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

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.