After a few searches on the wordpress plugin site I found a new comment spam protector and installed that and it was really simple to get it up and running.  Unfortunately for some reason when this was added to the comments forms they were put in an odd place, underneath the submit button.

So the simple install turned into updating all of the themes that I was using to ensure that it was being placed above the submit button.  I also did a quick hack on the php to remove the label that was being displayed.

Spam

After upgrading to the latest version of WPMU, I had a look around to see where there was a way of stopping spam comments since I was forever trying to delete them.  Doing a quick search on wordpress.com (why didnt I do this eariler) there are a number of plugins available that force the user either to a) answer a simple maths question or b) creates an image that the user has to enter.

I’ve not had the maths plugin running for the last month or so and on all the blogs I’ve so far had no spam comments which is fantastic.  Means that I dont need to keep deleting things every couple of days!!

Wordpress MU

I’ve been looking at setting up an eshop on one of my wordpress accounts and for the downloadable content page for eshop it shows that there is a max upload size.  After alot of hunting around and googling (which I thought might have been easier to find!)

Turns out it was quick an easy find when you know where it is .  To change the max upload size that is listed in the eShop options is for wordpress mu go to the mu site admin section.  In the options section there is a max upload size and also a max blog size as well.  Changing these options changes the listed upload size on the eShop option page, but of course there is still the possible limit on the upload from the php.ini file.  This can sometimes be set by using a .htaccess file.

Wordpress MU

When I was making the move to wordpress mu one of the strangess things that i encountered was a problem with pages and looking at full page articles.  When every I click on the links I would get an 500 internal server error returned.  Since the way that wordpress mu works it has to rewrite the url quite abit to understand what pages to actually get under the covers, for example:

http://phoenix.adamcoulthard.co.uk/blogs/2009/12/08/wordpress-page-hit-internal-server-error

is not an actual page on the server it gets rewritten to something that the server can handle under the covers.  I think alot of the problems were occuring because of the way that I had installed wordpress mu (at least this is what I think).  I had installed wordpress mu into a directory on the webserver rather than putting it into the root directory.  So when it created the .htaccess file with file rewrite information it added a base rewrite of that directory.  So if I installed it into wordpressmu/ then its rewrite base would have been /wordpressmu/ in the htaccess file.

After alot of googling with very little luck and attempting to use the write logging again with no luck, I started to think about what that rewrite base would mean to the system.  So I had a cPanel setup of *.adamcoulthard.co.uk pointing at /html/wordpressmu/ meaning that all the sites had to go to the wordpressmu folder straight away.  So if the rewrite base was adding on /wordpressmu/ then it would mean that it was going to be trying to navigate to /wordpressmu/wordpressmu/…. leading to the internal server error (I would have expected a 404 not found but nevermind).

So what I did was set the base to being just / and that solved the problems of loading the articles.

Wordpress MU

As you have probably noticed the site has been bouncing up and down over the last couple of days.  I got an email from my hosting provider to say that I had run out of space on my hosting account.  I had two installs of wordpress on it and wanted to add another but without the space (my hosting provider has upped my limit).

So after abit of searching I tried to use wp-hive which is suppose to be able to use the same installed wordpress code.  I gave it abit of a whirl but at that time it did not provide what I needed, ie the ability to easily move my two old wordpress sites into a central one.  After abit more googling and reading around I thought I should probably try the proper version of wordpress mulit user (WPMU) environment, this runs wordpress.com itself and a number of other high profile blogging sites.

The install of WPMU as for a normal wordpress install was really smooth and worked first time.  I suppose the biggest choice that I had to make when installing was whether to use subdomains or subdirectories.  Initially I thought subdomains so installed it, running through the rest of the install I then hit on whether I could actually update my hosting account to point to the subdomains to the correct location.  So I switched to subdirectories (using a great article).

Using the import I attempted to convert this blog first into the WPMU environment and then switched the subdomain pointer that I already had to point to WPMU.  Sadly this didnt work (still not 100% sure why but I suspect it was something on the URL rewriting), so I had to find a way to do the subdomains with my host.

More googling some time later I found a little trick for cpanel, that in the subdomain pointing its possible to use * as a subdomain and if the host has done the hardwork already in apache (or what ever is being used) all should work.  So I switched WPMU back to being subdomains and setup the blog correctly and everything seemed great!!!

Sadly I hit a few errors as you can probably see if you are reading this in the next day or so all the photos appear to have vanished from the blog! I also hit another couple of problems that I will blog in later blog posts so that they are easier to find for people searching.

Spam, can it get any worse?

Wow its amazing how time has flown by over the last couple of weeks, it does not seem that long ago that I was writing about ringtones.  Its been a busy couple of weeks due to one thing and another and I’ve not had chance to get back to the blog to write anything.  So I decided to make an effort today to write about anniversaries of products.

So I went through the usual of logon to the wordpress admin and was just about to press the Add New post button when I noticed the number of comments in the pending state, 68 to be precise.  Now since I have the approval stuff turned on wouldnt you think it was a complete waste of time sending strange spam comments!

Maybe I’ve missed a trick somewhere but since I just do a batch delete all of spam messages no-one ever sees them.  The people who do the spamming must know that they are not getting posted as comments, so why bother.  Its a really shame that the internet has gotten itself into this strange state, I’m sure I read a fact about email that 90% of it was spam or some silly number like that.  I wonder what the percentage of blog comments are spam?  Maybe some researcher can have a look into this.

Its something we just have to live with and cannot get any worse…… can it?

It’s really simple to install and setup, it’s really well interfaced into the touch enabling the posting pictures that are already on the phone.

Just a shame the keyboard is not that easy to use. However is auto correct is fantastic!!!!!!

Below is an old picture of new York that I had and it was so easy and quick to attach it.