Tag Archives: Wordpress

Wordpress

WP-DB Backup WordPress Plugin

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I just finished installing the WP-DB Backup plugin from skippy.net. This plugin allows you to perform a database backup directly from the WordPress admin screens. It’s pretty nice. It allows you to pick which database tables you would like to backup (after preselecting the core WordPress tables for you) and gives you the option of storing the backup file on the server, downloading it, or having it emailed to you. It also has a nice little progress bar that informs you of the progress of the backup.

This is much better than running my mysqldump command every time I want to take a backup of the server and manually secure copying it down from the server and sourcing it. One or two clicks, and I have my MySQL dump file on my local machine ready to be checked in.

If you’ve been looking for an easier way to backup your database, check this plugin out. It makes the task of backing up your database a lot less of a chore than it otherwise is.

Skippy’s also got a lot of other cool looking plugins on his plugin page. You might want to check them out and see if anything grabs you there.

WordPress Statistics Plugin – BAStats

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I’ve been looking for quite a while to find a good statistics package that could give me an idea of what is going on on the site over and above the default Analog stats that my web provider provides.

Tonight I came across the beta version of BAStats, by Owen Winkler. The package is a WordPress plugin and as such was installed and functional in minutes.

I’ll have to figure out whether it winds up being useful, but the amount of data it collects for the amount of effort I had to put into installing it is definitely worth it. Currently, through my administration panel I can report on the following metrics:

  • Top Page Hits
  • Top Hosts
  • Top Referring Pages
  • Top Operating Systems
  • Top User Agents
  • Top Search Phrases
  • Recent Page Hits
  • Recent Hosts
  • Recent Referring Pages
  • Recent Operating Systems
  • Recent User Agents
  • Recent Search Phrases
  • Graph Top 5 Page Hits – Segmented
  • Graph Top Page Hits

I don’t have enough data to see what the last two items do, but it looks like I now have quite a bit of information at my fingertips. I’m hoping this stuff is more intelligible than trying to sift through the analog stats. Time will tell. Right now all I see is crawlers.

Update

I was receiving some errors in the control panel and a data type error on the main page. To remove these messages, I did the following:

In the file BAStats_options.php, change the function check_option to look like the following:

function check_option($opt)
{
$settings = get_settings('bas_options');
if (!$settings) { $settings = array(); }
if(in_array($opt, $settings)) echo ' checked="checked"';
}

At line 115 , change the following code

if(in_array('log_spam', $options) && in_array('referer_spam', $settings))
{

to the following:

if(!is_array($options))$options = array();
if(!is_array($settings))$settings = array();
if(in_array('log_spam', $options) && in_array('referer_spam', $settings))
{

These changes should fix the errors you are receiving.

The Cost of Laziness

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The site was hacked defaced last night at around 4:45pm due to my laziness in not installing a simple one line fix to the WordPress software outlined on the WordPress Development Blog. After exploiting the SQL injection vulnerability that the fix closed, the person was able to log in to WordPress, create a new user, promote themselves to admin level and replace the index page. I found out about it this morning when I hit the site when I woke up.

This should be a lesson to you. Keep an eye on security updates for your software, and apply them as soon as they become available. The WordPress team posted this update 26 days ago (according to the blog entry, 40 minutes after hearing about the exploit) and I blew it off, thinking that this site was too insignificant to actually hit.

I was wrong. It’s insignificant, but apparently not so much so that someone won’t take the small amount of time it takes to use a Perl script to compromise a known hole when they found it by doing a Google search on the term “powered by WordPress 1.5”.

I’m usually pretty good about installing security updates … not sure what I was thinking when I blew this off.

For the record, the WordPress Team has performed a security audit of the code for similar vulnerabilities and found none. Thanks guys. I’ll pay more attention next time around.

New Site Theme

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I’m continuing to muck about with themes, because I’ve suddenly gotten tired of the way the site looks lately, which can be surprisingly unmotivating. The latest theme is a customized version of Mallow.

The theme is based on Kubrick for WordPress, but looks much nicer. We’ll see how long I keep this one. One thing I do like about it is the rollover menus at the top, which allows me to put some of the important areas right up top where they can be found easily. The first thing to go up there are the SVK Tutorials, which are getting quite a bit of traffic now that SVK has gone 1.0.

The header image is a subset of a picture of the sun setting over Holland that I found on Flickr. I just thought it looked really cool and worked well with the themes color scheme.

One thing notably missing are the Google Ads. I just can’t find a nice place to put them, so they’re being removed.

New Theme on Site

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Since the release of WordPress 1.5 I’ve noticed a lot of Kubrick around now that one does not have to work to get it going. As the days ticked by I started getting really annoyed with the look of the site so I decided it was time to change. After looking around a little bit, I found this theme you are looking at right now called ShadedGrey.

This is probably one of the cleanest, well organized themes that I have come across so far. It was designed by Sadish Balasubramanian.

Best part of it, aside from customizing the sidebar a bit, I didn’t have to work to get it going. It took all of about 10 minutes of customization to get the site looking as it does right now and I think things look a lot more organized and pleasant to the eye since the change. I personally feel the site has never looked better than it does right now.

Have I mentioned what a great piece of software WordPress is?