NeutralAxis

Thanks to Steve for helping me to get SSL installed and running.  After an unsuccessful attempt with his help last weekend, the problem dawned on me this morning as I was driving to work.  We had set the port 443 SSL virtualhost to the wrong DocumentRoot directory.  See previous posts about Virtualhost if you’re looking for more explanation.  Also, see the page here for part 1 of the SSL setup instructions followed for setting up a privately signed certificate,  and here for part 2, which we modified a bit for my purposes.  So far the only problem I’ve seen with SSL logins to WordPress is that the flash media uploader doesn’t work.  It reports an IO Error.

I got around to installing the WordPress 2.8 update and fail to understand why I have so many problems with normal one-click upgrades for this and plugins. (continue reading…)

The decoratr plugin for wordpress sounded interesting, so this is a test of it.  The plugin analyzes the content of a post and makes suggestions for photos to put along side the post.  Photos come from Flickr.  So after the jump, we’ll see what kind of suggestions it makes for a rambling post. (continue reading…)

Google hasn’t been indexing this blog for more than a couple of weeks and I’m fascinated by the attempts of spammers to leave comments.  So far the anti-spam solution is working perfectly.  I hesitate to say which one I’m using in case that would help a spammer defeat it.  But the interesting thing is the social engineering tactics they use.  The posts are all very generic but offer praise for the quality or helpfulness of the post.  They appeal to the users vanity.  I hold all posts from a user for moderation unless I’ve approved one of their previous posts and I presume the spammers recognize that and try to weasel their way into that first approval through flattery.  A new one was a bit different by asking “Can i take a one small picture from your site?”  That one would have been more believable if the post they were commenting on had contained any pictures.

While looking for some wordpress security info because I was being locked out of some of my own files, I came across a post on Blogbuildingu.com that was very helpful and gives a detailed rundown on making sure a wordpress blog and database is installed securely.  Strategies are described in detail, with examples, for setup of the mysql database and apache web server as well as file and folder permission levels.

Readers with iPhones can now see an optimized version of this site thanks to the addiition of the iWPhone plugin.  As the opportunity arrives, I may work on changing the color scheme to better match the standard colors.

Bingo!

I got the configuration worked out to eliminate “/wordpress” from my URL structure.  This turned out to be much simpler than I was trying to make it.  A big thanks to the various forums where I got advice, but apparently I never made myself adequately clear as to what I was trying to do, because none of the advice was valid for me. (continue reading…)

With the help of a very helpful website guru at webmasterworld.com, I thought I had this problem licked, but its still a no go.  His suggestions and explanation of the process made perfect sense, but resulted in complete failure to load anything at all.  I’ve been doing some trial and error changes, but so far, every different configuration option I try results in some part of the site failing.  Either I have wordpress links load with no local images, nothing loads at all, or something else breaks.  Last night I couldn’t get in to the administration page at all and had to reset everything back to my backup configuration.  I’m beginning to get an understanding of the process though, and I think the breakdown is actually with the rewriterule and rewritecond statements in .htaccess rather than virtualhost.  I think if I can just get some quiet time to work through it in my head, I can figure this out.  In the meantime, you may occasionally see the site down, or in a state of disrepair.

With permalinks now working, I’d like to figure out how to use Apache’s virtualhosts to make different URLs go to different folders as their root.  www.URL.com, blog.URL.com, and www.URL2.com would go to different folders as their document roots.  My first attempt only partially worked. (continue reading…)

I’ve been trying to get this blog adjusted to use “pretty” permalinks, so the URL of posts are readable, and its just not working.  It shouldn’t be this difficult.  [Update: See resolution after the link] (continue reading…)