New Defensio version released
My anti-spam plug-in of choice, Defensio, gets an update today - moving up to version 1.6. You can download it here.
I’ve been using this plug-in for several months now, initially because I wanted to move away from the WordPress standard Akismet. I’ve never had any issues with it whatsover, and it does everything I want an anti-spam plug-in to do. But I don’t get many comments, spam or otherwise, so it’s perhaps not being put through it’s paces very strenuously. I know that Collin has a different opinion.
This latest update has addressed the issue of visual compatibility with the WordPress 2.5 dashboard and also, according to the Defensio blog, “Many small things were improved and fixed”.
Brief Notes
1. As part of the surveillance nation we now live in, 20,000 cars have had their number-plates scanned as they visited Bluewater shopping centre. Just in case any of them was involved in a crime. God forbid that law-abiding people should be able to go about their daily business without being subject to scrutiny such as this. What were the police expecting to find? A few outstanding parking tickets?
Yet, as with the proposed ID card scheme and the proliferation of CCTV cameras the majority of us seem prepared to sit back and let it happen. The argument that I hear most is “If you’ve not got anything to hide, what does it matter?”. Well, the answer to that is “If I’ve got nothing to hide, why must I be subject to constant surveillance?”. It doesn’t help to stop crime and it doesn’t help to solve crime. It takes police off the streets, because they end up sitting in front of screens all day.
2. Lewis Hamilton wins again! Despite his team making an error of judgement over pit stops, Lewis won the German Formula One Grand Prix and has now pulled slightly clear of his main rivals Felipe Massa and Kimi Raikkonen. The remainder of the season promises to be just as exciting as last year.
3. There’s apparently a scheme in the pipeline to reward surgeons with bonuses when patients don’t die. Surely, that’s supposed to be what they’re trying to achieve anyway? We seem hell-bent on completely screwing up the NHS and this is just the latest in a long line of ‘initiatives’.
XML file too big to import
Part of “Going self-hosted with Wordpress : A Wolfie Guide”
On one of my older posts (Going Self-Hosted with Wordpress) Lisa has asked a question about how to import a larger than 2MB XML file into her new self-hosted WordPress installation, from her existing WordPress.com blog.
The first thing to say is that this is not a WordPress restriction, it is a restriction of the hosting company being used. If you have cPanel loaded on your host, take a look in ‘PHP Configuration’ and you’ll see that ‘upload_max_filesize’ is set to 2MB. (For some hosts this number may be smaller or larger; as always, your mileage may vary). There is a way that you can change this value, although I’ve only managed to make it 8MB on my server. (Before going ahead and making any of the changes that follow, please make sure that you have a working back-up of anything that you can’t afford to lose - just in case. I will not accept any responsibility for anything that goes wrong with your system and make no promises that any of these methods will work for you).
In your public_html directory, there should be a file called .htaccess. This is a small text file that, at least on my server, looks like this:
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress
If you add the line php_value upload_max_filesize 32M just before the final line, then when you go to the import screen you’ll be told that the maximum file size is 8MB. Whether the system will actually allow you to import an 8MB file is a different question and I have not been able to test this. Assuming it does work, once you’ve uploaded the XML file I suggest re-editing the file to take out the alteration.
If that does not work, then as far as I’m aware, you can’t change this setting yourself but your hosting company should be able to change it for you. If they can’t / won’t, then you need to look at a different solution which involves splitting the XML file into several smaller pieces.
Once you’ve got your exported XML file (to get this, from your wp.com dashboard go to ‘Manage’, then click ‘Export’. You get the option to restrict authors, but this won’t apply to most people. WordPress then saves an XML file to your hard-drive), you need to open it up in a text editor. I use TextWrangler - because its free and because it helpfully colour-codes tags, etc - but anything should work, even WordPad. What you’ll see is a huge list of text, with lots of things in tags (which are things like <channel>, <rss>, <item>, etc). All this text is what WordPress will use to reconstruct your blog on your new installation.
But that upload limit is a bit of a pain. I didn’t experience this issue when I moved The New Wolfs Howl because the export file was quite small (even now it’s only 1.4MB) but after a quick search around the forums it seems that this is quite a common problem. Unfortunately, splitting the XML file is not quite as simple as putting the second half of the file in a different document; there are certain things that have to be in each file.
The first thing to do is to work out how many files you need to split the file into. If your upload limit is 2MB and you have an 8MB file, then I would suggest you need to have five files - I know that eight divided by two is four, but I’ve added one to take care of the overlap. That will then give you a rough idea of who much of your file has to be moved each time. For example, my XML file is just over 21,500 lines - so I’d want just over 5,000 lines per file.
Take a look at your XML file and at the top you’ll see there are various items of header code (instructions from WordPress, etc). From the top line of the file (<?xml version=…) to <wp:base_blog_url>http://… needs to be in every file. Scroll right to the bottom of the file and </channel> and </rss> also need to be in every file. So, before any content has gone in, you want an XML file that looks like this:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<!– This is a WordPress eXtended RSS file generated by WordPress as an export of your blog. –>
<!– It contains information about your blog’s posts, comments, and categories. –>
<!– You may use this file to transfer that content from one site to another. –>
<!– This file is not intended to serve as a complete backup of your blog. –>
<!– To import this information into a WordPress blog follow these steps. –>
<!– 1. Log into that blog as an administrator. –>
<!– 2. Go to Manage: Import in the blog’s admin panels. –>
<!– 3. Choose “WordPress” from the list. –>
<!– 4. Upload this file using the form provided on that page. –>
<!– 5. You will first be asked to map the authors in this export file to users –>
<!– on the blog. For each author, you may choose to map to an –>
<!– existing user on the blog or to create a new user –>
<!– 6. WordPress will then import each of the posts, comments, and categories –>
<!– contained in this file into your blog –>
<!– generator=”WordPress/2.5.1″ created=”2008-07-12 05:47″–>
<rss version=”2.0″
xmlns:content=”http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/”
xmlns:wfw=”http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/”
xmlns:dc=”http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/”
xmlns:wp=”http://wordpress.org/export/1.0/”
>
<channel>
<title>Your Blog Title</title>
<link>http://yourblogdomain.com</link>
<description>Your blog descriptions</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:33:37 +0000</pubDate>
<generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5.1</generator>
<language>en</language>
<wp:wxr_version>1.0</wp:wxr_version>
<wp:base_site_url>http://yourdomain.com</wp:base_site_url>
<wp:base_blog_url>http://yourblogdomain.com</wp:base_blog_url>
[this is where the content will go]
</channel>
</rss>
So, now you need to get your content in there. In the first of the XML files, you’ll want to make sure that you include your categories and your tags; these are listed immediately after the <wp:base_blog_url> line. They only need to be included in one file. Then the rest of the file is filled up with content; just look for <item> and </item> tags and cut and paste information between files. Always make sure you only copy complete items, though, otherwise you’ll have an error.
This way of splitting files is a laborious process and will take a fair while, but will work if you do it properly. There are file splitting utilities out there, but I have not tested any of them for effectiveness (or simplicity).
Where are they now?
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a little obsessed with Alexa rankings and their relevance (or lack of it) for measuring a website’s success. Taking a look at their pages for wolfshowl.com this evening, I discovered that I am not the first to own this domain name; according to Alexa’s WayBack Machine, from March 2002 to the end of 2005 wolfshowl.com was a purveyor of “a wide selection of Homemade oils,Lotions,bath salts and Egyptian Perfume Bottles. As well as Bondage apparel, Erotic clothing for men and women. Jewelry of all kinds, and everything you can think of for your New age Supplies. We now sell Adult Pleasure Toys.”
Sounds like it was a much more interesting site back then, doesn’t it?
But I wonder what happened to the previous owners? Did the bottom fall out of the erotic clothing and adult pleasure toy market (surely not), or did they just decide to move on to pastures new? How do you even get into selling that sort of stuff online anyway? (No, really, I’d like to know ‘cos I’m sure there must be some money in it; answers on a postcard to Wolfie Needs More Money, England).
If anyone out there was involved with wolfshowl.com before I took it over in December 2007, drop a comment and let me know what happened.
[Apparently, wolfshowl.com now attracts 0.0003% of global internet users and has an Alexa rank of 275,702. Facebook, which is currently at 5, gets about 8.5% of global internet users stopping by. Even Google (at 2) only gets around 30%. At least according to Alexa and, as I've said before, who knows how relevant their figures are?]
Brief notes
Just a quick round up of things that have caught my attention over the last few days:
1. There’s a new diet drug that’s been approved for use in the UK, despite fears that it can cause depression and an increased risk of suicide - especially for anyone already taking anti-depressants. So, when you feel down about being overweight, take Rimonabant and feel really bad about how fat you are! But provided that a drug is approved by NICE it doesn’t matter how bad the side effects are - or how many other drugs you have to take to cure the side-effects! We all know that there is no miracle cure for obesity; if you want to lose weight, you’ve got to change your lifestyle and diet permanently.
2. Apparently, the US have said that they won’t recognise Zimbabwe’s elections this week, and Mugabe’s knighthood has been stripped. Even worse, England have cancelled the 2009 cricket tour of the country. Is it just me that thinks that none of this is going to make any difference? Let’s face it, Mugabe is prepared to kill the opposition to make sure that he stays in office. Why does he care if a cricket tour doesn’t go ahead?
I seem to remember a few years ago that the US and the UK decided that they needed to intervene in Iraq because of the human rights record of the country’s leader, Saddam Hussain. Mugabe’s human rights record is worse than Hitler’s, yet all we’re now doing is taking away an honorary knighthood? Could it be that Zimbabwe doesn’t have anything the West wants, so we just leave them to get on with it?
3. As well as being in trouble with race stewards for his mistakes over the last couple of Grand Prix, it seems that Lewis Hamilton is now wanted for burglary.
4. File this story under “There’s no smoke without fire”: Once again, John Leslie (former Blue Peter TV presenter) has been caught up in allegations of rape, dating back to an incident in 1995. He hasn’t got The Titmuss to stand by him this time, so how will he cope?
5. When I first read this story, it went into a bit more detail and I promise you that the driver was a woman, who’d put the automatic transmission into drive when she meant to put it into reverse. The current version of the story leaves out those details, but I think the pictures say it all. And I love the fact that the driver of the Toyota wasn’t in the mood to give interviews!
Wolfs Stuff
Wolfs Helpers
-
