Ever since Geoff wrote the small script to backup a WordPress installation automatically, I have wanted to make his script email me with the backups once they are done. So I modified the original script to email a given address with the backup files (the backup files are deleted from the server once the email is sent) I ran into some problems while running the script on my own server because of the sheer size of the backups. I rewrote it to FTP the backups to another server to prevent killing my mail server. However, smaller installations (anything less than 500 megs) would benefit from the email backup and I decided to release the code. You can download the script from here, copy it to a location on your drive that would allow execution, give it execute permissions (chmod 755 backupwp.sh) and then write a small cron entry that runs […]

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 […]