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).

I need a few good people to help beta test something I have been working on. Some sticky requirements include the need to be somewhat available through email or on IM or IRC to provide live feedback and a working WordPress 1.5 install to play with. I foresee testing times between 6 and midnight tonight, times are EST. Please leave a comment or email me if you are willing to participate and thank you if you are.

Web Spam Summit: More precisely, a web spam squashing summit is being organized by Technorati and hosted at Yahoo! Sunnyvale. I could have exchanged some valuable insight and information but am stuck here on the East side of the island! Oh the desire to move to the West! 🙂

I updated the original subscribe plugin, recently, using the database to store the subscriber list instead of a text file, as well as to require confirmation of all (un)subscription requests. It includes a management page to install the database tables, and to manage the list of subscribers. Check out the Subscribe2 beta announcement for the download link.

What is an AdSense Jail?: Every found yourself in one? I know I have! [EDIT] Let me explain a little. For those of you that advertise on your blogs, have you ever gotten into the situation where one fine morning your blog starts to generate a substantially large sum of revenue because of something you wrote (I mean substantial, really) and then you update your blog and the revenue dissappears as suddenly as it appeared? Once this happens to you more than a couple of times, and you stumble upon one of those again, you are afraid to update the blog till the deluge dissappears. This is what I term a “Jail”. The idea came to me from PRI. They have a bunch of recorded shows on a CD called “Driveway Moments” where you’re driving home, listening to a story on your local NPR station. Suddenly, you find yourself in […]

Jeremy had posted a small tutorial on creating the “possibly related stuff” search for Movable Type blogs and I converted it into a small plugin that can be downloaded here. The plugin is really simple and it adds a link to stuff that is possibly related. I dont know how useful it will be for everyone, information is always good. Please post bugs here. To install just copy to your wp-content/plugins folder and activate. This blog has a link generated for every permalinked page for testing.

The One Click Backup Plugin for WordPress 1.5 and above is ready. I have incorporated all the work done by Ryan Boren and Bob Apthorpe into it. Some of the added features of this version includes: A tweaked and modified PEAR/Tar interface that does not require passthru for file backup. Now users with passthru disabled and users on Windows systems can safely use this plugin. Security suggestions of Bob have been added to the readme, so please read through those carefully. The MySql backup is done through code and not through passthru. Again, passthru deficient systems and windows systems will benefit. Simple plugin install, no code to be modified. Just copy the files around, create a directory and activate the plugin. Backup folder will NOT get recursively backed up. PS: Passthru is not needed in this version, no special tools needed on server to perform backup. Download the plugin zip […]

I am incredibly impressed with the latest Gamma of WordPress 1.5 in spite of being very biased. I started a new blog today with it and it was a very satisfying experience, much like I had felt the first time I started a blog on b2 (Thanks Michel). I was so impressed, that I would like to share some of my pleasures with my readers. I am not new to WordPress, nor am I new to WordPress 1.5 but I had not started a new blog with the intention of making it public for sometime now. I had forgotten how much fun it can be. With the dazzling array of eye catching templates and themes to choose from, I was in heaven. I downloaded one that I liked, uploaded it to the themes folder, switched designs, changed permissions to allow me to modify templates on the fly, modified the header […]