Posts Tagged ‘wordpress’

WordPress Missing Gallery Slideshow Option?

Sunday, January 26th, 2014

Today I am working on a simple WordPress based website for a small school. On this particular site, a slideshow will be required. If  you Google for “WordPress slideshow” you will find a few links on the various WordPress websites and user forums regarding the built-in slide show tools.

Well, that’s misleading.

It took far too long for me to figure out that self-hosted WordPress does NOT include a slideshow option for image galleries. Slideshows are available to those who use a WordPress hosted site. So, for those of us who host on 3rd party web hosts (or on your own VPS, perhaps), you need to use a plugin (still).

I have used NextGen Gallery in the past, and it still is one of the most popular image gallery managers for WordPress, so it looks like I will be using it again.

And for your reference, here, is a list of features that are different between the “.com” and “.org” WordPress systems.

 

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Posted in blog, WordPress | No Comments »

Finally, the Perceptus Back Story Blog Gets a Personality

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

Look above!  The default WordPress blue Kubrick header graphic is gone.

It was finally time to make this blog a little personalized, a little bit custom.  We actually get a couple hundred hits a day on our corporate blog – much to our disbelief.

The new header graphic?  That cute little inukshuk was one of hundreds of impromptu inukshuks built during the best Olympics ever along the south shore of False Creek in Vancouver earlier this year.

Some technical notes:

  • We’re using a child theme of WordPress’s default theme, this way, we should have minimal problems updating the WordPress software in the future. This page was useful: http://op111.net/53
  • For some reason the image size was wonky – our image is 760×200 pixels, but websites gave different specifications – maybe it depends on the version of WP?
  • We stole the curved border from the Kubrick header image, then knocked out the middle “blue”, and saved it as a PNG with a transparent middle hole.
  • The inukshuk photo was flipped, cropped, darkened, fuzzed, and generally mishandled using the GIMP image editor.
  • The images were all combined in Inkscape.

If the blog traffic continues to grow, maybe we’ll do some real customizations next year.

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Posted in blog, blog.perceptus.ca, vancouver, WordPress | No Comments »

Automatic Upgrade Feature of WordPress Without FTP

Saturday, September 5th, 2009

I was intrigued by the automatic update feature of recent (2.7+?) versions of WordPress because I hate upgrades as much as the next guy.  Unfortunately, it didn’t work for all 3 WordPress installs for which I am responsible.

There’s a new security issue for WordPress, so I spent some time trying to figure out how to get the update feature to work.  When I attempted the update in the WordPress Admin section, it requested my FTP login settings.  Well, I don’t use FTP for maintaining these blogs.

Fortunately, it turns out that WordPress will only require FTP permissions if the file permissions are configured in a compatible manner.

This post cleared it up:

http://robspencer.net/auto-update-wordpress-without-ftp/

The gist is to set the owner of the WordPress files to the same user as the process that runs Apache.  Running a basic chown command did the trick!

Now I just have to research to make sure that this makes sense from a security standpoint…

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Posted in blog, security, upgrade, web server | 1 Comment »

Yikes! “Removal from Google’s Index”

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

I hate it when people with vacuous business models try to sap my web reputation and waste my time.

Earlier this week, Google sent me a friendly note with the subject line: “Removal from Google’s Index.” My first thought was that it was a scam or a phishing attempt.  But no, after examining the links carefully and doing a couple web searches, it turned out to be legit.

A blog we host was running WordPress version 1.5.  It’s not an active blog. It’s up  for posterity, so we didn’t really care that it was several versions out of date.  Unfortunately, that version of WordPress, and everything prior to 2.5.1 (I think), is exploitable.

In our case, it had been hacked to have hidden text links for run-of-the-mill spam links such as porn, pharmaceuticals, etc. In fact, the links appear to have changed a few times over the week or more that it had been compromised. Google noticed, and told us to get rid of the spam links or else it would be booted out of it’s search results.

So, upgrade WordPress we did. Overall, cleaning up the mess wasn’t too bad.  It could have been worse.

The moral of this story?  Do backups. Check for upgrades of software every once in a while (yeah right). And make sure that one or more of these email addresses work: contact@yourdomain.com, info@yourdomain.com, support@yourdomain.com, webmaster@yourdomain.com.  These are the addresses to which Google addressed the email.

My wish?  That WordPress and other common web applications had a single line in their FAQ that said in 100% unambiguous language what was the minimum version of software that was free of exploits.  I looked for several minutes to see if this blog, running WordPress 2.5.1 was ‘safe’.  In the end, I couldn’t tell, so I decided to upgrade to 2.7 while I had all the files handy.

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Posted in problem, security, spam | No Comments »