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Chances are, you’ve run into this WordPress error at one time or another: That’s a pretty unhelpful error message, isn’t it? Not only does it tell you nothing about what the exact problem is or how it occurred, but it’s also sometimes just plain wrong. Pretty often, it has nothing to do with insufficient permissions. […]

For all your theme testing and plugin development needs, here’s a huge list of WordPress sample content collections and dummy content generators. Export Files See How to import WordPress export files for instructions on how to import the files listed in this section on your site. Theme Unit Test Data from WordPress.org 22 Posts Sticky post […]

As of WordPress 3.1.3, it’s really easy to prevent unscrupulous web developers from displaying your site in a frame. Just add this one-liner to your functions.php file: Now any other site that tries to load your WP blog in a frame will get this instead: (The actual error message will vary depending on the browser. […]

Plugins are usually loaded and executed along with the rest of WordPress. However, since each plugin is physically just set of .php, .css and .js files, it is also possible for someone to bypass the normal load order and execute the plugin files directly.  They just need to type the right URL in the address […]

Now that spring has arrived (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), it is an excellent time to clean up and decruft your WordPress site. In this post I will show you a number of plugins and techniques that you can use to do just that. Note: Back up your database before running any of the […]

When another blogger links to one of your posts, you usually get an automatic notification known as a pingback. But when someone links to your homepage, there is no such notification*. This is because WordPress accepts only pingbacks sent to specific posts. Even if the person linking to you is using a publishing platform that […]

WP-DBManager is a handy plugin that can, among other things, make periodic database backups and send them to a specified email address. I installed it on this blog months ago and up until a week ago everything was working perfectly. Then one day the backup emails simply stopped coming. What Went Wrong? A quick check […]

If you’re a blogger, would you kindly run some numbers for me? It will only take a minute, and you might learn something interesting about your site as a result. First, take the total number of comments made on your blog and divide it by the total number of posts. This will give you the […]

After the Deadline is an advanced spell checker plugin for WordPress that was released on Monday. In addition to the standard spell check and suggestions features, it also includes style and grammar checking. The plugin also lets you define custom dictionary of sorts – you can set it to always ignore certain words. Here’s the […]

I love all kinds of tweaks and utilities, be it software-specific addons or standalone tools. WordPress is no exception – if server hardware was infinitely capable, I’d probably have a hundred or so plugins installed. But since the Moore’s law is being all too tardy, there’s a constant pressure to weed out underperforming and superfluous […]

Having up-to-date backups is an essential safeguard in case something goes wrong with your website. So some time ago I installed WP-DBManager and configured it to send a daily backup of my WordPress database to my GMail account. All was well, until last week the backup process failed five times in a row. Upon checking […]

The recent WeblogToolsCollection post about a new antispam plugin “WP Mollom” got me thinking. What’s the main problem with Akismet? It’s certainly good enough at catching spam – it only misses about 4 spam comments per month on this blog and has nearly 99.9% accuracy overall. However, the situation might not be so rosy when […]

Even after two years of blogging, I’m still not rich and famous. Why is that, and how can you avoid the same moderately unpleasant fate? In this post I’ll discuss some blogging mistakes that (still) interfere with the success of this site. #1 Lack of focus Pretty much every blogging-related guide begins with “pick a […]

Take the top 100 blogs from Technorati, scrape some connectedness statistics from Yahoo! Site Explorer, mix in a bit of improvised PHP scripting and Processing magic, and we’ve got ourselves a map of the equatorial blogosphere 🙂 About The Map This graph shows the connectedness level of some (see rant below) of the most popular […]

We all know that WordPress is a popular publishing platform, but how popular is it really? While I don’t know the number of active WP blogs, here’s a different yet interesting piece of statistics – a chart of the historical Google search volume for the keyword “wordpress”. (click the image to get a slightly larger […]

I’ve been trying to write a review ever since the first beta, but all I could come up can be summarized as “Meh. It’s okay.” WP 2.7 includes a lot of long-awaited features, which is great, but their implementation sometimes inflicts the aforementioned “meh” feeling. For example, there’s the dashboard menu – finally, a dynamic […]

I’m sure you know why I write this. A new version of WordPress is out, and I’ve upgraded this blog immediately. So here are the mandatory first impressions (nope, I don’t use SVN betas). Just conforming with the unquestionable avalanche of review-style posts that have appeared, with more no doubt being written right now. Right […]

Everybody and their animal companion have been writing WP 2.5 reviews ever since RC1 came out. Now that the new version has finally been released “proper”, the temptation to commit the slightly dishonorable act of following the trend and writing my own “first impressions” (or is it “second thoughts”?) post is too strong to overcome. […]

A while ago I saw the blog version survey at BlogSecurity.net and got an idea to do my own. The previous survey is more than 8 months old and several new WordPress version have been released since then, so I think a new study is in order 🙂 I collected a large list of WordPress […]

Lately I’ve become a bit tired of all the plugin-making, new-feature-adding and programming in general, probably because I’m currently out of exciting and easy to implement ideas. This leads me to finding alternate modes of time-wasting, like obsessing over stats – the RSS subscriber count in particular. And somehow that activity gave me a new idea and made me enthusiastic enough to start work on yet another plugin.

I recently blogged about my anti-spam experiment (which has been going great!). The one problem with the method I explained in that post is that it requires the user to modify WordPress core files. Editing the source code can be risky and may intimidate non-programmers. Turns out there is a good alternative though – the […]

I’ve had some of my posts scraped by spam blogs (splogs) in the past. Since I think “legal action” against these sites is not very effective (and I’m lazy, too 😉 ), I began wondering if there was some automated way to stop the content thieves. In this post I’ll talk about my findings, starting with simple feed copyrighting and up to advanced techniques that could be used to fight sploggers.

For months I’ve been getting dozens of spam comments, sometimes over a hundred per day. Most of them are caught by Akismet, which is great. The problem is that with high numbers of spam comments it’s virtually impossible to look through the spam filter logs and de-spam false positives. The bandwidth and processing power wasted […]

About two weeks ago I was browsing SEO-related sites and came upon a promising technique for getting one’s pages out of the supplemental index. It’s called “third level push” and looks particularily useful for blogs. This is an advanced technique and you should work on the basic stuff first before trying something like this.

Instead of a detailed tutorial I will offer some thoughts about the “third level push” method and some tips on implementing it (yes, this is going to be a long post).

Everybody gets email spam. Bloggers also get comment spam and trackback spam (lucky us). This blog receives a few dozen spam comments a day (most are caught by Akismet). What most people don’t realize is comment spam can actually be useful. Here’s how (note: includes some unethical stuff) – Fresh proxies. Typically spammers use a […]

Not long ago I wrote about several interesting WordPress plugins and mentioned that the admin drop down menu plugin wasn’t as easy to use as I’d like it to be. I considered writing a better one, but luckily I decided to check Google before commiting to that. Sure enough, there are others admin menu enhancements […]

Admin Drop Down Menu An indispensible plugin that makes navigating the admin panel much easier. The only problem is that I tend to accidentaly move the cursor outside the “hover” zone, resetting the menu, meaning I have to start over. Broken Link Checker Checks your posts for non-working links and lets you know (on the […]

Yesterday I installed a fresh copy of WordPress on a subdomain of this site. I used Fantastico’s autoinstall feature, so I got the WP 2.2.2 version. I left the visual editor enabled because I was feeling lazy. Today was writing a post using that new WP install and noticed that some lines where wrapping at […]

…but that’s okay – WP-Syntax resurrected it. After looking at one of my earlier posts I noticed that all the backslashes were gone from my code examples, most notably my regular expressions. I had the code wrapped in <pre></pre> tags. As some searching revealed, this seems to be a recurrent bug in WordPress 2.2.1 (I […]