Adrian Parr's Blog

Hooray! I finally got around to updating WordPress on my blog. I had been running version 2.5 for ages and just couldn’t find the time to update it, even though I knew I should. This afternoon I successfully upgraded to version 3.0.4

I just love it when things work! Respect to the developers at WordPress for making the upgrade process so simple.

This morning my blog got hacked by someone calling themselves M0µ34d. Luckily I spotted it quickly and managed to remove it quite easily (they had somehow added an ‘index.html’ file which takes precedence over ‘index.php’ on the webserver). I have no idea why I was targeted by these political hackers, I guess they just have some code that hunts down security holes in WordPress and take advantage. Maybe I had better make time to upgrade my installed version of WordPress to the latest release. Fingers crossed that will help. I should also do a new backup of the site and database just in case.

A fellow Flasher/Flexer over at GUYA.NET also spotted the hack very quickly.

Normal service can now resume.

Test blog post from my iPhone.

I love you WP-SpamFree!

For ages I was getting tons of spam in my WordPress comments (email notifications that the comments were ready for moderation and approval). I was getting dozens and dozens of emails a day telling me that I had more and more comments ready to approve. It was driving me crazy.

So I tried installing the Akismet WordPress plugin after obtaining an API key (though had a bit of a problem for a while and was getting an error message). Eventually I got it to work, but a lot of spam was still getting through. Grrrrrr….

Then I came across the WP-SpamFree plugin. I installed it and almost immediately the spam stopped. I’ve had it installed now for several weeks and I don’t think I have had a single spam comment since (touch wood).

If your WordPress blog is suffering from excessive comment spam I highly recommend you install it.

Go get it now from either the developer’s website or the official WordPress plugin directory.

I have just installed the XHTML Video Embed plugin for WordPress, written by SaltwaterC.

It allows you to embed Flash videos from sites like YouTube and Google Video in to your WordPress blog easily, and the resulting HTML code will be XHTML compliant.The syntax is as follows …

Here is a test, using Philip Kerman’s Why ActionScript 3.0? video.

This is a test post from Goolge Docs.

I have just read about doing this on the Web Worker Daily website.

Let’s see if it works.

Hooray, at last I have found a WordPress plugin that displays ActionScript just how I want. I’ve tried about four different plugins now and there was always something not quite right about them. What I wanted was;

• code to be displayed in a block
• ActionScript syntax highlighting (using something like GeSHi)
• line numbering
• ability to copy and paste the code without copying the line numbers
• long lines of code to not break out of the display block (to use horizontal scroll bars on long lines)
• ability to set a maximum height of display block (then use vertical scroll bars)
• keep code indented

Here are some of the plugins that I used at start with, and found that each of them had a problem with at least one of the above requirments;

• Dean’s Code Highlighter
• Code Snippet
• CodeHighlighter

Finally, the that I have settled on is called CodeColorer by Dmytro Shteflyuk. This seems to do all of the above, and was pretty easy to install and tweak. More info can be found on Dmytro’s personal site. So all the code blocks that you see on this blog are formatted using the CodeColorer plugin.

To use the CodeColorer plugin, simply wrap your code in the following tags …

<code lang=”actionscript”>

</code>

UPDATE 11/04/08

I have now turned off line numbering, because the numbers were being copied and pasted into peoples ActionScript editor when visitors tried to get the source code.

Also, there is still a slight issue with this plugin. When you want to go back and Edit a post, you are automatically taken to the ‘Visual’ editor. Switching between ‘Visual’ and ‘Code’ mode breaks the syntax highlighting.

So if anyone know of a really solid code syntax highlighter, then I’d still like to hear about it.

This is a test blog post using Deepest Sender (Firefox extension).

This is my first test post to my new WordPress blog. Hooray!!