This was a particularly annoying error message that was occurring for one of my legacy plugins that I refuse to get rid of. There are a lot of sites that indicate the problem is with a failed upgrade or misnamed database tables,but for me it was simply an issue with an old plugin and wasn’t happening anywhere else.

My fix was to edit the plugin file and change instances of admin_head to admin_menu . It’s apparently just a compatibility issue with newer WP versions.

Quick quiz: What does a hosting provider do when they know they’ve messed up and don’t want to deal with the fallout?

You apparently blame WordPress.

Don’t get me wrong here – being behind the scenes of server management for a webhosting company makes you the target of a lot of accusations.  And yes, most of the time when a user’s site gets hacked it’s their own damn fault. But in this case, Network Solutions is apparently trying to push their issues off on WordPress because they don’t want to admit they f***cked up.

Well, WordPress is pissed.  I logged into my dashboard today and the first thing I see in my news feed is:

A web host had a crappy server configuration that allowed people on the same box to read each others’ configuration files, and some members of the “security” press have tried to turn this into a “WordPress vulnerability” story.

To highlight the best part:

I’m not even going to link any of the articles because they have so many inaccuracies you become stupider by reading them.

P.S. Network Solutions, it’s “WordPress” not “Word Press.”

Burned.

In short, Network Solutions acknowledged that most of the problem was due to users’ public_html and wp-config.php files being readable by other users on the server – something which could have easily been caused by the users setting the permissions of those files insecurely. But they took a shot in the dark and said that the problem was caused by WordPress putting cleartext database credentials in the wp-config.php file – something that just about every software developer does, as WordPress states:

WordPress, like all other web applications, must store database connection info in clear text. Encrypting credentials doesn’t matter because the keys have to be stored where the web server can read them in order to decrypt the data. If a malicious user has access to the file system — like they appeared to have in this case — it is trivial to obtain the keys and decrypt the information. When you leave the keys to the door in the lock, does it help to lock the door?

Good point. They also went on to say that a properly configured web server will not allow users to access the files of another user, regardless of file permissions. This is why most hosts have switched to using suPHP or phpsuexec, a technology which Network Solutions was apparently left in the dark on. At least now they seem to be taking responsibility for the problem and are attempting to handle it.

I’m also going to state, based on comments in popular blogs from users that don’t know what the hell they’re talking about, that unless someone has access to view the source of a PHP file, they can’t see the database credentials. PHP files are executed server-side, and only their output is sent to the browser. Since the username and password are stored as variables and are not echoed out anywhere, someone simply calling wp-config.php from a browser can’t access your login data.

You’re probably going to find all kinds of fixes on various sites that this story is covered on, but I’m going to give the same advice I do for all my customers that have had sites hacked:

• Change your FTP and MySQL user passwords
• Replace all files on your site from a ‘clean’ backup
• Make sure the software on your site is up to date
• Scan your PC for viruses
• Choose a secure host

Remember that your site can get hacked regardless of who your host is or how secure they are, though your host has to take some level of responsibly for hacks that are caused by their own bad configuration, such as in the case with Network Solutions.

I decided to stop being lazy and get around to those upgrades I needed for my site and server:

- Upgrade PHP to 5.2.5 and Apache 2.2.6

- Upgrade Gallery2 and the WPG2 plugin for WordPress

- Upgrade WordPress to 2.3.1

First, I should admit that I do use the EasyApache installer from WHM, as it has vastly improved to the point where I don’t have to troubleshoot its builds afterwards, nor do I have to go back and reinstall eAccelerator and Suhosin – The current release of cPanel now includes those options and I must say that they have become rather flawless. In other words, it saves me the time of compiling shit by hand when all I have to do is click a few buttons and it’s all done.

Second, I was avoiding the Gallery2/WPG2 upgrade because I remember that the first time I set it up it was hell, and since it was so long ago I didn’t want to go through that again.

Third, since my last WordPress upgrade I had numerous problems with plugins and as a result I had to tweak most of them because their developers hadn’t released an upgrade yet. I finally decided to just suck it in and upgrade, though it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. There are a few things to point out:

- Ultimate Tag Warrior has been discontinued due to WordPress 2.3.1′s native support for tagging. If you’re a UTW user like me, you can still keep your sexy tag cloud by follow these steps:

1. In your admin section, go to Manager > Import and use the UTW import tool to convert your UTW tags to WordPress tags. Then go to Manage > Categories and convert your categories to tags too, if they were linked to UTW before.
2. In your theme code where you normally would display your categories, change the code to <?php the_tags(”); ?> instead of <?php the_categories(”); ?> or whatever it was before.
3. Since your tag cloud is now gone, remove the UTW code and replace it with <?php wp_tag_cloud(”); ?>. You can read more about configuring the tag cloud here.

Since removing UTW and upgrading my plugins and WP, I noticed that my site loads a ton faster though, so I’m overall glad that I finally got around to doing this stuff. If you’re lazy like me and still haven’t upgraded to WP 2.3.1, below is a helpful guide on how to do so:

http://polymathprogrammer.com/2007/10/29/upgrade-wordpress-2pt2-to-2pt3/

Yes, it’s another one of those. It seems that every blog has its own tips for increasing traffic, so I decided to add my own tips that seem to have worked for my site

My first website was bluebutterflyweb.net which was set up back in 2005 for a school project while I was learning PHP and simplistic web design. I eventually made that a personal site, but I didn’t really care about search engine placement because the only traffic I cared to generate was from my friends and colleagues. In August 2006 I changed the domain name to v-nessa.net. It wasn’t until I redesigned my site back in Dec of 2006 that I started caring about people actually finding my site…I only had about 400 unique visitors a month which is obviously equal to pathetic in the eyes of the internet world. Three months later, I look in my stats and see that the traffic has nearly quadrupled since my first launch. Putting the pieces together I came up with a list of what worked for me.

1) Write what people want to read.

The giant cluestick should have slapped you with this one. If you don’t write what people want to read, no one will read. Try to keep your blog focused on a niche…it’s ok to post on other topics occasionally, but try to keep your blog based on a general category to build a good reader database. For instance, you’ll see that my blog is primarily focused on programming and technology, with mild tangents of topics that no one probably cares about.
Also, be original. It’s ok to post on topics that are discussed in other blogs, but add your own twist and you’ll find that people will be less likely to turn their heads. You’ll always want “features” on your site that no one else has so people will have to go to your site to get it. You can offer your own scripts, themes, wallpaper, etc. to encourage people to come to your site.

2) Make it pretty

Have you ever seen a dog so ugly that you wanted to gouge your eyes out with a spoon rather than pet it, even though the owner says it the best dog in the world? I could probably say the same about your blog. No one likes an ugly site, or a site with a gazillion popups. Get yourself a good host, good blogging software, and a nice theme. I’m not saying this just because I’m employed there, but InMotion Hosting would be a good start for all of the above — for as little as $4 per month you get your choice of 5 bloggers that can be installed with a click of your mouse, not to mention a free domain name.

3) Watch your stats

Know where your traffic is coming from. I use AWstats on my server so I can see exactly how most people are getting to my site, like which search engine terms they are using, who’s linking to me, etc. I’ll occasionally see a crapload of search hits for a topic that I didn’t even write about…this lets me know what people are searching for and I’m therefore more likely to write on it because I know that people want to read it. It’s also helpful to know which sites are linking to yours so you can continue to keep tabs and possibly create even more traffic from that site to yours.

4) Search engines are your friend

This one should come second in the “duh” list, and it’s possibly the hardest point to write on in a post like this. I’m not going to lie — getting a good placement in search engines is not easy for some people, but if you don’t get listed no one will find you. There are a lot better resources out there that can elaborate more on this topic, but here are the key points:

- Check your code – You should make sure that the coding of your site will allow search engine spiders to properly crawl your site, meaning that your HTML should be clean and properly formatted. Using professional blogging software like WordPress can eliminate your need to worry about this.

- Use META tags, descriptions, and anything else you can squeeze in there – If you do a ‘view source’ on my site you’ll see that I have a variety of keywords set up. META tags are still valuable to most search engines, so don’t ignore them.

- Use SEF URLs – Search Engine Friendly URLs are formatted in a way that will allow search engines to find them. A link that looks like this will probably make Yahoo want to commit suicide:

http://domain.com/index.php?page=4&id=something&sess=123456778909

Try to make your URL’s formatted in a way that search engines understand:

http://domain.com/pages/page

If you are using software that generates dynamic URL’s like in my first example, you can create a rewrite rule in your .htaccess. Most software developers of blogging engines have additional plugins or re-formatted .htaccess rules that you can use.

You’ll also want to name the URLs approriate for the type of post. For instance, if you were writing a post on sex and candy, a url extension of …/sex-and-candy/ would probably score higher than ../index.php?page=123456.

- Use Sitemaps – I can’t stress how important this one is. A sitemap is just how it sounds — a map of your site. They are very easy to make, and can be submitted to Google or Yahoo in seconds. There are several sites out there who offer to generate them for you at no cost, but if you are using blogging software there may be a plugin available for you. For Wordress I use this.

5 ) Get listed

There are hundreds of blog directories out there, and the more that you can get into the better. If you go to the ‘Stuff’ section of my sidebar you’ll see several places that you can register your blog. This is called “Social Networking.”

6) Let people link

You should be somewhat reliant on other bloggers to help you, whether it be on their sites or in a blog directory. If you make this easy you’ll find that your visitors will actually do it, so add some links at the bottom of your posts to allow your visitors to instantly add your blog to social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, Technorati, and Digg. I use Sociable, which allows you to add over 50 different links to popular directory sites, even though I only chose the most popular.

7) Socialize

This is a tip I kind of found by accident, when I started posting on my friends’ blogs and random forums. When people read my comments they clicked on my site too. Forums can be a little trickier, but you’ll want to try to link back to your site as much as possible without spamming. Put your URL in your profile and signature, and try to link back to your site if you have relevent information to share. For example, I recently posted my Ruby on Rails tutorial on the cPanel forums, and suddenly I’m getting 100 more visitors a month from people learning how to install Ruby. Do use caution with this method though, as some sites frown upon users linking to their own sites.

And I use the word “released” very loosely. Yes, I just upgraded my blog to use WordPress 2.2 after this guy made it sound delicious. No, I don’t regret it, but I do think it would be best to wait for a bugfix. I shall start with the positives:

- It’s optimized a bit more to help your site load faster. This may or may not be noticeable to you, but it probably is to your webhost

- It’s harder to break your site by enabling a botched plugin. I tried to enable Staticized-Reloaded and I got what I interpret as the “WordPress Screen of Death”:

This is also a shame because this happens to be one bad-ass plugin.

Now for the bad, which outweighs the good:

- Don’t be surprised if your plugin database disappears. From some odd reason, WordPress could only find it after I created a new plugins folder and copied over my plugin files again….and yes, I had to re-enable all 30 of them.

- WP-Cache no longer works (at the time of this writing), and you’ll find that enabling it will cause some strange behavior on your blog. Oddly enough it also caused my plugin database to be erased yet again

- TinyMCE (the WYSIWYG editor) malfunctions, esp. in Firefox when trying to use certain functions.

- You may need to tweak your theme a bit. I had to make several code modifications to my sidebar and header files.

- Your boobs might shrink in size. Oops, wait…that’s what happens when you stop taking birth control.

Anywho, those of you who are thinking on upgrading, be prepared to spend a few minutes messing with your site and testing your plugins and such. It may be a good idea to wait for a bugfix, which by WordPress history will probably be out within the next few days.

If you haven’t noticed that my site’s been down for the last hour, it’s because I activated this mailing plugin that completely messed up my whole site to the point where I couldn’t even log in to deactivate it. It eventually came to me that if I move the plugin file it would de-activate automatically and poof, my website came right up. I guess my boss was right when he said I tend to be over-technical and miss the easy things.

Anywho, I’ve messed around with a lot of plugins and I’ve composed a tiny list of ones that you would probably be better off not installing. Some of these result in what Dan would call “the Internet version of ‘the clap’”

On the reverse, if you want to see the plugins that I recommend, you can view my post on the 13 Sexiest WordPress Plugins.

Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Pro

So much for trying to be internationally friendly. I was hoping that making my site available in other languages would boost this site’s popularity to readers in other countries, but instead it boosted the frequency of Apache crashes on my VPS.

WP-ShortStat

There are better ways to get optimized stats for your site, like using Counterize or WordPress Reports. I tried WP-ShortStat and all it did was slow my site loading by at least a minute, during which time I was able to pull a quickie with my ex and even smoke that cigarette afterwards.

No-WWW

Matt, oh Matt….what were you thinking? (And why didn’t you call me last night?) It took me a few lines in my .htaccess to do what this plugin does — and it doesn’t slow my site.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.website.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.website.com/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/[^\.]+[^/]$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/ [R=301,L]

Permalink Redirect

This is yet another plugin that can easily consume up to 3 seconds of loading time just to do something that you .htaccess can perform in an instant.



I decided to post a list of the WordPress plugins that I’ve found to be the most useful, a majority of which I use on my own site.
To see a list of plugins to avoid, see my other post.

1) WP Google Sitemap Generator

This one is by far the most important if search engine rankings are important to you. Once you install the plugin, it will automatically generate the sitemap.xml file that Google and Yahoo use to efficiently index your site. While I’ve always had good search engine rankings, my traffic doubled in January after adding this plugin, with triple the hits stemming from Google searches.

Download from Author

2) Adsense-Deluxe

If you’re looking for a better way to display your Google Adsense ads, this plugin may be benficial to you. You can store several different types of Google ad units, then call them by adding a simple HTML tag to your posts, varying with each different unit that you store.

Download from Author

3) Akismet

I can’t tell you how annoying comment spam is, and how many I find in my moderation queue every week. Akismet is pretty good at identifying spam comments and keeping them from bombarding your blog…it also ‘learns’ to identify spam based on what you tell it.

You should already have this plugin as it comes by default with WordPress, but if not you can download it here. You will need a WordPress API as well, which you can obtain here.

4) Ultimate Tag Warrior

Ever envy those sexy tag clouds you see on other blogs? You can always make your own, but for WordPress, Ultimate Tag Warrior is the best way to create your own customizable tag cloud. It can be implemented into your site’s sidebar with one of the many simple codes provided, and it automatically updates every time you add a new tag or category.

Download from Author

5) Sociable

This plugin easily allows your visitors to add you to over 60 social networking sites with the a click of a button. You can customize which sites you wish to include in the selection, as well as where the list appears. You can see an example of this below each of my posts.

Download from Author

6) WP-Cache

Working for a webhosting company that spends a major focus on server monitoring, we send out a lot of notices to customers whos WordPress sites are just killing the server. WordPress itself is lightening fast, but factor in all the plugins, images, and traffic, you’ve got yourself one slow-ass site. One of our system admins started recommending WP-Cache to customers, and it seems to have really helped both on the server end and the speed of the customer’s website itself. It basically does just what the name suggests — it caches commonly-accessed pages to avoid excessive and repetitive use of the database.

Download from Author

7) SRG Clean Archives

If you have a large website with a lot of articles that you want visitors to be able to find quickly and easily, you might want to implement an archives page. SRG Clean Archives will generate a pretty list of all your articles organized by month, and allow you to display them as a separate page or on an existing on. If you need an example, you can view my archives page.

Download from Author

8) Counterize

This plugin allows you to display tons of different stats on any part of your site with a simple HTML tag. You can choose which ones you want to display, as well as adjust the context in which they are shown. While I stopped using this plugin in favor of writing my own (for dignity purposes), it would look something like how I have my hits displayed in my sidebar.

Download from Author

9) Download Manager

If you are offering downloads on your site, whether it be themes, plugins, scripts, etc., you might find it valuable to track how many download you are getting. By adding a simple URL extension to your download target, you can have the Download Manager track and log who is downloading your files. You can also control who is allowed to download them, and how often.

Download from author

10) WPG2/WP-Forum

Nothing really annoys me more than when someone adds a gallery to their site that links off into something that does not look like part of the site at all. When people have galleries, shopping carts, etc. that are all linking to parts run by different web applications, the end result is the appearance of an Angelina Jolie-type family. It just doesn’t fit together. WPG2 is a wordpress-Gallery2 bridge that is used to display images from a separate Gallery2 installation within a single page. Similarly, if you are using forums you’ll find the WP-Forum plugin to be a tasteful way to add phpBB-like functionality to your site. If you have other software that you’re in favor of using, you could probably find a WordPress bridge for that as well.

Download WPG2 from Author

Download WP-Forum from Author

11) Subscribe to Comments

Wouldn’t it be nice to know when someone responds to one of your comments on one of the bazillion blogs you read? This plugin will give your visitors an option to subscribe to comments, and receive an email when someone posts a new one. You can also see who is subscribing to comments on your blog.

Download from Author

12) Fancy Pullquotes

This obviously isn’t the most vital and functional plugin, but it can add a whole lotta sexy to your blog posts by pulling out select words and placing them as large blockquotes off to the site. The version I’m using is slightly modified, but you can download the original from here.

13) wpPHPmailer

What most people don’t know is that the vast majority of php software will use the mail() function by default which sends mail out as the php user “nobody.” Nevertheless, this function has now become the feature most commonly blocked by major hosting providers. The reason we started blocking php mail() is that a customer’s software can become exploited and send out thousands of emails past our regular hourly sending limit because exim doesn’t limit the mail sent from the php user “nobody.”

On another note, some email providers are now blocking mail that comes from ‘nobody’ or marking it as spam, which can also cause your mail server to be blacklisted. Try sending yourself a message from your WordPress admin panel then look at the email headers when it is received. Most likely you’ll see the original sender as nobody@yourmailserver.com.

phpMailer is a popular php-based mailing agent that has been tweaked into an easy-to-use WordPress plugin to allow you to send mail via SMTP. I highly recommend using this as an alternative to the native php mail handling of WordPress, whether your host blocks nobody mail or not.

Download from Author

So I found out today from Paul that wordpress.org got hackedwordpress.org got hacked and their new 2.1.1 release is tainted. Yes, I said tainted. Someone hacker got down and dirty with the wordpress.org servers and altered the code in the new 2.1.1 release that apparently allows for a remote PHP file execution…then bundled it up for everyone to download and infect their servers with.

So now this means that I have to back up my site, disable my 20-some wordpress plugins, delete my files, download the new version, put the files back in place, then watch as my life slowly fades away. Damn Paul for paying attention to the tidbits of info the wp-admin dashboard.

Read the full article here

To my fellow bloggers, please  upgrade your WordPress installation to v2.1.2. Ahhhh, now doesn’t that feel better?

Well it seems that everyone has one, and I’d have to admit that a tag cloud is a good way to spice up your site a little bit. I first thought of this when setting up a friend’s site… he wasn’t using a CMS like WordPress or anything that I could find a quick tag cloud plugin for, so I figured I could probably just make my own. Well, I did and now I shall share it.

This tutorial will show you how to set up a simple tag cloud using PHP and MySQL, with a little bit of Ajax effects
Before we get started, take a quick look at the sample cloud.

Getting Started

The server requirements to make a tag cloud are minimal. You will need a new or existing MySQL database and PHP4+. It would also be extremely helpful to have something like phpMyAdmin or a MySQL command prompt to create the table.

Creating the Table

The first thing you need to do is create the database table. You can do this in either a new or existing database:

CREATE TABLE tags (
id int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
PRIMARY KEY(id),
tag varchar(100) NOT NULL,
count int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0'
);

I ran this query via command line, but it may be easier to use phpMyAdmin or whatever database tool you use. Basically, this is a simply MySQL command that creates the ‘tags‘ table with three columns: id, tag, and count. The id table is being set to auto-increment, meaning that every time a new entry is added the number will go up by 1. Depending on how you are implementing your tag cloud, you may want to remove this value if you have trouble adding entries.

Creating the Cloud
Now for the actual code itself. In this section I will break down the script that fetches the tags from the database and creates a pretty tag cloud. At the end you will find a full sample script that you can use for reference.

$db_host = "localhost";
$db_user = "username";
$db_pass = "password";
$db_name = "cloud";

mysql_connect($db_host, $db_user, $db_pass) or die(mysql_error());
mysql_select_db($db_name);

This is the section where you define a few variables and use them to connect to the database. You wil obviously need to input your database name, username, and password in order to allow the script to connect.

function tag_info() {
$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM tags GROUP BY tag ORDER BY count DESC");
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
$arr[$row['tag']] = $row['count'];
}
ksort($arr);
return $arr;
}

This is the function that grabs the tag information from the database and displays everything in the tag column as an array. Now to build the cloud:

function tag_cloud() {

$min_size = 10;
$max_size = 30;

$tags = tag_info();

$minimum_count = min(array_values($tags));
$maximum_count = max(array_values($tags));
$spread = $maximum_count - $minimum_count;

if($spread == 0) {
$spread = 1;
}

$cloud_html = '';
$cloud_tags = array();

foreach ($tags as $tag => $count) {
$size = $min_size + ($count - $minimum_count)
* ($max_size - $min_size) / $spread;
$cloud_tags[] = '<a style="font-size: '. floor($size) . 'px'
. '" class="tag_cloud" href="http://www.v-nessa.net/index.php?s=' . $tag
. '" title="\'' . $tag . '\' returned a count of ' . $count . '">'
. htmlspecialchars(stripslashes($tag)) . '</a>';
}
$cloud_html = join("\n", $cloud_tags) . "\n";
return $cloud_html;

}

?>

Take special note of this code:

class="tag_cloud" href="http://www.v-nessa.net/index.php?s=' . $tag

In this section I’m basically telling the script to append the tag name at the end of a link…in this case it’s my search path, meaning that clicking on, for instance, the ruby tag will take you to this link:

http://www.v-nessa.net/index.php?s=ruby

This will just take you to a search for the term “ruby” on my site, but you can specify how you want the tag name to be incorporated into a link. For instance:

class="tag_cloud" href="http://www.v-nessa.net/tags/' . $tag

The above example shows the primary purpose of a tag cloud, which will take the tag pulled from a database and pull all articles under that tag. An example of this is on the menu of my site, to the right.

The last part of the script should be the style sheet, which will direct how the cloud will look:

<style type="text/css">
.tag_cloud
{padding: 3px; text-decoration: none;
font-family: verdana; }
.tag_cloud:link { color: #FF66CC; }
.tag_cloud:visited { color: #9900FF; }
.tag_cloud:hover { color: #FF66CC; background: #000000; }
.tag_cloud:active { color: #6699FF; background: #000000; }
</style>

To Display the tag cloud, you just need to insert this code into your web page (or sidebar):

<div id="wrapper">
<?php print tag_cloud(); ?>
</div>

And there you go…your very own tag cloud. You’ll of course need to populate the table with your own tags, ids and count numbers, or plug this script into your blog to fetch the tags from its database.

You can find a full copy of the script here.