From the category archives:

Geeky Stuff

How to secure WordPress timthumb.php

If you have a selfhosted WordPress blog (WordPress.org), take urgent measures to secure your site from a recently discovered vulnerability. Many WordPress themes and plug-ins use a script called “timthumb” (timthumb.php). This is the most common code used to create thumbnails from pictures. End July, a vulnerability surfaced showing external users could dump malicious code [...]

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When things break – Yet another look inside the workshop for a self-hosted blog

You can classify blogs into categories using many different criteria. From a blog-administrator’s point of view, the main classification whether a blog is self-hosted on your own server (such as WordPress.org) or hosted by the blogging service itself (such as Blogger, Tumblr, Posterous, WordPress.com,…) Blogs hosted by the blogging service make you dependent on their [...]

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Help! My server performance went down!

A few months ago, I migrated 7 blogs with 350,000 blogposts from Tumblr to WordPress on my VPS server. Together with some other blogs and websites, that server happily processed about 50,000 visitors per month, with a steady increase of about 10% per month. All sites and the SQLserver were properly tuned, and the server [...]

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How I moved 350,000 blogposts from Tumblr to WordPress

I had seven blogs on Tumblr which aggregate news. Using a technique I described earlier, they take RSS feeds from over 1,000 carefully selected websites and blogs, filter them, clean them up, and feed them into the different Tumblr blogs. I used the unique feature built into Tumblr to convert RSS feeds into posts. All [...]

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How one small plug-in can slow down your site.
The Drupal version

Remember my rumbling about how one plug-in can make your WordPress blog slow? Well, here is a similar story about my Drupal news aggregation site. Before I begin, let me re-state that Drupal by itself, is fast. I mean real fast. That’s why I gave Drupal two thumbs up in my 2010 blogger’s wrapup. But [...]

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How to combine RSS feeds with Yahoo Pipes

Many bloggers use RSS feeds to check on the latest posts from different websites and blogs. Bloggers often use widgets to display RSS feeds from related blogs, or their Twitter and Delicious updates. Or they might simply pull RSS feeds into an RSS reader like Google Reader. Comes a time where it might be useful [...]

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How one small plug-in can slow down your blog

I recently migrated seven high volumne Tumblr blogs onto WordPress on my my private server. Even though I use aggressive caching, I still saw a lot of CPU load, caused by SQL-access…

How was that possible? I had every post preloaded in cache?

The venom sat in a small plug-in….

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How to import a Tumblr blog into WordPress

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I feel like standing in front of a rail crossing, when the red lights just won’t go off. Is it worth driving to the next rail crossing, just a minute further down the road? Are the lights defective, or is the crossing closed for a true reason? The longer I wait, the less it will [...]

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PHP 5.3.2, WordPress and The Mystery of The Disappearing Permalinks Settings Page…

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Remember I once wrote about the choice of selfhosting your blog or not? No? Well I did. And if you choose to selfhost a blog, some of the issues you need to be aware of are (drum roll): the work involved to maintain a selfhosted blog, protecting your blog from hackers, and dealing with (g)hosting [...]

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GoDaddy sites hacked again

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After the massive hacks injecting malware into shared hosted sites from several providers back in April and May, it seems they are back at work. Many sites hosted by GoDaddy are being hacked at the moment I am writing this post. Two of mine were affected an hour ago. Update: Hit again this morning (Sept [...]

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Securing your WordPress blog

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Bloggers have rushed to secure their selfhosted WordPress blogs after the recent massive hacks on shared hosts. I was one of them, even though only one of my blogs was affected. I spent hours browsing, looking for good resources, common knowledge, and solid tips to form a list of quitessentials on WordPress security. I also [...]

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