Fun times doing laundry and WordPress upgrades. Should do some hard drive installs today, too.

A happy belated birthday to my sister-in-law, Cindy, whom I did get a call into yesterday on my way to Chattanooga.

The Eric Peters / Andrew Peterson / Andy Gullahorn / Jill Phillips show last night rocked. [I'm probably going to be in trouble with Rick for not telling him about the show when he reads this.] I’m going to see Caedmon’s Call play on Thursday. My body rebels at the thought, but I also think I’ll get back from there before 0300 on Friday morning … unlike last night.

And yes, if you’re thinking that I’m testing the Timezone plugin with this entry, you’re right.

A couple weeks ago, Stephen pointed me to Kimmo Suominen’s Timezone plugin, which works with known timezone-setting protocols [almost always rolled into the operating system of the server] to do Daylight Saving Time changes. I’m testing it here on IJSM.org [read: I won't fiddle with my timezones tonight when I get back from Chattanooga], and we’ll see how it goes. I’m hopeful. If so, I’ll roll it out across my entire server chock-full of WP installs…

It works!

Part of me looks on at the new WordPress Widgets with derision: “Oh, great … more fancy-dancy geegaws that distract everyone while some architectural codebase issues go unsolved and good ideas go unaddressed.” Or, well, a mature feed format unsupported.

The rest of me—the part that’s a pragmatist and that really loves WordPress for what it can do, and not what it doesn’t do—loves the idea. Giving end-users flexibility? Awesome. Limiting the amount of time users need to be coding? Great!

Holler if I broke anything, here or anywhere else on my sites.

Well, we’ll see how sucktastic this turns out to be: I’m leveraging del.icio.us’s ability to pass along your links via XML-RPC to your XML-RPC-aware logware of choice—mine being WordPress—to push my del.icio.us links here. I guess this means I should start putting more commentary in my links. :sigh:

First dump should happen at 2300 local tonight. Here goes nothin’! [Oh, and it's thanks to this HOWTO on dumping your del.icio.us links into WordPress, which is missing one key component: in Step 3, you'll find the Experimental section only if you're editing your settings. Well-written HOWTOs are, indeed, hard-to-find---mainly because they're hard-to-do!]

I know what WordPress needs: they need an independent young Weblogger/journalist wanna-be to chronicle anything and everything about WordPress—positive mentions, switchers, complaints, requests, interviews with WP developers, and news about the venture capital powering WP these days.

If you use WordPress and want to spend 2-3 hours a day sifting through Technorati searches, etc., you could make yourself one hell of a niche market with a weblog about WordPress. It would eventually be a positive thing for the community, I feel.

I’m throwing that out there because I sure as hell have neither the time nor the desire to take it on.

Like most any user of WordPressDash, I have to tell you that this is the first post made with it. It’s pure goofiness to do so, but … oh, what the hell … it’s the Internet.

I will now leave the house, set off the alarm, and forage for food. When I come back, the alarm will be my bitch…

After reading Alex’s entry about page titles, I’ve flipped the wp_title() and the bloginfo() callouts on my single-entry template. The title will now appear first. On this entry, it will be: Page Title Inversion @ The Indiana Jones School of Management. I think that works better.

Note that wp_title() has a default separator of » that will trip you up if you don’t know it’s there, and the separator shows up before the post title. [Not good, I say!] If you put make it wp_title(”), though, you won’t have a separator at all. You’ll need to hardcode a separator between wp_title() and bloginfo(), though.

If, like me, you get a lot of utility out of Bad Behavior, support Bad Behavior 2 financially! Michael made a compelling argument for me to support him financially, which I’ve personally found is all people really need to support you. [That's a whole other entry, really.]

I brought Michael 5% closer to his goal. I hope there are 19 other folks like me who want to homestead the noósphere.

In just under six days of running Bad Behavior again on GFMorris.org, I’ve got 38MB of data in that table alone. Zoinks! Of course, I was also getting some kind of wicked referral spam run, averaging 10-15 spams a minute, all day long. For a while, I was going in to block the clowns with iptables—such are the joys of being the server’s systems administrator—but I found myself unable to keep up. I’d go with just the first page of IPs, ignoring duplicates, and by the time I got to refresh, I had at least another page worth of crap to re-ban. I finally just gave up … it’s not like the attacks are being effective, but I guess I’d like a way to ban obvious IP drones from touching my server. Today it’s referral spam … tomorrow, it could be hacking attempts. :shrug:

I’m again using Bad Behavior here. Thanks go out to Mike and Kari for testing the install I had on GFMorris.org and seeing that their issues were resolved.

In addition, I’m running Ajay D’Souza’s Bad Behavior Stats plugin purely for my own amusement. You have my thanks, Ajay.

Oh, and Michael Hampton has published a what-to-do when you or someone you know gets blocked by Bad Behavior. Handy!

I am now officially Alex’s bitch: not only do I personally use Tasks and FeedLounge, but I have a TasksPro install for [rocksmyfaceoff.net] and, as of yesterday, a UseTasks install for the UAH SGA House Rules Committee.

All this because of WordPress. WordPress is the marijuana of the personal productivity software marketplace.

I just activated my invitation to WordPress.com: Geof’s Relentless Kvetching About WordPress. If WP-related entries have been noise for you, then good; if everything else here has been noise for you, then good as well.

If you think this whole place is noise, well … I’m not making you read it, am I?

I’ve had to temporarily disable Bad Behavior; something about 1.2.1 didn’t like a number of my users. Now, it’s quite likely that the issues do fall on their end, but in the meantime, I’d rather field more comment spam and not inconvenience my users. Generally, I go for the solutions that inconvenience me less, but frankly, it’s more convenient for me to handle comment spam than it is for my users to be unable to reach their own Weblogs.

I’m sure something will work out soon and I’ll be back to being a happy BB user.

A couple of thoughts just occurred to me, so I’ll publish them while I’m thinking of them. They’re related.

• Right now, most every WordPress install has a meta element in the head area that echoes the version of WordPress. Now, as a recovering phpBB administrator, I’m reminded of something phpBB did after 2.0.13 or so: they removed making the version public. Now, doing that provides security by obscurity, but there’s value to it—hackers can Google for possibly exploitable versions of software where lazy adminstrators haven’t kept up with the upgrade process. Why make it easy for them? I think this should be gone.
• In place of this meta element, it would be wonderful for the WP guys to set up Ping-O-Matic to handle such things in pings, which could then be forwarded to some server at WordPress World Headquarters. I mean, WP is Matt [and Ryan], and POM is Dougal [and Matt], so … synergy, people! If you want the stats, come up with a less obtrusive way to get it. [Plus, far fewer people will go to hack this out of their pings than are likely to remove the meta statement.
• Lastly, to help the lazy amongst us WP admins, we should have a blaringly obvious content block---in yellow or red, depending on the severity---that does a quick lookup of the latest WordPress revision from wordpress.org and spits out a short statement, with links to the Codex with instructions on upgrading. This is also something that phpBB did inside the Administrator Control Panel.

With WordPress's fine support for technology that pulls and pushes data around the messy web, seems like all these are things easily done. Why do I suggest them? Well, in many cases, folks running things like WordPress and phpBB are doing so only after other people have installed them. They're either unfamiliar with, afraid of, or incompetent at installing server scripts. Scaring Supplying them with warnings will have them look up the people who did the support for them in the first place, and that'll be a good thing in the long run, I believe.

[A good thing for everyone but the poor saps who do the script installs. However, I'm one of those guys...]