wordpress

The Bad Behavior plugin for WordPress is great, it denies spambots even seeing your blog before they try to spam you. But there are four specific issues to be aware of with Bad Behavior 2.0.43.

4 conflicts when using the Bad Behavior plugin

1) On WordPress with WP-Super Cache plugin

Bad Behavior must be enabled in WP-Super Cache’s configuration in order to protect PHP Cached or Legacy Cached pages. Bad Behavior cannot protect mod_rewrite cached (Super Cached) pages.

mod-rewrite is the fastest and most efficient way to cache the pages. So if you Super Cache your pages make sure you’ve configured everything correctly or don’t bother using BB. Alternatively if you want both WPSC and BB you must select Advanced options to use PHP or Legacy caching. Then you must configure the WP Super Cache plugins options too.

Tags: plugin, wordpress

Update:21 July 2008 Don’t upgrade to 2.6! wait until 2.6.1 as there are permalink, login and posting problems. Of course this is the first time in years I haven’t taken complete backups before upgrading

I thought I should mention that I’ve upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.6.

In this day and age of fast moving security updates it is important that webmasters keep their software current. I’ve had a few old and ignored test sites hacked in the past that were not running WP, but the fact remains that security flaws are ofter found in ancient versions of software.

The World Wide Web is littered with the bones of abandoned and inactive sites. Often these then get hacked.

Tags: upgrade, wordpress

Frequently Asked Questions over at WordPress.com has a brilliant piece on backups for bloggers.

Several years ago I had to reconstruct WealthEsteem.org after catastrophic hardware failure. Luckily Google had begun indexing it so I didn’t lose any posts. But rebuilding the comments proved too hard.

Matt and his team offer the brilliant advice of subscribing to the RSS feeds of your own site as a way of maintaining backups. Subscribe both the posts and the comments feed via either a web- or desktop-based aggregator. I already subscribe to my blogs to keep an eye on how it looks to my syndicated readers, now I have another reason.

Thanks for this brilliant but overlooked tip.

Tags: backup, rss, wordpress