I’ve been working on an interesting new project involving WordPress, and while I was looking for a plugin to display theme thumbnail images, I found a whole bunch of very cool stuff! Here’s a list of what I found, in no particular order:

• All in One SEO Pack - A simple and very powerful plugin to manage all the items that make your site attractive to the search engines. You can set the meta tags for your blog’s home page and for any individual page.
• Sabre - To protect your signup process from automated signup bots. You can enable captcha (where the user types in a security code) or a math test to verify the visitor is human.
• WassUp - Peek at what your visitors are doing while they visit your blog. This is a supplement to a normal statistics program (like Google Analytics) and has some really nice features, such as who is on your site right now, and what pages have been viewed recently.
• WordPress Automatic Upgrade - Makes a backup of your blog files and database, downloads the latest version of WordPress, and sends you to the upgrade page for completion. Updating doesn’t get much simpler than this! It’s important to keep up with the latest versions, so this is a really great tool to have!
• WordPress phpMyAdmin - Gives direct access to all of the contents of your database. Very useful, but also a potential disaster… don’t use empty, drop, or delete unless you mean to do it and know what will happen!

So there you have it, some very useful plugins. As always, let us know if you want one of these or any other plugins installed. We’re happy to help!

Cookies are files placed on your computer by web sites, and they can be used to track your movements online. Many of the large advertising networks use cookies to see what kinds of sites you visit, so they can target their ads to your interests. If you would like to opt-out of this kind of tracking, here’s a site to do it:

Network Advertising Initiative

Simply check the advertisers from which you wish to opt-out, and you’re all set! You may want to visit this on a fairly regular basis, or if you delete your cookies for some reason, because you have to accept their cookie in order to opt-out.

For even more ways to opt-out of advertising, see this article: World Privacy Forum’s Top Ten Opt Outs

For all of you database nuts out there…

Exploits of a Mom

Thanks goes out to Bleys for this little tidbit.

Here’s a really neat site where you can load an image and get a color scheme from the colors in the image. Way cool!

colr.org

One of our clients has several Microsoft Access databases which we developed, and when I need to work on them, we email the files back and forth. Recently, his email program has started renaming the attached files!! For some reason, it comes through named as database.zlh instead of database.mdb. So I did a little digging and it looks like some program along the way is doing that for protection, to prevent viruses, trojans and such. Here’s an article which details the different extensions given to files when they’re being automatically renamed. I’m still not sure which program is doing this, but it’s good to know why it’s happening and to be assured that the contents are not being changed, just the name. The solution is to give the file the proper extension when saving the attachment.

A while back, I agreed to particpate in Blog Action Day, a movement to get everyone thinking about the environment.

One of my favorite ways to save the planet is to reduce usage of paper. It’s easy to do! The first step I took was to get myself off the mailing lists by going to Optout Prescreen to stop getting credit card offers in the mail, and then I did all of the forms at CDT.org. These two things practically eliminated all of our junk mail. And the junk mail we do get goes into the recycle bin rather than the trash. Perhaps these things can leave more trees for hugging! And that’s always good.

Do you have any favorite ways to save the planet? We would love to hear about them in the comments.

We’ve had some of our web site maintenance customers since 1999, and boy, a lot has changed in the web world since then! One of our cleanup tasks is to help people get their sites onto updated servers, like we did for one of our clients this weekend. It went very smoothly except for the database. It turned out the original format of the database was no longer compatible with the new MySQL software. Support was able to fix it, no problem. So, that made me think of the important things you need to consider when you’re moving to a new web server.

• Email Addresses - Be aware that all of your pop3 users (people who pick up their email directly from the server) will need to change settings in their email programs. If the email addresses are forwarded, you probably won’t have to do anything.
• Server Name or Program Paths in Scripts - Many web site programs have configuration settings that depend on the internal settings of your particular web host. Chances are, these settings are not the same from server to server, so you’ll need to check your software for places to update server settings. A program path example would be the location of sendmail - this client has cgi scripts which use sendmail, and one of its settings is the location of the sendmail program files on the server. The old server had /usr/lib/sendmail, and the new host has /usr/sbin/sendmail. A subtle change but it managed to break every program that sends mail, which is no good! Just a few tweaks set it right, though.
• Database and Software Versions - Some features in older versions of software may no longer exist in the new software, like what happened to the database in today’s project. There was another small problem of the same sort, and that’s detailed below. So be aware - upgraded web software may break some of your programming… hopefully only things that are simple to fix!

The problem that brought on this post was a change to the htaccess handling on the new server. For the next time I have to do this sort of thing, here’s what had to be changed…

Old .htaccess:
Options +Includes
AddType text/x-server-parsed-html .html
AddType text/x-server-parsed-html .htm
AddType application/x-httpd-cgi .cgi

New .htaccess:
Options +INCLUDES
AddOutputFilter INCLUDES html htm

Oh, and one other thing of which you want to be absolutely sure of before you change servers - have a good backup copy of your site!! The importance of having a complete backup cannot be underestimated. Wacky things can happen, and if you’re prepared, chances are likely you could at least get back to where you were before the upgrade.

With a little preparation and planning, you can have a smooth transition from one server to another. As always, contact us if you need help upgrading your web hosting. We’re glad to help!