jonlee.ca

I apologize for not making any posts this weekend but I’ve had quite the busy weekend! Here’s everything I accomplished (in addition to routine backups and such):

Formatted my Computer
This took the longest of all my tasks, and I couldn’t really do anything until this was done. I like the feeling of a clean brand new installation so I figured it was a good a time as any to do some in-house cleaning. I contemplated installing Ubuntu since my need for Dreamweaver is no longer an issue but decided against it because I don’t have enough time these days to twiddle with hacks and workarounds to get everything to work. Perhaps next reformat.

Upgraded WordPress from 2.1.2 to 2.2
I held off on this upgrade for a while due to security concerns but it seems like those have been addressed. The new version plugs a few security holes and comes with a few new features like built-in widget support and plug-in protection (meaning it won’t let you activate plug-ins that will break your blog – great for plug-in development!). Full changelog is here.

Updated all WordPress Plug-ins
Surprisingly, not many of the plug-ins I used had updates available but those that did, I upgraded.

Installed Bad Behavior Plug-in
Akismet blocks almost every single piece of spam that gets thrown onto this site but it also blocks a few legitimate comments, especially if they contain multiple links. Anyway, I got tired of checking my Akismet filter scrolling through thousands of spam comments to find one or two legitimate ones.

In order to alleviate this problem, I considered installing a captcha (those things that make sure you’re not a spam bot by making you enter some jumbled characters in an image). However, I didn’t want to make it more difficult for users to comment so I opted for another solution: the Bad Behavior plug-in.

What this plug-in does is it blocks access to your site by all malicious sources like e-mail harvesters, illegitimate crawlers and of course, spam bots. After installing it for less than a day, it blocked over 500 access attempts. Hopefully it won’t give any false positives so let me know if something isn’t working properly.

Oh yeah, make sure you read the installation instructions carefully. If you use wp-cache you’ll need to implement a small workaround to protect your cached pages.

Changed Domain Registrars of all my .ca Domain Names
All my .com domain names are consolidated with Namecheap but their .ca registration is quite expensive nor do they offer a WHOIS privacy option for Canadian domains. Hence, I transferred all my .ca domain names to Namespro.ca for about $10/year each (after their Father’s Day coupon – FathersDay2007 valid until July 1st). They offer WHOIS privacy protection for a one time fee of $7 and it applies to all the domains in your account.

Removed Broken Image Links
Image references from CSS files are invisible meaning if an image can’t be found, no error is given — no red X like a broken image link in your content. As I found out from mediatemple’s GPU charts, these missing images can put a bit of strain on your server if your content management system (WordPress in this case) can’t find them and essentially loads your entire 404 page. You can detect these with several Firefox extensions (FireBug for example).

Moved all my primary Web Development tools to USB
Following my own instructions for a portable web development USB drive and portable Eclipse installation, I created the drive with all the documents and tools I need for web development. That way I could keep my own Windows installation as clean as possible. Of course, everything on the USB is backed up on to my hard drive every day and a secondary back up onto the web server every week in case the flash drive goes missing or stops functioning. I’m considering packaging all the apps I use together into a single “Portable Web Development� download but I reckon it would be rather large.

Popularity: 2% [?]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 at 9:09 pm and is filed under Personal, Site stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.