Wordpress 2.6.2 and Automatic Updating
Wordpress version 2.6.2 is out, fixing a few security holes. If you haven’t already, you should upgrade your installation as soon as possible.
I think I’ve mentioned it here before, but if you’re not running the Automatic Upgrade plugin, stop and add it to the top of your to-do list. True to it’s name, the plugin does all the work of updating your Wordpress install with just a series of clicks. This is especially useful for users who may be afraid of uploading a bunch of files or perhaps don’t have FTP access to their blog.
From a technical perspective, the plugin does a lot of nice things on the system side. First, it gives you zip files containing your content and database backups. It’s more a just-in-case thing, but nice to have. Then, it puts your blog into a maintenance mode. That way, people aren’t leaving comments or trying to log in during the upgrade. It will also de-activate your plugins, again, to reduce the possible errors that may pop up. The plugin then gets new files from Wordpress directly, updates your install, turns everything back on and asks you to clean up the cruft leftover.
Upgrading today took 3 minutes, which is a small price to pay to make sure your install is safe and secure.
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Backup Your Wordpress Databases
Back-ups are a good thing. Nay, a very good thing. Two years ago, I had an external hard drive fail and I lost all my music (including music I made myself), movies and thousands of pictures of my boys. We were able to get many of the images from relatives, Flickr and more, but I learned my lesson the hard way.
These days, I back up to the cloud. I use Mozy Home (now part of EMC) and for $4.95 a month I get unlimited online backups. Now my music, photos, videos, work stuff and more is backed up automatically and I don’t have to worry about it. Mozy has both Windows and Mac clients.
I blogged recently about backing your entire web root up to S3, but maybe you don’t have the access or the knowledge to get that all set up.
If you’re using Wordpress to power your blog, this plugin may be right up your alley. It’s called the Wordpress Database Backup plugin and it pretty much does exactly what the name suggests. It backs up your Wordpress database (which pretty much is the brain of your blog) and allows you to either download it manually to a file or have it emailed to you. The files are compressed so even if you have a great deal of posts, comments and more, the file sizes won’t overwhelm you. The files I get for this blog are about 178k.
What makes the plugin great is the fact you can schedule backups and have them delivered to you via email. You could, conceivably, have the plugin email you a backup every week, and if you’re using the gigs and gigs of storage Gmail gives you, you could just leave the emails and files in Gmail until they’re needed - let Google worry about the storage and bandwidth. The less I have to think about when it comes to blogging, the better, and the plugin makes my life a bit easier.
Even if you don’t set up the cron-type backups, I’d recommend this plugin for the manual backups you can do whenever you want.
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Preemptive Strikes Against Blog Spam
Blog spam is a pain. It wastes your time, your bandwidth and storage space. Kyle asked today on Twitter for some advice on how to reduce spam loads. Here are some plugins and code I’ve used to reduce spam on my blogs.
Akismet
This plug-in does a very nice job of marking spam and is set-it-and-forget-it easy. You’ll need a Wordpress API key and installation and setup is a snap. Akismet will quarantine comments and trackback pings in a special area so that you can either mass delete them or go through them and check for false positives. I’ve seen some false-positives on trackbacks. You can use Akismet with Wordpress as well as several other systems, including Movable Type.
Bad Behavior
A great way to stop bots from spamming you is to not even let them on your site. Bad Behavior does just that. If you don’t use Wordpress, you can still integrate the code with your PHP-based web app. I once got blocked from visiting a site by BB because I was using a Playstation3. I think BB didn’t like my user-agent.
ReCaptcha
ReCaptcha is a cool project out of CMU. I’ve been meaning to do a whole post on it, but I use it at my institution to reduce spam and it works great. Bad people stay out and as a byproduct, books are being digitized. You can learn more about there here. There is a Wordpress plugin as well, as well as resources for a large number of other content systems and programming languages.
Spam Firewall
One of the issues with Movable Type is that everything runs as a CGI process. This means if your blog or site runs MT, and you have open comments, your mt-comments.cgi script is going to be slammed. This means higher loads on your server, which in turn can lead to degraded performance, and worse, if your site is hosted in a shared environment, can get your blog turned off. My MT scripts are constantly getting killed at Dreamhost. Spam Firewall serves as a gate-keeper for your mt-comments.cgi script by trying to thwart off would-be intruders before they even get in. This plugin is only for PHP-based installs.
I hope this helps you reduce the spam on your blog.
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