How about this for timing….on February 27th, I upgraded my version of Wordpress from 2.0.4 to 2.1.1.  It was quite some time since my last upgrade, and there were several security fixes that I needed to get installed.  I was briefly proud of myself for getting my site sort of up to date.

Then yesterday there was this announcement.  To save you from having to click the link, here’s the important excerpt:

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.

So…I picked the three or four days in the entire history of WordPress, which has been one of the most stable and secure blogging platforms around, to upgrade.  How’s that for amazing timing?

Don’t worry, I’ve (just finished) upgrading to the secured version.  And to be clear to my non-techy visitors: none of this has *anything* to do with the security of my visitors.   If you have your own WordPress blog (and obviously aren’t “non-techy”), upgrade now- this is not an optional upgrade!

I added Google AdSense to my blog in December of 2005.  As I said back then, I was curious how it would work for me.

I had no expectation when I started of making any real money.  My exact words back then were “… I’d be surprised if AdSense generates more than a buck or two a month for me”.  How prophetic…

To date, Google’s AdSense has generated $19.05 in revenue: that’s pretty much a buck or two a month.  For the curious, Google won’t pay out a red cent to you until your revenue tops $100, so the almost-$20 my site has “earned” in the past year isn’t even sitting in my wallet.  Five years from now, though, I’ll be rolling in the cash!

More interesting to me than the revenue is looking at the statistics Google Analytics generates.  About 90% of the visits to my site are first time visits; only 10% of the visitors come back a second time.  Hmmm: something to be said for having compelling content, I guess.  80% of the visits to my site come via Google searches: I think the sitemap feature, which keeps Google indexes of my site current, is helpful in that regard. 

What is the most “popular” content on my site?  A post I made entitled “The man with exploding arms” has been at the top of the hit parade pretty much since I first posted it.   Don’t ask me why.  Second or third place is usually something about Teresa Noreen,  and similarly usually one of my “techie” posts (currently my Vista posts are generating some traffic).  To be clear, a “highly rated” post on my site only generates about 300 clicks a month: the top five are all in the 100-400 visits per month range.

Is my site generating more traffic now than a year ago?  Unfortunately, I don’t have a full year of data yet.  Comparing two dissimilar months (E.G.: September to February) is generally not very helpful: different times of the year generate different amounts of traffic.  However, I compared May 2006 to February 2007 : if that’s any indicator, it looks like total unique visitors is up from about 50 per day “then” to about 150 per day “now”. 

Statistics are fun!  Okay, I’m weird…

I’m upgrading the version of Wordpress (the software that runs this blog) on my server.  This is a periodically necessary process in order to keep up with security updates. 

Some site features may temporarily disappear during the upgrade, and should re-appear once the upgrade is complete.  It is also likely that there will be some problems during the upgrade process. 

Please bear with me as I complete this- thanks!

UPDATE: In theory, the upgrade is complete and all of the site functions are restored to normal.

I haven’t been posting here for a loooong time: over a month, I think.  So, what’s up?

In the past month, I’ve been doing the following things:

• spent a lot of time exploring Second Life
• caught and started recovering from a really bad cold.  I’m still sick, but gradually returning to normal
• worked
• took a weekend holiday with Irene for our anniversary
• posted some pictures to the gallery here from when my friend Chris was visiting

Nothing amazing or fantastic…nothing to suggest why I haven’t posted here.  And no guarantee that I won’t disappear again.

I have become increasingly intrigued with the concept of “tagging” in blogs over the past year or so. Tagging is a way for someone posting a blog entry (or other web content) to include some sort of categorization hints in the form of keywords. Specialized search engines like Technorati can then use those keywords to present “similar” content.

Over the last 24 hours I’ve been trying to set up a “local” (I.E.: on my server) tag structure. As my base I used Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) for WordPress. I then added some things:

• A hack from Nathan’s blog to get friendly URLs (E.G.: www.kgadams.net/tags/) to work. This still sort of bothers me, since the UTW developer, Christine, seems to imply she has it working with WordPress’ internal URL rewrite features
• Another hack, this one from Robin Lu, to get UTW, Wordpress, and Ecto (my blog editor) working together happily.
• a hack to Robin’s hack in order to make things work with Ecto 1.8.8 for Windows (see below)

Getting Ecto 1.8.8 for Windows to work with UTW

Robin’s hack (part 1), as I understand it, basically relies on the function of a feature in Ecto which supports embedding tags as keywords instead of within the “normal” body of the HTML. I imagine this works great in the Macintosh version of Ecto- in the Windows version, it doesn’t quite work. Ecto still includes all of the HTML comments and such along with the tags when you choose the “Keywords” option, so you end up with tags that look like:

<a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/lawyers" rel="tag">lawyers</a>

Not exactly what is wanted, when the real keyword in the above line is “lawyers”.

To fix this, I added a simple little function to xmlrpc.php that fixes 90% of the problem:

/* Kelly Adams UTW/Ecto hack clean Ecto keywords */
function ecto_clean_tags($tagset) {
        /* strip html tags */
        $clean_tags = strip_tags($tagset);
        return ($clean_tags);
}

I added this immediately before Robin’s “ecto_get_keywords” function. I then “wrapped” each $POST assignment from Robin’s hack with this function like this:

          // ROBIN LU UTW / ECTO HACK
          $_POST['tagset'] = ecto_clean_tags($content_struct['mt_keywords']);

The last 10% of fixing this for me was to change the settings in ecto slightly.

I’m still not all the way there- I want to experiment with a tag cloud or something similar- hopefully I’ll have that up soon.

If the site looks a little “broken” at the moment, that’s my fault. I decided it would be interesting to try a new(ish) option for Wordpress called “widgets” which, in theory, will make it easier for me to customize the layout of my site. Before I can do that, I have to be using a widgets-compatible Wordpress theme. The one I’m experimenting with now is called “WP-Andreas09“.

UPDATE:  I’ve restored most of the basic site structure, but I’m still missing some content (E.G.: the Google news feed, the recent comments block, the image from my gallery).  I’ll finish that up sometime in the next few days.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress, widgets, andreas09

There are times here in Kelly’s World when I post not just daily, but several times a day. This is usually followed by periods of time during which I’m basically silent- sometimes two or three days, occasionally a week or two.

Why am I so inconsistent? Firstly, this blog is a “fun” past time for me- sort of the opposite of work. If writing a post feels like work, I tend not to write it.

Secondly, every once in a while something happens that changes how I blog. For example, I started playing with a new beta version of Ecto V2.0 for Windows a couple of weeks ago. I really want to use it: it has some visual editing features I’ve wanted for a while. But its not working properly for me (something about its registration features). My thoughts turn to this problem every time I sit down to potentially blog, and I feel less inclined to write. Contrariwise, a few weeks before this I started using FeedDemon, which aggragates RSS/Blog feeds from hundreds of sources into a single “view”: the massive flow of news inspired me to write four or five posts over the course of a couple of days.

In addition to the blog-related inspirations/distractions, real life can often alter my blogging habits. My work is sometimes rather demanding. At the moment, in addition to my normal web “event production” tasks, I’m working on an application development project. I have tons of new and fun things to learn about, such that my work day is growing to include evenings and weekends. Then there is Irene’s hip replacement, and sick cats, and all the other little things that pop up and add “variety” to life.

My objective is to keep posting “several times a week”, with several being between one and many times. Fewer than that, and people stop visiting here- and I like visitors! One post a day would be ideal, but I suspect that’s not in the cards. So…keep visiting, hook me into your RSS aggragator (right click and copy the URL into your feed reader) if you like. And thank you for reading my posts when and if I make them

Technorati Tags: meta-blogging, procrastination, ecto

My Mom must love me- she actually has printed out one or two of my blog entries. But until tonight, printing one of my blog entries wasn’t exactly easy. I’ve taken care of that now…

I’ve added a new plugin to my WordPress blog- WP-Print by Lester Chan. It seems to be working great: you should see a “print this post” link at the bottom of this posting here on the main page, and a little printer icon near the title when viewing an individual posting.  If you click this link the page will be regenerated without the fancy borders and such, ready for printing.
I had to work a bit to get the plugin to work with my site. There were a couple that “broke” the plugin entirely until I corrected them. When I first started up the plugin clicking the link generated a 404 error. That was easy to fix- the readme even told me what to do: re-generate the Permalinks (Options->Permalinks->Update Permalink Structure. Once the 404 error was cleared up, the next problem was that clicking the link generated a blank screen. Looking at my PHP logs revealed this error:

Mar 13 00:21:21 kgadams httpd2: PHP Warning: wp_print(/…/wp-content/wp-print.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /…/wp-content/plugins/print/print.php on line 185

To fix the problem, I changed print.php, line 185 from:

include(ABSPATH . ‘/wp-print.php’);

…to

include(ABSPATH . ‘/wp-content/plugins/wp-print.php’);

Easy to fix…but kind of odd that the original “include” worked for anyone using this plugin- unless I’m misunderstanding the meaning of “ABSPATH”, or its somehow set incorrectly on my WordPress install.

Technorati Tags: WordPress, WP-Print

I am the admin of this site. It makes sense that I can edit anything here…and so I can. I had this theory, though, that a registered user here should be able to edit their own comments. Apparently, I was wrong.

I’m still digging into this to make sure, but it appears that comment editing is sort of an all or nothing situation. You can’t just be permitted to edit *your* comments- if I give someone rights to edit comments, they can edit anyone’s who happens to be at the same security level.

Bogus…hopefully I can find a way to work around this.

Technorati Tags: WordPress

My apologies to folks who have posted here in the last several days and never say their words of wisdom appear on the site. I’m calling out here to Daren (who commented on my Linksys/Linux connection failure item), James Lynch (who commented on my NSLU2/ Linux Samba post), and my very own sister, Connie, who probably didn’t post exactly where she wanted to but I love her anyway.

What happened is this. Firstly, for some unknown reason I stopped receiving email notifications from my blog when I have something to moderate. I’m still not sure what’s going on there, but I’ll look into it. Secondly, I received something like 50 spam comments over the course of the week or so that I wasn’t receiving notifications, so when I finally *did* get to moderating I had to dig through a lot of crapola.

I really, really like getting comments here from people. I figure if I inspire someone to comment, good or bad, then its like they give me a “gift” of their time. I have to moderate comments in order to keep the site clean of spam. Once you’ve been approved for one comment, though, your future comments should go through automatically without me approving them.

Anyway…you have my apologies. I’ll be looking at some ways to at least let you know that your comments are queued for moderation when you post- at least that way you wouldn’t think something is broken other than me

UPDATE: I figured out why I was not receiving email notifications for postings here. My server got confused about what its hostname was, and postfix didn’t like that. I think I have the OS and postfix talking together happily again, so I should be getting “awaiting moderation” notices once again

Technorati Tags: moderation, blog spam