Danny Tsang » WordPress

New 2011 WordPress Theme

Danny — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 09:45:57 +0000

Today I have finally published the new theme I have been working.

I wanted to try and update the look and feel of the site to something more modern and try using some CSS3 techniques. HTML 5 canvas was planned but I never got round to using it.

I’m sure there will be some bugs so do not hesitate to contact me or leave a comment if you find one.

Remove WordPress Default Admin Account

Danny — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 16:19:27 +0000

A good security tip is to remove the default “admin” account that is installed by default. Before doing so create a new user who also has the role Administrator.

When deleting an account such as the admin one, WordPress can re-assign all the post under that account to the any account including the new administrators account.

The only thing I had to do was use a different email address when creating the new user and then change it back to the original once the admin user was deleted.

Take 5 Minutes to Make WordPress 10 Times More Secure

WordPress – Your Browser Is Out Of Date

Danny — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 21:30:01 +0000

Never knew it was WordPress’s job to keep your browser up to date:

WordPress Twitter Tools Shows Blank Page On Connect

Danny — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 05:57:25 +0000

Overview

I use the Twitter Tools plugin on WordPress to tweet my blog posts as well as showing my Tweets in my side bar. The recent change to oAuth and disabling basic authentication by Twitter has made the process slightly more cumbersome to get working. Having said that the Twitter Tools settings page does a good job of guiding users to setting it up correctly.

The problem I had was that it wasn’t getting the API keys but at the end where it says Connect to Twitter After pressing it a blank page would show.

Solution – cURL

Install PHP cURL. This is very simple:
sudo apt-get install php5-curl
Enable the plugin in Apache and reload it to make the changes take affect:
sudo a2enmod php-curl
sudo service apache2 reload or for older versions:
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

Twitter Tools Support

WordPress Upload File IO Error

Danny — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 12:31:47 +0000

Just tried to upload files for the first time on my newly installed LAMP service but got an error message on the upload dialogue box saying IO Error in red.

A work around is to use the browser upload which only allows you to select one file at a time to upload.

To fix the issue, upgrade your browser’s Adobe Flash plugin.

WordPress 3.0

Danny — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 21:28:52 +0000

Just upgraded to version 3 of WordPress. Visually the default admin panel has been tweaked. It’s too soon to tell what’s been added without going through the release notes.

WordPress 2.9.2

Danny — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 20:35:53 +0000

Minor update to WordPress. Related posts: WordPress 3.1 Update. WordPress 2.8.3 WordPress 2.3 Upgrade (Update) Related posts:

WordPress Avatar

Danny — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:01:05 +0000

To get an avatar to work in WordPress you need to sign up for an account on Gravatar’s website. Make sure the email address matches the email set in the user profile.

Gravatar’s website

WordPress Incorrect Username / Password With VSFTP

Danny — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:25:44 +0000

I was getting an error logging into my FTP/SFTP server via WordPress when I tried to upgrade a plugin or two. It was saying the username / password was incorrect yet I was able to log in using an FTP client.

I checked all my config settings for both VSFTP and Apache but ended up restarting both services which made it work. I did not see any errors in VSFTP logs and no relevant entries in Apache. One those strange occurrences I guess.

WordPress 2.9.1 Deployed

Danny — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 21:46:30 +0000

I have rolled out the latest version of WordPress to 2.9.1

WordPress 2.9 Released

Danny — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 12:34:43 +0000

I have upgraded to WP 2.9 with no problems. I only had one plugin which was not compatible with the new version. Related posts: WordPress 2.6.1 Upgrade Plugin Problem With WordPress 2.3 WordPress 3.0 Related posts:

WP 2.8.5

Danny — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:17:56 +0000

Upgraded to WordPress 2.8.5. A bit late spotting this release

Another WordPress Security Patch

Danny — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 19:29:02 +0000

I missed this one by 2 days but it’s now on 2.8.4 Related posts: WordPress 2.5 Upgrade Hectic WordPress 2.1 Related posts:

WordPress 2.8.3

Danny — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 19:12:44 +0000

Another minor revision of WordPress has come out and installed.

WP Upgrade

Danny — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 22:03:44 +0000

It only felt like 2.8.1 came out but now 2.8.2 is out and patched here.

WordPress 2.8.1 broke my automatic upgrade

WordPress 2.8.1

Danny — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 17:51:09 +0000

Upgraded to 2.8.1. Had trouble upgrading it automatically so I did it manually which worked. Related posts: TomTom 6.15 WordPress 2.9 Released WordPress 2.0.4 > 2.0.5 Related posts:

WordPress 2.8 Update

Danny — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 18:50:35 +0000

It’s been coming and now it’s out and running on this blog. WordPress 2.8

Automatic WordPress Upgrade To 2.7.1

Danny — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:40:44 +0000

My blog is running 2.7.1 but this was a special upgrade for me. I used the automatic button instead of doing it manually. I had never trusted the automatic process as I have heard horror stories of broken WordPress websites.

I did it because I have to go to work to minutes ago and the the fact that the automatic plugin upgrades have been working out very well. As usual I took the precaution of backing EVERYTHING up but I did not have to use it. Thumbs up to the WordPress people.

WordPress Built-In Media Library Non Relative Links

Danny — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:01:34 +0000

I have encountered a problem with the way the built-in media manager inserts media into WordPress blogs.

Normally when I upload and embed / link to photos or other media which are hosted on the same web server I use relative links. For example /images/example.jpg

This has the advantage of when I’m moving between domains the web content would not be affected as long as the example.jpg is in the image directory which is in the root of the website.

WordPress’s way of doing things are by absolute referencing. It inserts the domain + the path of the image like http://www.dannytsang.co.uk/images/example.jpg
This means that if I change my web address from http://www.dannytsang.co.uk to http://www.dannytsang.com the example.jpg would not load because the .co.uk domain would not exist any more (presuming I did not renew or host the site on that domain once I had it on the .com domain).

Of course the media manager would need to add the domain if it was on a different website but there is no option to enable or disable the absolute linking on the built-in WordPress media manager. This has lead me to update a bunch of pages on this site in order for the images and other media to load.

There needs to be an option to switch between the two types of referencing.

WordPress Thumbnail Generation Greyed Out

Danny — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 10:19:13 +0000

I create a new install of WordPress and as I was writing up a post or two I noticed the thumbnail options were greyed out and only allowed me to insert my images full sized. The problem was a missing graphics library called GD in PHP. In Ubuntu 8.04 use
sudo apt-get install php5-gd
and restart the Apache server to load the library
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Re-upload the image and the option should be available.

Ubuntu Forum post