It’s kinda “old”, but just read now on this message that there’s a serious vulnerability going on with Wordpress: if your site was hacked, when a user clicks a Google search result pointing to your site, he’ll be redirected to another site.
The two sites that the users are being redirected to are “your-needs.info” and, most recently, “anyresults.net”. On the amazing Alexa graph below, the red line is a well-known site with ~90k unique monthly (confirmed), the blue line is for “your-needs.info” and the green/yellish is for “anyresults.net”.
It seems that there’s no official word on the case yet, but some people posted suposted solutions in the thread about the problem. Not working for eveyone, though.
So, if your site traffic drop heavily without apparent reasons, check your Google links.
Post Image is a great Wordpress plugin that displays an image attached to a post without you having to add the <img> tag to the post content. It’s great to list the posts with a thumbnail on the site and display the full sized image in the post page.
The last version of Post Image wasn’t working because Wordpress 2.5 changed how thumbnails are named, so I made a small change in the code. It’s working great for me, but since I only tested on one site, it may contain bugs that will destroy your whole life. Please leave a comment if you find one.
If you wan’t to try it, download the modified version (1.2) clicking here. For a reference on how to use it, see the original page.
On Wordpress versions prior to 2.5, if you uploaded an image named “photo.png”, the thumbnail would be named “photo.thumbnail.png”. With version 2.5, there’s a new naming scheme where instead of “thumbnail” we have the dimensions of the image, like in “photo-150×143.png”. It’s not a big of a change, but a lot of plugins that were hardcoded to point to the files with “thumbnail” stopped working.
Fortunately, the solution is quite simple. Wordpress stores the filename of the thumbnails in the field “_wp_attachment_metadata” on the table “wp_postmeta”. This field is serialized with a lot of other information about the image, so you have to use unserialize on field value and extract the name of the thumbnail from the returned array.
Just came upon an online form with a select field that, when clicked, opens a popup window containing another select field with the values that should have been on the first select. When you choose a value, the popup insert the value on the first select and closes itself.
It’s so stupid that I think I’m missing something here and there’s a good reason to do that.
Started the day with this message from Dreamhost:
“This is just a notice that your DreamHost Account has a balance of $119.40 (including any charges not due until 2009-01-22), with $119.40 due (since 2008-12-22).”
At least they have sense of humor and showed the picture of the guy who made the mistake of billing every customer for the whole new year.
After upgrading WP to 2.3 I wasn’t expecting find 100+ spam links in my blogroll today. It seems that the code of the link manager wasn’t checking if the user had the permission to manage links. The fixed file can be found here. You should replace the “link.php” of your 2.3 WordPress instalation with that code. I found the solution on this topic.
UPDATE: I found another 41 spam links today after the “link.php” fix. According to that forum post the fix should have worked, but it didn’t. While an official solution don’t come out, I’ll change the theme code so it display the blogroll with static HTML instead of grabing the links from the database.
UPDATE 2 (2007-11-22): no more spams here, don’t know why.
* Ten spam links in the blogroll means that I should upgrade this Wordpress installation more frequently.
* WordPress now support tags. I used to use categories as tags. I’ll probably keep doing that.
UPDATE: just read on this post that if you use “tag” instead of “category” as the base word in the url of category pages (like I do here), you should use a different word as the base for urls of tag pages (you can change this on WP administration, under Options -> Permalinks). If you don’t do this, all /tag/* pages will generate a 404 error.
* I heard about wp-cache when I moved all my sites to Dreamhost, but never started using it. Last week I was trying to speed up the sites and realized that wp-cache is actually very good. Dreamhost isn’t the most fast server in the world (sometimes it’s the opposite), but caching WordPress just made the pages load VERY faster than usual and didn’t cause any problems as I was thinking it would.