Scott Yang's Playground

Last time it took 20 minutes for someone to snap up my WordPress.com invitation. This morning when I logged on, and found they gave me another one. Then I remembered that Glenn wanted one, so I dispatched mine straight to him. However, it spilled error back to me, saying that he has already been invited, [...]

Three weeks ago I blogged about WordPress.com‘s invitation, and today I received the following email: A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away you entered your email address on http://wordpress.com/ to get a blog. We’re now inviting small groups to use WordPress.com and your email address was selected today! Yeah! So here we [...]

I hate referrer spams.

Moved! I have moved this project to my programming/Internet blog — Search Excerpt WordPress Plugin. WordPress’ searching capability is a bit mediocre at the moment. It splits up the keywords, digs out texts using SQL LIKE statement, and returns all entries that match the criteria, in a reverse chronological order. Then the default template will [...]

Matt announced about the invites you need to be part of the recently announced WordPress.com. You cannot just “sign-up” to this latest WordPress based service. You will need an invite, just like how you usually get onto sites like Orkut, Gmail or Yahoo 360. Except the catch is — everyone will only have one invite. [...]

As I was blogging about the latest Drupal security update, and how slow the WordPress team reacts to security exploits, WordPress 1.5.2 was released by Matt, Ryan and co, fixing 10 bugs according to Trac milestone.

As discussed on Slashdot, is another PHP library vulnerability that affects PEAR’s XML-RPC module. James at GulfTech has demonstrated this vulnerability with an exploit. It turns out the PHP XML-RPC library uses eval() without checking, which allows arbitary PHP code to be executed if the XML-RPC message is cleverly crafted.

Last week I looked at the option of adding sponsored links via AdSense to this site. So far I am getting around 5 bucks from the clicks. Not too bad I guess, but at the same time it is far from covering my Internet bandwidth. An interesting exercise nevertheless, as it was my very first [...]

Spotted from the WordPress “Dashboard” that WordPress 1.5.1.3 has just been released with a security fix on “xmlrpc.php“, the code that handles XML-RPC requests so you can manage your blogs using tools like w.bloggar and ecto. Currently I am managing almost 20 WordPress 1.5 installations on FOCUSer.net (still having around 6 stubborn users that are [...]

Bad Behavior plugin for WordPress, not your usual content-analysing comment spam filters, but it looks at HTTP traffic and browsing behaviour to determine whether the incoming request is a human or a bot. I have installed it for 2 weeks, and had dramatically reduced not only comment/trackback spams, but also referral log spams. Great plugin!

A bug regarding to “404 Not Found” handling has been reported by James, and I’ve patched Permalink Redirect WordPress plugin this moring to 0.3. Download the latest here. Changes: Do not try to redirect in a 404 situation.

This is an update for my permalink redirect WordPress plugin. Download the latest version here. Changes: Handle ?m=yyyymmdd style query string. Suggested by Mark. Handle pages. Suggested by Chris. Handle archive by author.

Sick of that massive Apache mod_rewrite rules generated by WordPress to have user-friendly URLs? Annoyed by the fact that you need to re-generate all these rules and save them into your already-crowded .htaccess file, when a “page” is created or re-named in WP? Try the following rules, and it’ll fix mod_rewrite woes once for all. [...]

Moved! I have moved this project to my new programming/Internet blog — Permalink Redirect WordPress plugin. About I am not sure why the WordPress people insist that, GET /2005/05/29/foo-bar HTTP/1.1 is exactly the same as GET /2005/05/29/foo-bar/ HTTP/1.1 If you have not spotted the difference, one has a trailing forward slash ‘/’ in the URI [...]

I have recently installed two WordPress plugins to slightly enhance the visual of comments. Gravatars – uses the globally recognised avatar to display a 48×48 image next to each comment to identify its poster. IP to Nation – displays a little country flag next to the comment poster’s name, guessed from its incoming IP address. [...]