Web Development Insight

I found out my news feed was not working for my WordPress blog news.smartlabsoftware.com.

The feed is supposed to be directed to feedburner. The feedburner feed worked fine. But…

I typed in the feed path: news.smartlabsoftware.com/feed/ and whoa! A 404 not found.

First I blamed the plug-in. Not that.

After some research, I found out there was no .htaccess file in the blog’s root directory. Nor on my copy on my computer. I copied one from another blog site and the feed started working. I used the generic .htaccess that appears when WordPress is installed. I’m surprised WordPress did not recreate it. I’m on WordPress 2.9.

BTW, a nice feed to subscribe to is the FeedMedic alert. It is at the bottom of your home page for feedburner. It alerts you of any feed problems. Nice.

I tried to get a WordPress blog claimed on Technorati and it failed.

One fix suggestion was to remove the trailing slash from the feed and the blog URL. That did not work.

The next suggestion I tried was making the feeds full text instead of summary. That did not work.

Technorati says in its instructions to add the claim code to an existing post and the crawler will find it. Therein lies the problem.

I added the claim code to an existing article. The article updated but not the feed. I ended up writing a text post with the claim code on a separate line. I made sure I could see the code in the feed, the I claimed it. Successfully, I might add.

BTW, my feed goes to Feedburner which should not make a difference.

How to replace the kubric header image with a better image in WordPress 2.7.1.

1. First I replaced the kubricheader.jpg image with my own. I kept the image dimensions the same (760×200 pixels).

2. In header.php I replace the header div with the following:

<div id="header">
<a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>"><div id="headerimg"></div></a>
</div>

This worked very nice. I would rather use a theme but I was in a time crunch.

I am all for saving time. In the old days backing up a WordPress blog meant either using phpAdmin to back up the database or manually logging into each blog and using a backup plug-in.

No more.

Starting with WordPress 2.0 the bundled backup program was taken out and made a separate plug-in. Version 2.0 of the WordPress database backup plug-in takes advantage of WordPress cron program and will email a backup on a regular basis. I use once a week, though the granularity can be once an hour.

Once installed, go into Manage then Backup. On the bottom of the page the time frequency of the backup and the email address is set. Note if you choose once a week, the weekly backups are on the day you hit submit. Since I like getting backups on Saturday I started all my backups on a Saturday.

Note this only backs up the WordPress database; not the WordPress source code.

admin Doug

WordPress released a new version 2.1.1 which is mostly bugfixes and security fixes. Version 2.1.1 includes about 30 bug fixes, mostly minor things around encoding, XML-RPC, the object cache, and HTML code. Here is the file diffs between v2.1 and v2.1.1. (No guarantee comes with this). Download WordPress 2.1.1 upgrade diff. Just overwrite the existing files, upload them, then run the upgrade program.

Read about the upgrade in depth on the WordPress blog.

Doug

One of the banes of blogging is spam comments. Nearly every blogger gets them. One way to reduce comment spam is to turn off accepting comments on older posts. Each blog host will have a different way to do this…if it is possible. Check with your host to see how.

Generally trackbacks are a nuisance since they do not require a login to implement. The poor moderator or comment filter must decide whether these are legitimate or not.

Since shutting off accepting comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks before a specific date is not built-in, WordPress has a comment timeout plug-in that does the job.

Doug