Today I was looking at a list of the top 30 WordPress plugins in blogosphere and decided to give the related entries plugin a try. Adding a related posts section to each post should make the post more informative and handy. It was a little more complicated to add the plugin to the blog than most plugins since I had to edit your my main Index template, my single post, and my archives in my theme. The first time I edited the main template it was fatal and I had to use the back button to fix the problem. After a little tinkering I got related entries working on all three templates and looking okay.
Month: March 2007
TrueCrypt 4.3
TrueCrypt is a software system for establishing and maintaining an on-the-fly-encrypted drive. On-the-fly encryption means that data are automatically encrypted or decrypted right before they are loaded or saved, without any user intervention. No data stored on an encrypted volume can be read (decrypted) without using the correct password or correct…
I have been using TrueCrypt for over a year on my laptop. I keep my QuickBooks and other sensitive files in it. My assumption has always been that if my laptop is stolen that my XP login password would be cracked pretty easily. Ophcrack showed me how easy it can be done. My other assumption is that breaking into TrueCrypt would be way too hard for most thieves. I highly recommend TrueCrypt.
WordPress Themes by Sadish » MistyLook Version 3
Recently I found out that my Version 2 theme had a problem with the MistyLook options screen under the latest version of WordPress and I could no longer exclude pages from the navigation bar. Before I went about hacking his code to make it work I decided to see if Sadish had upgraded his theme. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Sadish had upgraded MistyLook to Version 3. Not only had he fixed this problem but he added several other nice features such as, drop shadows, custom block quotes. The drop shadows looked nice on the posts so I am going to leave them in. I did not like that the drop shadows were being applied everywhere so I turned them off for the sidebar. Although he added a custom image header feature, I overrode it in the header.php so I could use my existing image. At another site I overrode the code so that I could use my rotating random images code. Great job Sadish!
Clean CSS – A Resource for Web Designers – Optmize and Format your CSS
I have been playing around a CSS Optimizer, Clean CSS. The most interesting feature is its ability to merge the same selectors and properties automatically. This gives you a slightly different picture of what the CSS is doing and where you have duplicated properties. Today I finally gave it whirl on a live site and did not notice a change.
2003 SP2 is okay!
I installed SP2 late on Friday without any obvious issues besides that it took a long time to install. Late in the evening IIS shut down for an unknown reason. I did not catch it until the following day. It caused several problems in programs dependent on IIS. After I restarted IIS everything has been stable for the last two days. Everything I tried still works.
Win 2003 sp2 on Microsoft update now
On Microsoft update and apparently soon on WSUS is Windows 2003 sp2. I want you to go over to your servers right now and turn off auto updates if you have then enabled on the servers. For R2 WSUS boxes you won’t get SP2 automatically as SP’s are offered up but not auto installed. But I don’t want you to accidentally install this service pack as for us SBSers we need to read KB932600 …but as of right now the link isn’t yet live..
Windows Small Business Server 2003 R2 (SBS 2003 customers – Please read Knowledge Base Article 932600 before installing SP2) …
I did not see this one coming. I am busy with other things and do not want to deal with SP2 until someone else figures out the problems. I do not have any problems that SP2 will fix. In fact I am pretty happy with my servers. With the tax season peak just around the corner this is the wrong time to drop in unannounced with SP2. Fortunately my servers will only update when I bless it. So I should be in good shape.
Where Our Standards Went Wrong
To validate or not to validate; that is the question. A List Apart’s own Ethan Marcotte helps us to re-examine our approach to standards advocacy and how we can better educate our clients on the benefits of web standards.
Link to Where Our Standards Went Wrong
I still prefer that my sites validate but I do allow warnings and occasionally minor errors to get through. It is a tradeoff. I want the sites to validate but I need to limit the amount of time I spend debugging validation problems since I am the only person who cares that the problems get fixed. The biggest advantage to having a site that validates is to minimize the maintenance headaches supporting multiple browsers.
Use an XHTML Sitemap for Better Indexing
Link to Use an XHTML Sitemap for Better Indexing
I just finished adding a Sitemap page to my blog using the instructions on post I have linked to above. Chris did a great job. The instructions were easy and having a single page of all my pages is pretty handy. I think Google has done a fine job indexing my blogs but occasionally I have had trouble searching for a post I have made in the past.
Carnival #33: Communicating with Donors
This week’s edition of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants, which is a joint edition with the Giving Carnival, is now up at Donor Power Blog and Tactical Philanthropy. You can read it either place. The selected posts are the same, but Jeff and Sean added their own comments to their versions. The posts take a look at what donors and nonprofits wish the other knew about each other and provide some fascinating scenarios for nonprofits to think about. What do donors really want to know? Are donors always right? Do donors even remember they’ve given to you? Check out the carnival.
More Resources from Kivi: How to Write a Nonprofit Annual Report – A Four-Week E-Course You Can Start Today
Link to Carnival #33: Communicating with Donors
The BusinessBlogWire pointed me at this site via their Blogtipping roundup. Kivi has some excellent nonprofit advice on her site. As Treasurer for a nonprofit I was modestly interested in her advice on how to write a nonprofit annual report. Our Development Director had mentioned he was interested in writing an annual report a couple of months ago. I liked the idea but loathed the fact that it would involve a lot of my time since I was the custodian of information. As Treasurer my plate has been overflowing for several months. My workload has forced me to beg off of strategic plan meetings even though I have a vested interest that this strategic plan be a plan that can be implemented. Strategic plans and annual reports go hand in hand. It is hard to plan for success if you do not keep score.
My problem with strategic plans is that board members try to be so nice. They never seem to say a bad word about strategic plans they think are unrealistic. In their hearts they want to be wrong and the strategic plan to work. Their dilemma is that they already know that there are plenty of situations that will cause them to say and act differently than where the strategic plan is pointing them. The words they speak and the actions they take will not mimic the hope in their heart. Breaking this status quo is the grand challenge.
WordPress 2.1.1 dangerous, Upgrade to 2.1.2
Long story short: If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately.
Longer explanation: This morning we received a note to our security mailing address about unusual and highly exploitable code in WordPress. The issue was investigated, and it appeared that the 2.1.1 download had been modified from its original code. We took the website down immediately to investigate what happened.
Link to WordPress 2.1.1 dangerous, Upgrade to 2.1.2
Just when you thought it was smart to perform changed files upgrades, they find a security breach and recommend you flatten your installation and start over with a clean install. Oh well!
Hard Disk MTBF: Flap or Farce?
Data sheets for hard drives have always included a specification for reliability expressed in hours: commonly known as MTBF (mean time between failures), or sometimes the mean time to failure. Same difference: One way assumes that a drive will be fixed, and the other, replaced. Nowadays, this number is around a million hours for an “enterprise” hard drive. Some drives are rated at 1.5 million hours.
Now, that’s a good stretch to time. After all, a year is only 8,760 hours. One million hours comes to a bit more than 114 years. Some may be scratching their heads, since the hard drive itself has only been around for 50 years (IBM’s giant 350 Disk Storage Unit for its RAMAC computer). This can be confusing.
Instead, the MTBF is a statistical measure based on a calculation extrapolated from less-lengthy readings. It all means that drives are very reliable, with a failure rate well under 1 percent per year. Go Team Storage!
However, several papers covering large-scale storage presented at FAST ’07, the USENIX conference on File and Storage Technologies, held recently in San Jose, Calif., are kicking up a stir online about MTBF.
The Best Paper award was handed to “Disk Failures in the Real World: What Does an MTTF of 1,000,000 Hours Mean to You?” by Bianca Schroeder and Garth Gibson of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Their study tracked a whopping set of drives used at large-scale storage sites, including high-performance computing and Web servers. The data suggests that a number of common wisdoms surrounding disk reliability are wrong.
For example, they found that annual disk replacements rates were more in the range of 2 to 4 percent and were as high as 13 percent for some sites. Yikes.
Source: Hard Disk MTBF: Flap or Farce?
I found this fascinating article about MTBF and disk failures yesterday. I have known for some time that you must take the MTBF figures with a grain of salt. Disk drives appear to fail more often than what the MTBF figures would leave you to believe. The differences between “enterprise” disk drives and “retail” disk drives appear to be indistinguishable in the real world. Yet as an IT professional we will always recommend the component with the higher perceived quality even though we have misgivings about the statistics. For most businesses the cost of down time due to a disk failure is much higher than the additional cost for quality. Although we hate to admit it, there is a significant subjective component to our component recommendation.
Using Version Control to Manage Web Site Changes
A while back I decided that Version Control software was a better way for me to manage web site changes. This adds a little bit more documentation and incremental control over the daily backups. For small shops Version Control looks like overkill but it is simple to use. So I bit the bullet and setup a Subversion repository on my Windows-based computer. Initially I thought I would only keep my theme customizations and content in the repository but I eventually decided to keep the entire directory. Today I decided to document the process I use to update a website. In this case I am upgrading WordPress from 2.1 to 2.1.1 with a zipped file of changed files. I will be using several open source programs in addition to Subversion and TortoiseSVN. I will be using WinMerge to compare directories and FileZilla to upload the files. There are many suitable programs for these tasks. These are the ones I used.
Step 1 – Update your working copies
Use TortoiseSVN to retrieve a clean working copy from the repository.
Step 2 – Download the updated files and expand into directories
In my case the updated 2.1.1 files are in a zip file which follows the WordPress directory structure. I download the file and expand it into directories. I also print the updated file list. I am going to use the file list as my check list for the rest of the process. Stuff happens!
Step 3 – Compare the directories and update the files.
I use WinMerge as a quick check to compare the directories. I have projects set up to automate my comparison settings. It should show that the files I am updating are the ones on the file list. Surprisingly I find I am missing a couple of files shown on the changed file list. I opt to download the full source and add the missing updated files to my updates. I use WinMerge to copy the changed files over the repository files.
Step 4 – Update the website
In this step I use FileZilla and the file list to upload the changed files. It is a real plus that my host provider allows me to use sFTP. Every extra bit of security helps keep the hackers away. Since this is a minor update I will leave all of my plugins active during the upgrade. WordPress recommends that you deactivate your plugins before updating in case you run into problems. I sort the local directory based on Last Modified date so that the changed files are on the top and easier to find. I move from directory to directory updating the changed files. FileZilla continually reminds me that I am overwriting existing files. That is good. There are only four directories and twenty file so the process goes quickly. When I have finished uploading the files I go to my browser and click on the Site Admin link in WordPress. It prompts me with links to complete the upgrade. This is normal. I follow the links and finish updating the site within a minute. I do a quick check of the website to make sure everything is still working. I have finished updating the web site.
Step 5 – Commit the changes to the repository
I use TortoiseSVN to commit the changes and with a description. When I am finished I use TortoiseSVN to check the log and make sure that the description I just added makes sense. This is probably the last time I will look at the description until I need to understand it sometime in the future. I am happy with what I wrote so I move on to my other projects.
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