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Since I installed hashcash plugin for this wordpress.org blog site, comment spam has dropped to zero. So, it is effective indeed.

The wordpress hashcash plugin is easy to set up and less intrusive as Capicha! plugins.  However, it seems to be a surge of trackback spams after hashcash plugin choked comment spam inflow. Could it be the spammer actually has logic to detect hashcash plugin in their automation scripts?

I am uite sure the surge is only in eyes of the observer. guess I’d need to bite the bullet and apply for a wordpress.com API key, then enable kismet.

Yesterday a fellow wordpress administrator told me it is important to have some kinda spam control for blog comments. I said, I’ll worry about it when it hits me. Besides, Gmail is ready already, since Gmail drops notificaiton emails from this blog server to SPAM folder. My adoption of SPF (Sender Policy Framework) using Godaddy.com hasn’t been successful either. Today, I got my first batch of comment spams from the same author and IP address. Hmm, is it just coincidence? Read the rest of this entry »

This post, as a live journal, will document the journey of this self-hosted wordpress blog server: how it gets created, maintained, altered, upgraded, and secured. The live diary will cover the whole spectrum of a wordpress blog server, or as a business-savvy would put it, the blog’s “ecosystem”: the hardware, networking (DNS, routing, firewall), operating system, Apache, PHP, MySQL, wordpress blog server software, security, themes and plug-ins, Google AdSense, backup and restore, disaster recovery, performance boosters, and etc. Read the rest of this entry »

I had been using tiger-admin 3.0 without any problem since Wordpress 2.0.6 and 2.0.7. The server was then upgraded to Wordpress 2.1 the first day it became available, with all plugins disabled prior to the upgrade as instructed by wordpress.org. Initially I had problem with visual editor mode and timeofday plugin. The visual editor problem was resolved quickly. Only last night I got around to re-enable tiger-admin wordpress plugin. The administrator dashboard looked pretty again. Yay! I was happy. Off I went, to bed.

Tonight, when I was updating a static page on how to secure wordpress server and other LAMP servers, the editor gave only a half-width window instead of the full-width window. The WYSIWYG editor mode or visual editor mode works fine. With the half-width window, it is rather clumsy to identify and to edit out a handful of extra <LI><UL><UL></LI> by hand. This is how it looked like:

These extra HTML tags were generated automatically by the VISUAL editor, by mistake, I guess. The extra HTML tag generation was triggered by a blockquote between unordered list items with a few attempts to indent/outdent (or promote/demote) list items. I believe visual editor in Google’s Blogger suffers from a similar problem. Under visual editor mode, I eventually reach a point that I can no longer promote or demote a line any more.

Even though it took me a bit longer to edit out these extra HTML tags, I decide to leave it alone. Rarely I need to edit in code mode anyway. Otherwise, why use a CMS?

Later I tried to identify 404 links reported by Google webmaster tools by searching the URI elements from manage/post and manage/page. The search form is somewhat misaligned and returned nothing, when I know at least one of the post or pages should have showed up. At that point, I decide to deactivate tiger-admin to verify whether it is to blame. Sure enough, once tiger-admin 3.0 is deactivated, the search form looks normal and returned results as expected. Of course, now the code mode gave full-width as well.

hmm… I thought Wordpress 2.1’s release page has tiger-admin 3.0 listed as fully compatible. Anyone shares similar problems?