulting in an incomplete page.
• The automatic upgrade no longer accidentally deletes files when cleaning up from a failed upgrade.
• A problem where the rich text editor wasn’t being loaded due to compression issues has been worked around.
• Extra security has been put in place to better protect you from plugins that do not do explicit permission checks.
• Translation of role names fixed.
• wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title.
• Upload error messages are now correctly reported.
• Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed.
• Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed.
• SSH2 filesystem requirements updated.
• Switched back to curl as the default transport.
• Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload.
• Stricter inline style sanitization.
• Stricter menu security.
• Disabled code highlighting due to browser incompatibilities.
• RTL layout fixes.

If you’re into that sort of thing, you can read all about the changes between 2.8 and 2.8.1 here, and more details are here.  I upgraded using the auto-upgrade feature in the dashboard and it took under a minute.

Yes, the rumours are correct: I now have a Privacy Policy.  And, somewhat confusingly, it’s no longer private.  If you can get your head around that, here’s some more stuff that I will lay on you.

This site has always had a privacy policy.  Like most important documents, I carried it around in my head and, if you so wished, I would have presented it to you upon request.  However, the grey beards of the internet were unhappy with this state of affairs.  They felt that this wasn’t right and proper and insisted that I created a written version that people can see without asking.  Now, you know me and you know I can be trusted “word is bond” and all that.  Yes, I may have used your address to buy a few personal items on sites I wasn’t too sure about – security on the internet is very important.  Oh, if those passports I ordered turn up, could you hang onto them for me.   Thanks.

They have obviously got at Sire as it’s his fault that I wrote this down.  This now means that instead of just trusting me, as you should do, and accepting that all is kosher and pukka on this site you now have to read the Privacy Policy and understand it and then explain it to me every single time I decide to amend it.  Tedious but apparently necessary.  So yeah, read it, understand and then leave your front door keys under the mat, I’ll bring the van round.

Unrelated Footnote: While writing this, I had a thought.  Is it possible to get someone accused of a crime on the internet without actually doing so?  To explain, in the above post I have put URLs under “Sire” and “it’s his fault“.  These links are now indexed by search engines.  If I were to write a completely normal and ordinary post, but use certain phrases as keywords and give them links, could I construct a letter to the data mining authorities via these means which would mean that Sire could get a call from the Aussie Stasi?  And, if I wrongly accuse him, would this cause him to form an Aussie A-Team?? Hmm, I feel an experiment coming on….

By the way, apologies to Sire for singling him out – it was those two links that kicked off the train of thought.  Obviously I wouldn’t implicate him in any crimes.  Obviously.  No, really.