Wordpress

It’s Alive!

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It's Alive
It's Alive!

That’s right! One Digital Life has risen from the dead. Well, ok, maybe it wasn’t dead but it was definitely in a deep coma.

I started this blog on May 28th, 2004. For many years I posted here fairly often. For a time, the site was actually relatively popular. But, as time went on, the posts slowed and my last post was on October 5th, 2011. The site lived on, unattended, until early 2016 when it was compromised by malware. I’ll probably never know how it was infected, but it was most likely an out-of-date version of WordPress or an unpatched plugin.

The infection came at a time when I was unable to even attempt to fix it, so I had to just quarantine the database and all the files, and walk away. It was heartbreaking.

I’ve thought about bringing the site back many times over the years. I had been using WordPress for so long, and built a lot of functionality in a very non-WordPress kind of way (by today’s standards), that it always felt like a daunting task to bring it back and modernize it. But, this past weekend I got a bug in my but and decided it was time!

So far it’s gone fairly smoothly. I dug everything out, cleaned up the malicious code, updated WordPress and plugins, and the site is up and running again! I’ve started fixing some of the broken functionality, and broken links, but it’s going to be a long haul to get it back into top shape. Don’t be surprised if you come across some broken links, missing images, etc.

I plan to continue clearing out the cobwebs over time. I’m not certain how much I’ll be adding to the site. It does feel nice to have a place to post again, so I would like to continue adding new content now and then. If you would like to be notified of new posts, I still provide an RSS feed that you can subscribe to. If you happen to be one of the few people out there who’s still subscribed to the old feed, you may want to refresh the subscription. I use to run it through FeedBurner, but I’m not sure if that even works anymore.

Admin Bar Minimiser: Show or Hide the New WordPress Admin Bar with a Single Click

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WordPress 3.1 brought with it a new Admin Bar. When administrators are logged in, the bar sits on top of all the front-end pages of the site, allowing quick access to some basic wordpress settings and functions.

The new Admin Bar seems to have been met with a love it or hate it reaction. Personally, I love the functionality, but I hate having to look at the bar all the time. Luckily, that’s where the Admin Bar Minimiser plugin comes in very handy. Instead of being forced to choose between enabling or disabling the bar completely, this plugin allows you to simply show / hide the bar with a single click.

My thanks go out to developer, dgwyer, for creating such a useful plugin.

Hotfix Released for WordPress 3.0.5

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via weblogtoolscollection.com.

A tiny bug made its way into the recent release of WordPress 3.0.5. The release did fix the security issue that it was intended to fix, but it was a bit overzealous and “stripped advanced HTML (on display, not save, thankfully) from comments by people with the unfiltered_html capability.”

This particular bug has been deemed a rare case, and the developers would prefer to focus on 3.1 than release yet another 3.0.x update, but they were able to sneak a hotfix for the bug into the latest release of Akismet (2.5.3).

A new plugin, appropriately titled Hotfix has also been released to fix this particular bug and select future bugs as they pop up, “so you don’t have to wait for the next WordPress core release.” Think of it as a dedicated plugin for minor WordPress updates.

A fix for WordPress gallery comments not showing up in comments RSS feed

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This won’t be of a huge interest to a lot of people, but it took me a while to find an answer, so hopefully this will save someone else a little time.

WordPress has a very nice built-in photo gallery feature where each thumbnail in a gallery automatically links to a dynamic page for that image, allowing visitors to comment on the photo.

Unfortunately, there’s been a bug in this feature ever since it was first introduced. Comments made on these dynamic gallery pages don’t show up in the site’s comment rss feed. The feed ignores them completely.

For whatever reason, the folks behind WordPress haven’t seen this as a high priority issue, so it’s never been fixed. I’m currently working on a personal project (more on that later), that would really benefit from these comments showing up in the comment rss feed like they should. Fortunately, after a fair amount of digging I found the answer in this comment in the WordPress Forums.

To force gallery-page comments to show up the standard WordPress comments rss feed, simply add the following code to your theme’s functions.php file:

function fix_comments_rss_attachments($cwhere) {
return "WHERE comment_approved = '1'";

add_filter('comment_feed_where', 'fix_comments_rss_attachments');

Or, if you would rather not edit your functions file, I’ve dropped this code into a handy WordPress plugin:

  1. Download the plugin
  2. Unzip the file
  3. Upload “gallery-comments-rssfeed-fixer.php” to your Plugins folder and activate it. There’s no configuration options – it just works.