Oops Tuesday 2008-04-01
What happened to this blog of mine?
If you are my reader, I can assure you that this uncluttered and rudimentary look is only temporary and for experimental reasons.
Yours truly!
/Petit
Post Scriptum:
Should you have returned after the reset to standard template, please just disregard this message.
[Edit] Well, it’s back 
WordPress 2.5 Released Monday 2008-03-31
A safe and heavy 2.5 version of WordPress is released and installed here at petitpub.com.
As usual upgrading along the lines of the three step upgrade process went without problems.
Hopefully I will be able to redesign the Dashboard or at least the Write Post page. In earlier versions I had all widgets for setting tags, allowing pings, selecting category and creating a slug to the right of the input field. Now they are by default below the scribble area, and I have to scroll down to do that.
We’ll see!
WordPress Shot in the Foot Saturday 2007-03-03
This is to alert you to immediately update your WP 2.1.1 installation, if you downloaded and installed that version lately.
As I wrote, not long ago “WordPress is Secure Blogging“. However destructors traveling cyberspace are getting cleverer each day. If you cannot penetrate the installed blogging platform, why not attack and change the distribution?
According to word from the WordPress blog
Long story short: If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately.
Longer explanation: This morning we received a note to our security mailing address about unusual and highly exploitable code in WordPress. The issue was investigated, and it appeared that the 2.1.1 download had been modified from its original code. We took the website down immediately to investigate what happened.
So, earlier versions of WordPress are not affected, and bloggers at wordpress.com are safe too. Only if you installed WP 2.1.1 lately, go ahead and install the update now!
WordPress is Secure Blogging Thursday 2007-02-22
There is high security awareness in the team developing WordPress. Today, the 30 days new 2.1 version is getting a maintenance upgrade to 2.1.1, mainly containing smaller bug fixes, but also some security measures. For the earlier 2.0 version, which had its latest maintenance as 2.0.7 at the same time, there’s now a 2.0.9 security upgrade.
It’s really nice to be in good hands,and whether you took the bold step from WP 2.0 to the famed 2.1 or stayed with the 2.0, you should take the new face lift.
Just make sure you select the correct upgrade.
Spammers Go Away Wednesday 2007-01-24
Yeah, they really should disappear. I have Akismet installed for the benefit of my blog and my occasional readers. During the fairly long time I had it installed not a single spam comment has slipped through. Hurray for that!
It is still annoying, to have to log in to the admin page and delete spam messages on a daily basis.
Yes of course I’m spoiled. Just came to think about it. What if the wizards behind Akismet hadn’t done such an ingenious work, my gosh! I would have waded in spam comments spread out all over my blog, even contaminating old posts, that I had already given a good cleaning. Now I find them gathered in Aiksmet’s own container, and can select to browse them or kill them on sight.
Until this day Akismet has caught 8999 spammy messages, after todays record amount of 218.
I’m really happy about this neat and effective catch and destroy tool.
Most common fake comment lately is
Actually i am not an active serfer, but this this site is really great, i will spread it through my friends.
No, whoever you are, you are not a “serfer” at all. You are a dumb program sending dumb messages from fake adresses to make my blog unreadable. You’ll not succeed, but as the unnecessary piece of code you are, you don’t care. So what am I doing here, talking to evil code somewhere. Here endest that silliness 
[Edit 01-27] Oh, I love inventions, don’t you? Today I got a really nice spamment, which wasn’t caught by Akismet, because a machine would find it reasonable.
It goes like this:
I always have terrible trouble with comment-related plugins that require me to put some line in the comment loop; I can never seem to find the right spot. Can anyone tell me where I should put the php line in my comments loop? I haven not modified anything much, and I would be very grateful. Thanks!
I certainly could have been tricked into letting it through from my second defense line, the moderation queue. If it hadn’t been for the stupidity to send the same comment to three different posts. Then again I’m not that good at PHP anyway.
Your Words Travel the World Thursday 2007-01-11
By automatic syndication and by your loyal subscribing readers, the words you write, will travel far and wide. And fast! They may meet and influence people of different age and sex and from different cultures. Manuel Amador of weblog tools collection has written an interesting essay, “The wonderful journey of a blog post“, on this very subject.
It is humbling, and it makes you think ( again ), on your own blogging efforts. Is what I write about interesting enough? Would anything of it offend someone? In short, do I care about my readers enough?
Well, I promise to try. For now, I’ll say no more. Read the article and get amazed!
WordPress Updated Sunday 2006-10-29
In the anticipation of the 2.1 version of WordPress, here comes the bug fixed and polished 2.05 version.
If you don’t use the WordPress blogging tool, you should just download this version and follow the install instructions.
Chances are, that you already run the 2.04 version, and in that case you’ll get away cheep Mark on WordPress has put together a page with a Changed Files List, and what’s even brighter, he have made a diff file, containing all files that has changed since 2.04. You can download it in a ZIP archive from the same page, and just upload them to your old installation. You should the run the update script to get everything running again. If you don’t however, you will be reminded and offered an update link. Just click and you’re on the air again!
Really nice job Mark!
Truth in Blogging Friday 2006-09-15
And of course an good way of getting links, and promoting sponsors
The moving Flickr API Thursday 2006-09-14
I like free services like the Flickr image sharing service, and I’m not alone. Not only is it a easy way of sharing your photos with anyone connected to the Internet. You can choose who has access to your images or some of them, you can get them commented on if you are so inclined. And new ways for presenting your images pops up quite often. It’s a popular service and developers come up with innovative applications for selecting and presenting images all the time.
The applications rest on public API:s for authentication, and request for images in different sizes and other criteria, as how they are tagged, how popular they are, who owns the image, and so forth.
There is a problem with this, if the service endpoint, i.e. the URL of the service, is hard coded into the application. For my own flickr badge, called petikr I noticed a whilde ago, that it ceased to show any images. I thought the service was temporarily down, or bogged down. I am ashamed to admit, I didn’t discover until today, that the damage was permanent.
Sorry if you have problems with it! It is fixed now.
I googled for “flash flickr stopped working”, to see if someone had the same problem. Oh, yes. And some of them knew why and had the solution, like Doug Marttila at “Forest and Trees“, author of findr. Flickr changed its service endpoint just slightly.
I wrote a tutorial on how to build your own Flickr Flash Display, in quite a few steps, each having its own demo. all of them was compiled using Kelvin Lucks Flashr wrapper for the API. The API endpoints needed by the application is hard coded into the Flicks class of the library.
I did a lot of experimenting with Flashr at the time, and now I had to find all the correct versions of the example in my tutorial, and recompile them using the same version of the flashr library, updated with the new service endpoint.
That is hard work, and although it is nice not to have external setup files, I think maybe one should. Flash can easily read in data from a text file, XML based or not. It is good for volatile data such as developing protocols or moving web services.
Akismet Jubilee Monday 2006-09-11
Hurrah!!
My Akismet has just cought it’s 500:th spam, and not one slipped through.
Time to celebrate.
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