Tag: Wordpress

Sociable Plugin Doesn’t Play Nice

I’ve been using the Sociable plugin for adding easy “share” links to the bottom of my posts. Up until yesterday, I’ve been using the 2.x versions of the plugin, but yesterday I upgraded to 3.4.4. Today, I’ve noticed to my surprise that the plugin automatically adds a box to my admin dashboard with “The Latest News from Yoast,” Yoast being the plugin’s maintainer, Joost de Valk’s, blog. The plugin itself doesn’t feature any way to completely disable this “feature.” One has to hide it using the dashboard settings. While this may seem benign, in my opinion it’s pushing the limit. If I’m interested in getting updates from that blog, I would sign up to its RSS feed. I don’t like getting “free” functionality that’s not advertised in the plugin description.

I must add that as a user of the Sociable plugin, I’m more than satisfied. I probably won’t stop using the plugin just because of this issue, but it still seems to me like improper manners.

WordPress Backup to FTP

Update: A newer version of the script is available.

This script allows you to easily back up your WordPress blog to an FTP server. It’s actually a modification of my WordPress Backup to Amazon S3 Script, but instead of saving the backup to Amazon S3, it uploads it to an FTP server. Another update is that now the SQL dump includes the database creation instructions, so you don’t need to create it manually before restoring from the backup.

Although I’ve written it with WordPress in mind (to create backups of my blog), it isn’t WordPress-specific. It can be used to back up any website that consists of a MySQL database and files. I’ve successfully used it to back up a MediaWiki installation.
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WordPress Backup to Amazon S3 Script

This is an updated version of my WordPress Backup Script. The new version basically does the same thing: backs up a WordPress blog (actually, any site that consists of files and a MySQL database). The new thing about the script is that instead of only saving the backup locally, it also uploads it to Amazon S3.

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Clean URLs (Permalinks) for WordPress on Lighttpd

I’ve moved my blog in the last few days to a new, bigger dedicated server (as well as some other sites I own). After doing some benchmarks (I plan to post those soon), I’ve decided to switch to Lighttpd. While the exact migration notes are the topic of another post, I can say that I’m fairly satisfied with the move.

After setting up the server, I started moving the blog. Importing the files and the database was pretty straightforward. But when I thought everything was ready and I transferred the domain to the new server, I’ve found out that none of my inner pages are accessible. The reason, as it turned up pretty quickly, is that WordPress depends on Apache’s mod_rewrite to create the clean URLs (the so-called permalinks). This actually posed two problems:

  1. WordPress depends on Apache’s mod_rewrite.
  2. WordPress uses .htaccess files for the clean URLs configuration.

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WordPress Backup Script

This is a small script I’ve written to automate my server-side backups of my blogs. It creates a backup of both the database and the actual WordPress files.

#!/bin/bash

# (C) 2008 Guy Rutenberg - http://www.guyrutenberg.com
# This is a script that creates backups of blogs.

DB_NAME=
DB_USER=
DB_PASS=
DB_HOST=

#no trailing slash
BLOG_DIR=
BACKUP_DIR=


echo -n "dumping database... "
mysqldump --user=${DB_USER} --password=${DB_PASS} --host=${DB_HOST} ${DB_NAME} 
 | bzip2 -c > ${BACKUP_DIR}/${DB_NAME}-$(date +%Y%m%d).sql.bz2
if [ "$?" -ne "0" ]; then
    echo -e "nmysqldump failed!"
    exit 1
fi
echo "done"


echo -n "Creating tarball... "
tar -cjf ${BACKUP_DIR}/${BLOG_DIR##*/}-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.bz2 ${BLOG_DIR}
if [ "$?" -ne "0" ]; then
    echo -e "ntarball creation failed!"
    exit 1
fi
echo "done"

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Hidden Spam Links in WordPress

About a week ago, I decided to look at the HTML source of my blog. I was in total shock to find a spam link hidden there. This is how it looked:

<!-- ocadia theme credits, downloaded from wpthemesfree.com -->
<u id="ocadia" style="display: none">Buy some <a href="http://detoxbuddy.com/categories/191.html">marijuana drug testing</a> products</u>

Ocadia is the name of the theme I’m using, so I guessed the hidden link came from there. I was partially right. The code indeed resided in the index.php file of the theme, but as I later found out, the theme had nothing to do with that. I removed the link and the comment immediately, and went to see if it was distributed this way from Beccary (the author of the theme).
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