Daily Archives: Sunday, 27th April 2008
WordPress 2.5.1 is out
As is so often the case, within a month of a major WordPress release, assorted bugs are driven out of the metaphorical woodwork, and new security issues are discovered and fixed.
So, if you’re running WordPress 2.5, you need to get the new version 2.5.1 as soon as possible. There is a security fix in this one, but I don’t have any details of what the exploit is. More information is available at the Development Blog.
For anyone else who hasn’t upgraded to 2.5 so far, I have no idea if 2.3.3 is vulnerable, which is a bit of a worry. While I’m still not entirely happy with the layout of the Write page, I’ll be upgrading this site just as soon as the new version of WPG2 is confirmed as ready. I depend on WPG2 to link WordPress with Gallery 2, and without it, large parts of the site would be broken, twisted and mangled. Or at the very least wouldn’t work.
The WPG2 guys had some fun making things work, as WordPress 2.5 made some quite significant changes. The good news is that they believe they’ve completed development, and they’re now doing some final testing prior to a release which should come soon.
Related posts
Weight Report – 27 April 2008
And it’s another one of those random variation thingies today. Yes, I’m a whole pound heavier than I was yesterday.
Mutter.
That’s Safari’s it Goes
Well, I gave Safari a good go. I used it as my main browser on the Mac for over a month, and for what it is, it’s pretty good. Pages render in generally the expected manner. It’s quick enough. With a tweak or two, it behaves moderately sensibly. But. Yes, there’s always a but. Somehow, it just doesn’t quite come up to what I’m used to with Firefox.
Things I missed when using Safari:
- Scribefire: Makes it easy to start a post about a site and save it as a draft so I can polish and publish it later. The closest I could get was the Bookmarklet, which mostly works, but if the URL contains certain patterns, mod_security on the server barfs. BBC News breaks it every time, and as I like to link there, this was annoying.
- Greasemonkey: runs little scripts that let you customise web pages you’re reading. There’s some nice stuff for Flickr, which I really missed. Safari does have something called Greasekit, which can run some of the same scripts, but as it had a security problem, most of its functionality is now missing, so it wouldn’t run the scripts I needed.
- Multiple tabs set as home pages. Works on IE7, too. I like this a lot, and it’s annoying that Safari doesn’t do it
Now those might not seem like big issues, but for me they’re major improvements to how I work with a browser, and as I spend a lot of time in web browsers, they’re enough to make me revert to Firefox, which I have done.
On the other hand, I did get used to the handy keystroke for sending a link to a page by email – Cmd+Shift+I. Firefox doesn’t have that, as I realised when I pressed it a few times. I had a quick look for a Firefox extension that would let me add custom keystrokes before having a D’oh! moment. Mac OS X allows you to set your own keystrokes, either system-wide, or for a particular application. So, I added the stroke to Firefox, and it works!
I don’t think the experiment with Safari was a waste of time – it was worth giving it a proper trial, and I’ll certainly give future versions a fair test, too. If you’re on a Mac, and you don’t have my particular needs from your web browser, then Safari is a good choice. It’s just not quite right for me at this time.
That’s Better…
I mentioned last night that the site seemed to be a bit unwell. As it didn’t seem to relate to anything I’d changed, I contacted Dreamhost support, and JJ had a look. I have to say that on the rare occasions I need to contact Dreamhost, I generally get a good response from someone who is polite, friendly and can communicate well. Not only that, but they understand what I’m asking and either fix the problem, or help me find a solution if it’s my fault. That’s exactly what I want from anyone’s technical support, and it’s not always what I get, so I do appreciate it.
Anyway, it did seem that the site was getting a lot more requests than normal, which was making the CPU usage increase incredibly, which was slowing the thing right down when I was trying to work on it, which was a little frustrating. Getting those lovely “Internal server error” messages wasn’t much fun either. JJ asked if I was using caching, which I haven’t been doing up till now, but I decided it was worth trying the WP-Supercache, which seems to be highly regarded. I installed that, let it update my .htaccess file and watched for a while. Sure enough, it started creating cached versions of pages, which will automatically be served up to random visitors.
If you’re a regular visitor who’s left a comment, and you haven’t cleared your cookies, you should get live pages served up to you, so you’ll never know that anything has changed. Everyone else should see much the same, but possibly a bit quicker than it might otherwise be. We shall see.
This morning, I took another look at the graph, which seems to have settled down nicely. I don’t know what was going on last night – the logs did show a lot of search engine spidering going on, but that doesn’t normally upset the server so badly…
There was, of course, one little gotcha. When I came to add the screenshot to the gallery, I found I had a problem – clicking on any of the top level thumbnails just brought me back to the page instead of drilling down into the various albums. I did a bit of digging and found that this was probably due to the various fancy .htaccess rules arguing with each other. I quickly turned the rules off and on for Gallery, which made that work again, and should allow wp-supercache to keep doing its stuff.
Oh what fun….
