Archive for the 'WordPress' category

WordPress is currently preparing a new version 2.3 that will bring new possibilities to work together (multi-author blogs and web sites) and to enrich the articles/posts.

We should see the final 2.3 version on September 20th.

You may remark (or may not) the appearance of a new feature on this web site: on each individual post page, there is now a little list of similar articles. It is intended to help you discover new articles that you may not know but are related to the post your are reading at this time.

Have fun!

For the interested WordPress users, I can tell that to get this feature I used the “related_posts” plugin of Wasabi.

Some advice provided by Donncha for those who would like to move from PHP4 to PHP5 on a server supporting WordPress exploitation. Nothing big, but it is always good to check the items she points at:

• Location of PHP.INI
• Update to mysql and gd libraries
• Compatibility with WP-cache

Authors of a web site sometimes (more and more often) find themselves in the difficult situation where the content of their site is “borrowed” by someone else. I just found a very helpful and detailled post by Lorelle (”What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content“) that explains what to do and how to react. My best recommendation to any blog writer.

It is well known that the human brain has pattern matching capabilities much further advanced than those of the best equivalent software programs. This explains that failure rates of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program may be as high as 1% (or even 2%) of errors, which is requiring later human proof-reading to ensure a reasonable quality for document scans. But when the document is old, badly printed, or degraded, error rates may climb further into the unusable (even more so when we address the scan of thousands of documents like is done by libraries and cultural institutions all over the world).

On another issue, the SPAM problem on the Internet became a major problem: Prorams try to make believe that they are human beings in order to insert advertisment anywhere a user can write (in the messages of a forum, in the comments of a blog, etc). For some time now, it became common that human users must identify themselves by their capacity to recognize a badly written word. Theoretically, this is a very efficient Turing test allowing to differentiate a human from a machine only by the results of their actions. Practically, the abilities of software programs have become so impressive that SPAM is slowly coming back again through those filters named CAPTCHAs (those images that you must read and copy back in order to be identified and approved for a specific action).

The problem appears to be: create CAPTCHA tremendously difficult for the automated software and, simultaneously, bring human beings to the task of checking scans of documents difficult to read by program.

The solution: reCAPTCHA.

The idea is to provide a CAPTCHA service to thousands of bloggers and forum administrators (WordPress, phpBB, etc.) Users are invited to recognize two words specifically difficult to read (profesional OCR programs failed during scans done by Carnegie Mellon University). The user must recognize them both. One is used to check that this is a human being, the other will fill a database of OCR translations that will be used to deliver even more CAPTCHAs and to improve the quality of a document scanned by Carnegie Mellon. Dual core technology: efficiently fight spammers and deliver millions of human users to improve the scan quality of thousands of ancient documents (without using slave labor).

Example of a difficult to read/scan document:

One of the key advantages is that most pro OCR programs can tell when they fail to recognize a character or a word (when they are not confident enough).

Being propulsed to the home page of a famous web site like SlashDot or Digg is intensely satisfying for the author of a blog, but it usually results in an intense traffic storm for your server that may not survive to the typhoon even if it comes from friends.

DownloadSquad grouped some ideas on how to optimise your WordPress site around this risk or when you fall under that kind of pressure.

I just installed a WordPress plugin to make Roumazeilles.net usable from a mobile phone (WordPress Mobile). If you want to test and tell me about problem, you’ll be thanked.

When, as I do, you want to include some bits and pieces of software code in a WordPress post, it starts to become a serious headache. As a matter of fact, WP has not really been prepared for this and it creates a number of issues. Those I already encountered here:

• The <?php tend to disappear (unless you start juggling)
• Some charcaters would not display at all (or badly)
• The overall presentation is pretty bland if you use <code>

So, I looked for a plugin (nearly everything in WordPress is done by adding on of those marvellous little code gems that can be included in a few seconds into the basic configuration) adapted to this task, easy to install (I don’t want to be stuck with heavy maintenance just for this), easy to use.

Here is the summary of what I checked and my opinion regarding them.
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Favicon’s are those little icon files that you place at the root of your web site. They display in Internet Explorer along with your bookmarks, in Opera and Firefox on the address bar near to the address of the site you visit.

When you want to produce a favicon for your web site, you probably do not want to loose a lot of time. I selected a small free software that takes a few simple graphics and transforms them in a small icon (it tells you the best choice of size and colors for a true favicon):

Simple and to the point. Exactly what you need in such a case.

I did not yet have time to evaluate it formally but, on the paper, it seems that YAPB (Yet another photo blog) is a plugin allowing ot easily build a photoblog based upon WordPress (the size of thumbnails is configurable, WordPress themes are still usable, but there is no galery).

One rule: One image, one title, one description.

Worth evaluating. Worth downloading.

In the spotlight: Sony Alpha 900 Canon EOS 5D Mk II Nikon D700 FX Download Nero for free

Webcron is an automated task service at set hours. If you know Unix or Linux you already heard about the Crontab. Webcron is a Web adaptation of this well-known Crontab. But nothing complicated at all!

Webcron allows you to do tasks at set hours by looking for a page on your website. For example, save your database, therefore you only have to prepare a script database_save.php that saves the database to a file. Add then a task to you Webcron to do the http://www.domaine.com/sauvegarde_base.php request.

Very simple and recommended.

I recently checked the log files for my web site roumazeilles.net and I stopped to look at the share of the different tools used by the users of the RSS feeds of the site:

It seems that the FireFox users are clearly in love with RSS feed (independently of the Operating System they use).