In your Wordpress folder go for the wp-includes folder and find a file called formatting.php. Lines 20 and 21 look like:


$static_characters = array_merge(
array('---', ' -- ', '--', 'xn–', '...', '``', '\'s', '\'\'', ' (tm)'), $cockney);
$static_replacements = array_merge(
array('—', ' — ', '–', 'xn--', '…', '“', '’s', '”', ' ™'), $cockneyreplace);


The arrays contain characters to find and characters to replace. There’s one to one correspondence. As you can see, a double dash, a triple dash and a double dash with spaces get replaced by an em dash. The ellipsis gets replaced by …

The characters in question are ‘\’\”‘ – backslash-escaped (since PHP requires it) single quote and double quote replaced by ” Remove both ‘\’\”‘ from static_characters array and ” from static_replacements array, and you’re good to go – you will still keep your ellipsis, your em dashes, and your trademark symbols.

Tip 1: this will still leave the fancy quotes for backticks (those ` characters to the left of 1 on your keyboard) and fancy apostrophe in the possessive ’s, like “This is Alex’s site”. If you want those removed as well, remove elements ‘“’, ‘\’s’ from static_characters and corresponding values ‘“’, ‘’s’ from static_replacements.

Tip 2: Want some other character replaced automatically? Then insert a character to replace into static_characters, such as (c) and insert a character into static_replacements, such as ©

• using the cheapest hardware possible
• replicating entire databases at a time
• use DNS for load-balancing DB servers
• automated way to bring up a brand new slave
• track the most expensive query

There’s also a talk by Jeff Dean given at the University of Washington last year regarding Google’s BigTable – distributed hash project.

WordPress Dev Blog points out one important factor to consider: Yahoo! Hosting admins will automatically upgrade the WordPress installs when a new version comes out.

It contains only the stuff that matters to most of the bloggers out there – data on unique visitors, incoming links, comments and post popularity.

MeasureMap requires the Webmaster to insert JavaScript one-liners into the blog source code, and they support all the major blogging platforms. However, instead of overpopulated and frequently meaningless lists of incoming referrers provided by AwStats and Webalizer, MeasureMap tries to extract some meaning from the incoming links. The Webmaster can always see which links are new, how many visitors they brought in, which outgoing links were followed from the blog (as far as I know, none of the server-based ISP-provided stats packages do this) and which search terms the visitors used when arriving at the site.

The Search Terms view allows the Webmaster to track the most popular search engines and most popular queries used to find the blog.

It’s hard to give a good review to a service that’s still in early beta, but overall MeasureMap tries to please the Webmaster and is one of the easiest tracking systems to use.

When you lean towards someone and tell them a little bit of information, you are making an “aside” comment. In blogs, you can do that on your blog by passing on small bits of information to your readers called Asides. Also known as remaindered links or linkblog, Asides were originally implemented by Matt Mullenweg, developer of WordPress, and it soon spread far and wide and became a very popular method of adding little bits of information to your blog. Asides can be run from within your WordPress site, and do not require installation of another blog. All you need is a few lines of code, and a new category.

The problem is content completely disappearing, with titles and everything else, including templates, appearing on the page with no problem. Apparently it only happens when you want to combine the %post_id% and %postname% tags for the mod_rewrite permalink generation in Wordpress options. The solution? What I found to work is replacing the_content() call in the index.php file (or wherever your page content is generated, which could be single.php in some themes) with

<?php echo $post->post_content; ?>

Thanks to unrelated support topic.

<?php
$ch = curl_init();
$timeout = 5; // set to zero for no timeout
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, ‘http://example.com’);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
$file_contents = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
echo $file_contents;
?>

Normally the account on DreamHost would consume less than 1% of my CPU seconds, this time we were in the double digits. DreamHost happily obliges with the status reports on CPU minutes, but they become available the next day, so switchingall the plug-ins off and then rutning them on one-by-one becomes a week’s worth of project. Looks like Recently commented plug-in is to blame, since it doesn’t scale quite well for a site where the list of recently commented posts appears each time a page is viewed (with roughly 2-3K pageviews a day).

Recently commented posts is actually much more than that. The official name is Customizable Post Listings and it supports Display Recent Posts, Recently Modified Posts, Random Posts and some other options. The function call produces a listing of the posts that received comments recently, which helps the Webmaster (if you need to reply to the recent comments) and the reader (in case they want to see what’s currently discussed on your site). See it implemented here, for example.

Most Commented – a natural addition to the site which gets lots of comments. Helps the Webmaster and the reader to see what’s hot and what topic requires extra attention, since it causes so much user feedback. See it implemented here, for example. The function allows for the actual number of comments to be displayed next to the link to the entry.

WP-ShortStat adds a ShortStat tab to the DashBoard in WordPress. It keeps track of hits, unique visitors, most popular pages on your site, recent referrers and top referrers, user’s browsers, countries, language locales and search strings used to reach your site. Overall, excellent reporting system, consisting just of a single-file plugin and installation as simple as dropping the file into the Plugins directory on the server. Can’t link to it implemented, since it’s part of the admin interface.

1. The Options – Discussions tab has a section titled Comment Moderation. It asks you for a number of links a given oost can have before being moved off-page into the review queue. Note that this does not include the URL link that is provided in a separate form field, we’re talking about the links in the message itself. Generally I found that setting the value to 1 radically eliminates the amount of spam, as there are few legitimate postings, where people are pointing to more than 1 site. Naturally, if in your post you’re asking visitors to submit their favorite links or something related, you can expect the number of URLs to climb up.
2. List of banned words in WordPress is another useful feature. Be careful not to have an empty line in that list, i.e. make sure that the cursor does not move beyond the last letter of the last word. Having an empty line on the banned words list would invalidate each and every comment posted to the site, although this might change with the future releases of WordPress, as it is apparently a bug. For now, the list of casino, gambling, holdem, cialis, debt seems to be quite sufficient for weeding out bulk of stuff.
3. Edit – Comments tab provides an interface to all the comments posted. By default you can view 20 at a time. By default it throws you into View Mode, where you can delete the unnecessary comments one by one. If something more radical needs to be done, go to Mass Edit mode, where dozens of comments can be deleted at once. If you got hit by a comment spammer pretty hard, use the search engine to find all comments containing a specific keyword, but be sure to start in Mass Edit mode, so you can do a Select All – Delete, after the search engine does its job.
4. But I need to look at more than 20 comments! In the extreme case you get hit by an especially notorious comment spammer, and you are tired of defaulting to 20 comments per time, since the totals are somewhere in the thousands (this had happened), look into the file edit-comments.php in your wp-admin directory. See line 68? In WordPress 1.2.2 this line says:
   

   $comments = $wpdb->get_results(”SELECT * FROM $tablecomments ORDER BY comment_date DESC LIMIT 20“);

   That 20 needs to be changed to something else, and the file needs to be uploaded back to the server. Once you’re tired of looking at hundred entries (or so) at a time, you’ll can go back to the original 20.

Hopefully few simple rules will eradicate the comment spam from your site, as WordPress is undoubtedly one of the best engines to fight it.

WordPress is the most prominent rising star of weblog software, completely free and with a large and active community. Styles, plugins and hacks are readily available, with problems such as comment spamming being addressed far more rapidly than competing applications.

Yes, good job and congrats. WordPress has excelled on many fronts, including ease of installation (two-step process, what could be easier), link management (the link manager software is praise-worthy on its own, people often seem to miss how important it is for anyone organizing their bookmarks) and extensibility (plugins and hacks abound). They also managed to fix some pretty grim security issues in record amount of time.

However, some things could be improved:

• Decide on a better tag structure. Currently some tags start off with wp_, some do not, and the documentation is all around the WordPress Web site, some is in Wiki, some not. Perhaps decide and finalize the tags, so that deprecation won’t be an issue when the next version comes around.
• Ship an RSS aggregator with default install. The product is used primarily by bloggers (although I’ve been using WordPress pretty successfully as content management system at TechInterviews), and they love to export and import RSS feeds.
• Ship a better default template. This is not a personal request, as I feel comfortable with Wordpress CSS tag structure and always make my own CSS, but the default template with coloring and all just seems to be lame. Maybe it’s just me.