I worked for a while and made an Awstats installer for 1and1 web hosting clients. It only works for the business and developer accounts, because it needs to create a cron job to read the logs every night at midnight. I have the feeling that most people use the cheaper “Home” account.
It only works in a 1and1 environment because I hard coded the log format that 1and1 uses. I could redo it to work on more standard linux platforms, but sites that have CPanel don’t need it.
I wish I had checked the cron thing before I started writing the programs.
I wonder if there is a widget that only displays to people coming in through Google or Bing search. I could make a list of similar posts based on the search items in the search.
So far my test Wordpress MU site gets nothing but Spam. I can tell if it is spam before the blog gets very far, but the registration is a klugey process. I want to have users fill out all their information and some extra data. I then want to see a list of these with the ability to accept or reject a blog. I also want to be able to send a personalized rejection letter explaining why their blog was rejects.
I have started the plugin and I’ll announce here when it is installed in case anyone wants to see how it works.
I installed the new Wordpress version of Buddypress. Early versions required WPMU, but the new one works in straight WP. I also downloaded the Template helper plugin. I got it working on a couple of blogs. I had to tweak the template additions to work with my templates, but otherwise it seemed to work.
There were strange bugs, such as not being able to create a new group once one was made.
I did not work at all on one of my blogs that was based on nothing more than a bastardized Kubrick theme.
I have uninstalled the two plugins and I will be watching for more stable updates.
I downloaded and ran a few plugins that were supposed to do threat scans and I was not that pleased. I wrote my own plugin that scans for the problems that I found in a blog that I just cleaned up. It works well, but it is not ready for prime time. I’d like to make it user friendly, perhaps with a way to edit the bad code, before I release it.
I wrote a plugin that notifies me of PHP errors in my WordPress sites. I set it initially to send everything up to E_NOTICE and received over 500 messages in two minutes.
If you want to use this, the first thing you want to do is turn on PHP5. Wordpress will work with PHP4 in most cases, but it generates a huge number of notices, especially where it uses HTML_entities functions. Whoever wrote these parts of WordPress was not aware of the various flavors in these functions.
I also received a large number of reports that an index was not found. The code should use an if (array_key_exists(..)) whenever it accesses an array, even $_GET or $_POST. The E_NOTICE is thrown, slowing things down and adding to the errors reported.
I found large numbers of errors in supposedly “premium” themes. They consistently refer to variables which have not been defined – perhaps they did exist in older versions of Wordpress.
I found an error in one of my own plugins. It tried to load HTTP_REFERER, without checking to see it it was in the server array. I need to fix that, even though it does not show an error, I should fix the E_NOTICE being thrown.
If you use this, turn it on for 30 seconds and then turn it off. If it is a new without traffic, then hit the site once or twice, exercising the code and then quickly deactivate the plugin.
I wrote a plugin for Steve this morning that took less than 5 minutes to write and check. It was 3 lines of core code and a few lines to load the action. Most of this was cut and paste.
The plugin forces comments open every time a post is published. Steve’s system somehow has lost the ability to open comments.
He will be giving me access to the site and I will do a total upload of a fresh wordpress install to see if that helps. Steve as you remember was badly hacked.
He is also having trouble with image uploads. I will work on that also.
I doubt if anyone else needs such a brute force effort to open a post to comments, but if you want it, I’ve got it.
It turns out my open in new window plugin was easily translated to bbPress. I had to change only one line. The javascript loads in the head now because I could not find the hook for the footer, but it works just fine.
Just put the files in your my-plugins dir and it is done. It works with javascript so all external links (except those in iframes) are opened in a new window. Leaves the internal links alone.
I made css zen garden as a test blog to see how it does.
Mostly it fails due to fixed size blocks for text that does not have enough room for blog entries. Interesting stuff though. I am pretty sure that www.csszengarden.com will block me for stealing their bandwidth once a few people try this.
http://www.blogseye.com/_test/
I committed the 1.30 version of the Permalink Finder to the repository this morning. This was my first plugin and one of the most useful. I added links to the 404 error pages and referrers so that you can check why a page is not being found. I also added the uninstall routine which will get rid of the modest amount of data the thing collects.
There is no urgent reason to update other than to get rid of the red mark on your admin page.
