I'm Just Sharing

WordPress 2.9.2; An Update You Can Probably Skip

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Feb 16, 2010

If you have a WordPress blog, by now you probably have noticed that there’s another update, this time to 2.9.2. Unlike previous updates, this one corrects a minor security flaw that most of us really don’t have to worry about, so you can probably skip it. However, since I’ve mentioned that, I might as well gripe about it at the same time.

The security fix has to do with this new thing they added with 2.9 where, instead of just deleting certain messages, you can move them to the trash and then delete them from there. It seems that if you have people who log into your blog to do whatever, they can look at any messages that you have trashed. The concern is that if you trashed something because it was sensitive, you might not want anyone else in there.

Of course, I’ve kind of railed against having to sign into blogs to comment anyway, so in a way this penalizes those folks who have made people log in to comment; tough being you. As for what move to trash, the only things I move to trash on any of my blogs are when there’s a trackback and it’s coming from me from another blog I’ve linked to. I figure those don’t need to be there, and I’ve already taken care of not sending trackbacks to the blog I’m writing on because of the No Self Pings plugin I wrote about back in November.

My minor rant is against this “trash” thing to begin with. I’d like to know how many people have been going around deleting things from their own blogs, then suddenly saying “oops, I wish I hadn’t deleted that?” Frankly, it’s an extra step I hate having to do when I do it on those trackbacks. However, since they did that, why couldn’t they have added the one more option in their drop down menu to allow those of us who feel sure about what we’re getting rid of to delete at that point?

And one more thing. Have you noticed when you check your spam filter than if there’s something in there that’s really not spam, if you select Not Spam it moves it to your comments, but you still have to approve it? At least here the drop down menu does give you the option to approve the comment so you don’t have to touch it twice. Consistency can be our friend sometimes.

Anyway, skip this update if you don’t have people logging into your blog, or if you don’t ever plan on having anything sensitive that you don’t want anyone else to see in your trash.

by Paul Myers; check it out!

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell

Upgrade To WordPress 2.7.1; How?

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Feb 17, 2009

For at least a week I’ve been seeing this notification at the top of my blog, in the administration area, telling me to update to WordPress 2.7.1. Well, obviously it’s still there, and I still haven’t upgraded, but it’s not for a lack of trying.

On all three of my blogs, which are all WordPress blogs, I have clicked on the button that asked me if I wanted to upgrade automatically; nothing happened. I thought about downloading the update and loading it myself, but I decided against it because, after all, isn’t that why I added the Automatic Upgrade Plugin to begin with?

So, after numerous tries on each blog, I decided it was time to go online to see if anyone else had a fix for it. Of course, I wasn’t close to being alone with this issue. And there are fixes galore, but they involve, well, some interesting differences. The first is that you have to totally kill the Automatic Upgrade Plugin, which supposedly counters the upgrade program that was inserted into WordPress 2.7 to begin with; I didn’t know that. You don’t just inactivate the plugin; you have to totally delete it from your blog. Well, I figured that was easy to try, so I did, then tried to update my blog; nope, wasn’t happening.

Then I read something else that said to inactive all plugins and that would work. I did that, and I got to the next stage, which came with a message that said “unpacking the core update”; that’s as far as that went.

Someone else said you had to not only inactivate all of your plugins, but delete them as well. At that point I said “no”, it’s not happening. I have a bunch of plugins, and I have all the settings just the way I want them, and I’m not about to go through all that trouble for an update. Someone tell me why WordPress had to mess with the automatic upgrade process, please.

So, why not just download the update and load it manually? I did some reading on that, and it seems that many people either lost their blogs entirely or lost some feature of their blogs. I decided I wasn’t going through all of that noise, even though I may be a bit more technically minded than many people. Though the original process used to only take about five minutes, it’s been awhile since I’ve even had to attempt it, and I’m just not in the mood to do so.

Why did WordPress make this one so difficult? They don’t think they did, but the numbers seem to disagree with them. For the number of fixes that are supposedly contained in the update, it seems to be causing just as many problems for some people who actually got it to upgrade by some fashion. Does that mean their upgrade was invalid, or just that the program was unstable with some downloads? Frankly, I don’t know and I don’t care. I want the protections, but I also want WordPress to officially fix this thing, then tell everyone what’s wrong, instead of us having to run around researching it on various forums and getting conflicting advice. Of course, I say all this with the understanding that the software is free, and that, truthfully, they don’t have to do a single thing to help us out. And this proves why sometimes, with free, you get what you deserve.

Still, I’m holding out hope, so if anyone else had problems loading this thing, and did something that I didn’t mention above to get it working, and it’s working fine, please share.

Tweet My Blog

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Oct 17, 2008

Almost two weeks ago I wrote a post on joint ventures and talked about J-V Network.com. While in the process of talking about that site, I walked through the process of finding a j-v partner and talked a little about a product for your blog called Tweet My Blog. I’ve had this bad boy sitting on my computer, as I was out of town for a week and have been catching up with other things since I’ve been home, and have now finally had a chance to do something with it, and wanted to tell you more about it.

Of course it’s a WordPress plugin, which we all know and love, and that’s a great thing because it means it’s easy to install. I opened the zip file, uploaded it to the blog, activated it and was ready to go. The first step is going into the settings to put in your Twitter name and password. You do that so that when you make a post, it’ll make the post for you. It will also show Twitter posts that either you make to someone or posts that someone makes to you, and you can set the number of posts you want to show, 5, 10, 15 or 20. However, you don’t do that here. Instead, after you put in your settings, which can include your affiliate number if you decide to become an affiliate with them, you go to where your widgets are and pull it over from there, then set the number of tweets you want to show.

I’ve done that part, and once I actually publish this post I’ll be able to see what it looks like on Twitter, which should be interesting. This will make it easier for me if it works properly because I won’t have to do a copy and paste to Twitter anymore, which I’ll like, although I will lose the ability to individually highlight my post before I post the link. But I’ll give up that luxury for the convenience.

This plugin really is that simple; if you’d like to check it all out, click on the affiliate banner below; happy posting!