bobpeers -> blog

The title says it all. This page describes how to do it and to stop the wp_posts table filling up with multiple copies of the same post.

I only recently discovered that when I upgrade my Diskstations firmware my SSH settings are wiped out. This includes the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file plus the certificate located at /root/.ssh/.

It’s not like I upgrade the firmware that often but it’s annoying that I have to go through this procedure every time I do.

I see the latest firmware also has an enable SSH option but I’d really like to see this expanded into a full SSH interface, allowing for different ports, not allowing password logins, certificate generation etc.

Wordpress Directory Permissions

While I was upgrading my blog to Wordpress 2.6 I noticed some strange files in my upload directory. As suggested in the Wordpress codex my upload directory permissions were set to be world writeable (777) since this was required my my web host but it seems that someone has exploited this hole and uploaded files there. On top of that they then get linked by Google so searches on my site show content from the uploaded pages.

I’ve since disabled the Wordpress upload capability by changing the directory permissions and I advise you to do the same. This page echoes my sentiments well.

After initially using the Digg 3 Column theme I decided to go for a more minimalistic theme. Inline with my main site having virtually no images I decided an image free theme would be best.

As a bonus this means faster page loads and smaller bandwidth on my web host. I also just like the simplicity of the new theme, it gives far more priority to the text which after all is what a blog is all about.

After some searching I found the White as Milk theme which then led me to Skimmed Milk, my current theme.

I use a XHTML 1.1 Doctype on my main site so I decided to try the same with my blog. It was actually surprisingly easy to do (including serving the page as Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml) and just required some minor edits of the functions.php file in the theme folder.

For my own sake I like the fact that in Mozilla browsers pages completely break if you send invalid markup using this content type, at least they are easy to notice and fix. I’m also so used to writing pages that conform to a XHTML 1.1 Doctype that most of my pages validate first time.

To be honest up until I started this blog I knew very little about blogging software. Sure I had heard of MoveableType, Wordpress and Blogger but as far as which was best for me and how they actually worked I was clueless.

I knew I wanted a few things from the start.

1. GPL Licensed
2. Hosted on my own host.
3. Running on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)
4. Fairly easy to install
5. Extensible and hackable if I want to make my own changes.

I try to use free software whenever possible these days. My laptop is actually a dual boot windows XP Professional / Fedora 8 machine but I can honestly say that I boot into Windows less and less. The last time was probably a couple of months ago when I had to develop something work related requiring Office 2003.

I wanted to host my own site just because I like the flexibility this affords. Domains are very cheap these days and hosting is also cheap, especially if you don’t require huge bandwidth or space. This way I get to write my own htaccess file and change the way the host works as I see fit.

It had to be LAMP because I run a development server on my laptop with the same setup so it’s great for me to install the same software locally and test with different setups. Also if I make more radical changes to the code I don’t break things on the main site (even though this sometimes happens when I screw up, usually making chages too late in the evening!.

Easy to install just because even though my main site is all coded by me in PHP I didn’t feel l ike spending ages reading how to use the software first. I’d rather install, use, and then learn more about it over time and if I feel like delving deeper to make code changes then I can do so at a later date.

It seemed after some research that Wordpress fit all these needs and I’m glad I made this choice. Installing was a breeze, it probably took me 20 minutes and that was going slowly to make sure I didn’t miss a step. I think if I had to install it again it would take 10 minutes at most.

If anything there’s too much choice when it comes to extensibity. With over 1,600 official themes and nearly 1,500 plugins listed trying to find exactly what you want (especially when as a newbie you’re not sure what plugins you might want)is pretty difficult. As a result I’m starting off slowly with only a few plugins to stop comment and trackback spam, probably my two biggest worries about blogging.

The biggest change for me is letting go and relying on plugins written by other people where I’m not really sure how they work. After developing my own site and knowing the code backwards it’s a strange feeling to suddenly be just a user of sortware and not a developer. Still it’s either this or reinventing the wheel so I guess I’ll have to get used to it.