Upgrade WordPress Plugins Automatically

One of the challenges of keeping a WordPress blog running smoothly is making sure all installed plugins are updated promptly when new versions become available. WordPress 2.5 makes this easier than ever by adding an Automatic Upgrade feature.

As shown in the following illustration, the a note in the Plugin Management administration panel indicates that the Bad Behavior plugin (which I rely on to keep the spambots off my blogs) has been updated.

I have two options for bringing my blog up to date:

• Download version takes me to the Bad Behavior page on the WordPress.org’s Plugin Directory so I can read about and download the update. This functionality has been around for a while — at least since WordPress 2.3 — with all plugins that support it.
• Upgrade automatically takes the update process a step further. When I click this link, WordPress automatically downloads, uncompresses and installs the new version of the plugin for me. It displays its progress as it works, as shown here, and confirms that the upgrade has been successful.

I’ve been using this new feature for a few weeks now and it’s worked like a charm. It’s a heck of a lot easier than upgrading the old fashioned way.

Video Blogging with Viddler and WordPress, Part I

What’s this all about?

One of the things I’ve been following from arm’s length is the audio and video blogging phenomena. I’m talking about sites like Utterz, Seesmic, and Viddler.

I’ve tried all three and until I tried Viddler, I couldn’t get excited about any of them. But Viddler has a few features that make video blogging easy and fun — primarily because it works so well with WordPress.

In this series of articles, I’ll explain how you can use Viddler to create video content with any compatible camera attached to your computer and get that content on your blog. And, if you’re a WordPress user, I’ll tell you about two Viddler plugins you can use to make it easy for your blog readers to find your video content on Viddler — even if you didn’t post it on your blog — and even leave video comments for you.

What is Viddler?

Viddler is an online service that enables you to upload or record videos that can then be shared with others. It’s a bit like YouTube, only classier and used by people who want to communicate rather than show off entertainment-based content.

At least that’s my take on it.

Viddler uses Flash to capture video from a camera attached to your computer. It works great with my iMac’s built-in iSight camera and microphone, as well as the iMage camera I bought for traveling with my old PowerBook.

But you don’t have to capture video directly to Viddler. You can take an existing video file and upload it. Viddler supports .mov, .mpg, .wmv, .avi, and .m4v formats. You can’t, however, upload television shows or other material that’s likely to be copyrighted. Viddler doesn’t have the same deep pockets as YouTube and probably doesn’t want to be sued. Besides, you shouldn’t be sharing that stuff anyway.

Once content is on Viddler’s server, it can be set as private, public, or available to just your friends. (Like most social networking sites, you can create a network of friends to share videos you don’t want the general public to see.) You can also share your videos with others on other social networking sites or by embedding them in your blog or e-mail messages.

Getting Started

Of course, to use Viddler, you need an account. Go to http://www.viddler.com/ and click the big green Sign Me Up button. Then follow the prompts to create a user ID and password. You’ll have to provide a real e-mail address, since Viddler will be sending you a confirmation e-mail. Once you get that e-mail, click the link in it to finish setting up your account.

You can now create or upload videos. I’ll discuss both of those tasks in future installments of this series.

Meanwhile, if you have a Viddler account, why not take a moment to share the info about it with us? Use the Comments link or form for this post to provide your Viddler username so we can check out some of your videos.

WordPress 2.3.3 Urgent Security Release

From WordPress.org:

WordPress 2.3.3 is an urgent security release. A flaw was found in our XML-RPC implementation such that a specially crafted request would allow any valid user to edit posts of any other user on that blog. In addition to fixing this security flaw, 2.3.3 fixes a few minor bugs. If you are interested only in the security fix, download the fixed version of xmlrpc.php and copy it over your existing xmlrpc.php. Otherwise, you can get the entire release here.

Bad Behavior/Digg Conflict

This morning, while experimenting with a Digg link on my personal blog, I got an unusual message from Digg saying:

This link does not appear to be a working link. Please check the URL and try again.

Huh?

The link, of course, was fine. It was a link to the home page of my site.

Why is this a big deal? Well, being “dugg” can increase the amount of attention your Web site gets among blog readers. A well-dugg post can attract many, many hits. Some of those people might turn into regular readers.

(You can read my experiences with being dugg here and here. Although things can get a bit out of control when you end up on Digg’s home page, I lived through it without any permanent damage.)

Since I was on Digg, I decided to do a Digg search for the error message. The article I found, “Bad Behavior 2.0.11 Wordpress Plugin Blocking Digg Submission” on GeekTeks.com answered my question and provided a fix.

Apparently, when the author of Bad Behavior updated his plugin and spam site references, Digg was blocked as a legitimate site. The solution is to add Digg’s IP address to Bad Behavior’s whitelist. I just did this on all sites running Bad Behavior and the problem has gone away.

Miraz and I highly recommend Bad Behavior in our WordPress book. It not only helps prevent spam comments from being posted to your WordPress blog, but it also reduces the amount of hits to your MySQL database, thus reducing site congestion and theoretically speeding up access to your site.

Do you use Bad Behavior 2.0.11? If so, read the above-referenced article and follow its instructions to fix the problem.

CommentLuv = SpammerLuv?

One drawback to a WordPress plugin.

Back in November, I wrote a post about a new plugin I’d installed on my two main blog-based sites: Maria’s Guides and An Eclectic Mind. The plugin is called CommentLuv and it automatically retrieves and displays a link for the last post a commenter added to his or her blog.

Here are some examples from the post I wrote about CommentLuv, where I invited people to try it out.

The idea behind CommentLuv is to encourage people to comment by automatically linking back to their blog. I think it’s a great idea — when used by people who have real content to contribute in comments.

On the surface, CommentLuv is extremely attractive to spammers who keep blogs. Not only can they include a relatively normal looking comment with a link to their blog when they enter it in the Web site field of the comment form, but they also have an automatic link to their most recent work. Two links for the time it takes to post one, right? And that second link can give readers an idea of what their blog is all about by including the title of the most recent post.

What these people don’t seem to realize is that the CommentLuv link is created with a “nofollow” attribute. So if they think they can improve search engine optimization (SEO) by adding links to their sites on the sites they comment on, they’re wasting their time. The links are not recognized by Google or any other search engine or automated tool.

But what I’ve seen lately is a number of the same people coming back, again and again, to post comments like “Great post! I’ll keep checking in.” These comments usually appear on recent posts and, with some commenters, they appear several times a week. This gets past my spam prevention software and ends up on my blog.

While most people wouldn’t mind the added comments with their apparently complementary content, this isn’t content. It’s spam. There’s nothing being contributed to the site other than two free links for the commenter. So I delete these comments regularly.

Now I’m not suggesting that you avoid CommentLuv. I still think it’s a great plugin. But I do want users to be aware of its attraction for spammers. On a popular blog, installing CommentLuv could add about 10 minutes a week to your spam maintenance routine — after all, you have to manually decide whether a comment is legitimate or posted solely to attract hits for the commenter’s blog. Adding a regular abuser to your blacklist might be a good course of action.

RSSImport

A WordPress plugin to add links to RSS feeds.

On pages 165-166 of WordPress 2: Visual QuickStart Guide, Miraz and I discuss CG-Feedread, a plugin that enables you to list the titles (with links) of posts on another blog based on RSS feed content. We use the plugin on this site to list content from Miraz’s Mactips.info site and my An Eclectic Mind site.

I hate to admit it, but I never really liked that plugin. It came as part of a package and I was only interested in that one part. So today, while attempting to add the same feature to two of my WordPress-based sites, I looked for a different, simpler solution. And I found it: RSSImport by Frank Bueltge.

RSSImport is a one-trick pony. It enables you to add a list of posts from any RSS feed. There are four options: the number of posts to list, the URL of the feed, whether the list should include descriptions, and whether the post title should be truncated to 30 characters.

You install and activate the plugin like any other plugin. (You can refer to Chapter 7 of our book or consult the documentation that comes with the file if you need help.) Then place the following code in your template file — most likely sidebar.php — where you want the list to appear:

<?php RSSImport(10,
"http://feeds.feedburner.com/mariasguides"
,false,false); ?>

The options go between the parentheses. In this example, I’ll pull 10 posts from the Maria’s Guides feed, exclude the description, and disable the 30-character limit on posts. The result looks like this on An Eclectic Mind. As you can see, I included a heading before the code so the list would blend in with the rest of my sidebar content.

And if you look on the Maria’s Guides site, you’ll see a similar list for an Eclectic Mind. (The two sites used to be one and they’re still somewhat “joined at the hip.”)

I recommend the plugin if you’re looking for a simple solution to list another blog’s posts. But if you want to list multiple blogs’ posts in the same list, CG-Feedread is probably a better solution.