Weblog Tools Collection

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You CAN use your old Wordpress 1.2 index with Wordpress 1.5. Not that it is recommended, nor will the wonderful theme features of Wordpress 1.5 work, but it can be done with relatively little effort. (PS: if you have not noticed, this blog has been upgraded, but is using the old template)

1. Backup your index.php and your wp-layout.css (and all other files and the database, in my opinion)
2. Perform a normal upgrade of your blog
3. Open your old index.php and add the following line to the top of your file, right after the <?php
   Add the line:
   define(’WP_USE_THEMES’, false);
4. Copy your old index.php and layout.css to your blog

Caveats:

• Things might break. Hacks will need to be reapplied and plugins might need reworking, just like any other upgrade
• Your theme might have deprecated functions, variables in it which will need to be weeded out.
• You WILL NOT be able to use any of the Wordpress 1.5 Theme features

The reason for this post is because I see too many Wordpress bloggers that are afraid of upgrading because they believe that their templates will break or be unusable when they upgrade.

Wordpress 1.5 Themes Competition This is always a great idea and I was wondering when Alex and others were going to start it again. There is a Competition Blog. The theme competition will run for four weeks, with all entries being due on March 25th. See the complete list of rules and prizes.

I cannot contribute much, but I would like to add $20 to the prize pot, to be distributed in any way to the winners as determined by Alex. I will contact Alex with the payment details.

This was a LOT of fun the last time with over 110 styles created for this purpose.

I am not sure if that was entirely correct terminology. What I am looking to collect are names, links, sources etc of applications that will let you record your voice to MP3 format, connect to your blog tool (Worpress support preferred), create a post with an enclosure (Wordpress would just require a link, enclosures created automatically), post it via XMLRPC and upload the MP3 via FTP.

A myriad of applications to download and listen to Podcasts are available, then why has this other market not seen much action? If there were such a tool, would anyone be interested in using it (read: I would write one if there was any audience for it)? What about Applescripts? I vaguely remember seeing something about an applescript that would do some or all of the above and more.

Please leave me some suggestions. The more important ones will be added to this post as edits.

Well, WPBlacklist 2.9 with support for WP 1.5 is here The only new feature in this release is the addition of support for running trackbacks and pingbacks thorugh the blacklist. Unfortunately, this release probably will not work with WP 1.2 - I haven’t had the time to test it or to find a means of ensuring backward compatibility. It however does work pretty well against the new trackback spam :p You can download it from the WPBlacklist page

If you are experiencing slow posting in Wordpress 1.2 or below (like I did this morning) or get fsockopen() errors from PHP, it might be related to geourl problems. Look under options->Miscellaneous and uncheck the box that says “Use Geographic Tracking Features”. Try posting again to see if the speed has returned.

Considering the problems I have had with GeoURL recently, I am quite glad this is out of the Wordpress 1.5 core (last I remember from the CVS logs).

This plugin for Wordpress 1.5 allows a blog user to safely and easily share the contents of their “moderation keys” and “blacklist” with other trusted bloggers. This method is a very powerful way of disseminating spam identifiers and has been proven to be very effective in preventing comment spam.

Installation is really simple. Just download the file, unzip it and drop it into the wp-content/plugins directory of your Wordpress 1.5 blog. Activate it in your plugin manager and look under Options->Blacklist Peers. There you will find information on the plugin and the Peering interface.

In simple terms, every blog has a unique “Peer ID” that is used to allow other blogs to exchange blacklist and moderation key information with it. This Peer ID can be discretely distributed among trusted peers. A list of all blogs that are in a Wordpress blog’s “Links”, and have an XFN relationships defined, are displayed on the Peering page. In order to update your own moderation keys and/or your blacklist from any of these blogs, obtain the Peer ID from the blog owner in question (making sure that they have this plugin installed), paste it in and click the appropriate button. Thats all! Their Peer ID is stored in your blog’s database for future use.

Wordpress 1.5 introduced quite a few programming enhancements under the hood (more on that later) and this plugin exploits two of these gems. Some caveats of this plugin include the limitation of peering among Wordpress 1.5 blogs (at this time, that I hope, will change) and the ability to selectively filter peers. These are enhancements that are in the works and will be released soon.

Download the Blacklist Peering Plugin for Wordpress 1.5

[EDIT] For those that want to try it out but do not have another blog to test it with, here is a something for you to test with. Add http://mindfulmusings.net/desidalal to your links as an XFN “friend” or something and use PeerID 0d45d3c81be5ad88a86daeb07e832878 to update both the blacklist and the moderation keys.

SECURITY WARNING: PLEASE RE-DOWNLOAD THIS HACK IF YOU ARE USING IT, A VERY SERIOUS VULNERABILITY HAS BEEN DISCOVERED AND FIXED.

David Merwin has modified my Contextual Search hack for Wordpress to work with Wordpress 1.5. This is now offered as [EDIT] a zip file [EDIT] and installation is quite simple. The feature set remains the same as before.

• Text based “fuzzy” searches within WordPress
• A nice Google like interface which is very customizeable
• Search results with decreasing relevance to search topic
• Trap for words which are less than four letters long, the search then gets routed through the default WP search
• “Next results” button which shows the next 10 (or less) results in relevance

Download Advanced Contextual Search for Wordpress 1.5

Please leave bugs and comments here. I am sure David will check this often.