wordpress

WordPress Update Services

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Thursday, March 11th, 2010
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WordPress' Update Services allow you to let other people know you have updated your website. WordPress automatically notifies popular update services that you've updated your blog by sending an XML-RPC ping each time you create or update a post.

When WordPress contacts these updates services, they process the ping and update the indices (database) with your update. When people are using sites like Technorati or Sphere, people can see your most recent additions and changes.

Most people use Ping-o-Matic which, with just one "ping" from you, will let many other services know that you've updated.

Otherwise you can insert your own ping services in the Settings => Writing => Update Services in the admin panel of your WordPress installation. Below is a list of some of the popular update ping services on the Internet.

XML-RPC Ping Services
http://rpc.pingomatic.com http://api.feedster.com/ping http://api.moreover.com/RPC2 http://api.moreover.com/ping http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2 http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2 http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php http://www.blogsnow.com/ping http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php http://ping.blo.gs/ http://ping.feedburner.com http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/ http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2 http://www.feedsubmitter.com http://blo.gs/ping.php http://www.pingerati.net http://www.pingmyblog.com http://geourl.org/ping http://ipings.com http://www.weblogalot.com/ping

Alternatives
* An alternative is Feed Shark (Blog and Ping), which pings over 60 services for free.
* Feedburner users can use the Feedburner Pingshot service, which will alert most popular ping services.
* If you're interested in manual configuration, have a look at the WordPress compressed ping list.
* Check Vladimir's WordPress Ping List, manually checked and updated
* The Smart Update Pinger (requires registration) and the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer plugins provide future post pings, logging, and avoid sending any ping notification when editing previously published posts. The Smart Update Pinger also provides correct extended ping request handling.

How to Disable WordPress Plugins

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Monday, January 25th, 2010
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I recently used a new WordPress plugin which crashed my whole site, couldn't do a thing and I definitely couldn't access the admin site to disable the new plugin. So to disable the plugin, you need to access your database.

Using a tool like phpMyAdmin or if you're an experienced user you can access the database directly. Go to the 'wp_options' table, find the row 'active_plugins', you will see something similar to the following, depending on the number and type of plugins you have installed: a:1:{i:0;s:19:"akismet/akismet.php";}

That value represents every active plugin on your site, so to quickly disable all your plugins, copy this string to a safe place for backup (just in case), clear the value completely and save. All your WordPress plugins are now deactivated, now you can reactivate all the plugins except the one that was causing you problems.

Getting Permalinks Working in WordPress on IIS

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Tuesday, March 17th, 2009
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This is a frequent question for most IIS users on how to get permalinks to work in WordPress, it's fairly simple really once you know how of course. So the problems are, you're using IIS so using mod_rewrite won't work, you're on a shared server so installing a mod_rewrite alternative for IIS is not available either. You can have URLs with a index.php in them (for example http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php/2009/03/17/getting-permalinks-working-in-wordpress-on-iis) but they're pretty ugly looking and doesn't fit into the URL standards (in other words, it's just nasty).

WordPress Codex has a very useful page about working with permalinks, there's one solution that uses 404 error pages, however when you look at what it does it's very slow and again very nasty. The 404 error solution makes the server try to find the page, it doesn't exist so the server directs the user to the 404 error page, the 404 error page then does it's own working out to figure out where the user should be going, and then it would make it's own HTTP to the correct URL.

This example would work great if only it didn't make a HTTP, so what can we do with this example to make it more efficient.

  1. <?php
  2.    $qs = $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'];
  3.    $pos = strrpos($qs, '://');
  4.    $pos = strpos($qs, '/', $pos + 4);
  5.    $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] = substr($qs, $pos);
  6.    $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
  7.    include('index.php');
  8. ?>

* Put the above 404 error script in the base of your WordPress directory.

* Set your site's 404 Error Page to the file above

* Setup your permalinks in WordPress -> Options -> Permalinks

Because it's including the index.php file into the script, it's utilising the functionality that is already present in WordPress.

Resources
* Pretty WordPress Permalinks on IIS
* WordPress Codex Permalinks
* 404 Error Solution

New WordPress > New Design

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Thursday, April 17th, 2008
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I've recently updated WordPress (the software that drives this blog that you're looking at) and I must admit I'm not too fond of the new administration site. However besides the 'look' and 'feel' of the administration site the rest of the features are pretty cool, and to adapt some of these new features I'll have to redesign the blog (the part you see).

So over the next couple of weeks I'm going to be working closely with Freehill Media to develop a new design for the blog that will also be able to use the new WordPress features. If anyone has any suggestions to what they want to see on my blog, or what they want created for their own blog, drop me a comment below.

New WordPress > New Design

Comments

Thursday, April 17th, 2008
Tags: , , , , , , ,

I've recently updated WordPress (the software that drives this blog that you're looking at) and I must admit I'm not too fond of the new administration site. However besides the 'look' and 'feel' of the administration site the rest of the features are pretty cool, and to adapt some of these new features I'll have to redesign the blog (the part you see).

So over the next couple of weeks I'm going to be working closely with Freehill Media to develop a new design for the blog that will also be able to use the new WordPress features. If anyone has any suggestions to what they want to see on my blog, or what they want created for their own blog, drop me a comment below.