Displaying 1 To 22 Of 22 Comments 10 Year Anniversary Project Entry Thanks for the shout-out, Jeffro! I think you’re the first person I’ve seen actually make a post! » Posted By Dougal Campbell On May 15, 2013 @ 1:17 PM 300 Free Icons For Web And User Interface Design Oh, there’s also the Faenza icon set, created for Ubuntu. » Posted By Dougal Campbell On November 30, 2012 @ 11:13 AM I’ve recently been on a hunt for GPL-compatible icons for my Documents Shortcode plugin. I did find this: Open Icon Library One of the downloadable packages is specifically for GPL-compatible icons. » Posted By Dougal Campbell On November 30, 2012 @ 10:57 AM A Closer Look At Brute Force Attacks Against WP Sites Unfortunately, this is one of those areas where there’s not a “one size fits all” solution. Blocking an IP that submits too many bad login attempts is a pretty common solution, but it has pitfalls. Many networks are behind NATted firewalls, so all connections appear to come from the same address. So in blocking an attacker, you may also be blocking innocent by-standers who are on the same network. This might be acceptable for some web sites, but in other cases it might not be. » Posted By Dougal Campbell On March 16, 2012 @ 1:55 PM Crummy Advertising On WordPress.com I don’t remember if I ever publicly mused about it, or what discussion triggered it, but about a year or so ago it struck me that a logical next move for Automattic would be to create their own ad network. With a single blog network as large as theirs, ad-targeting could be fine-tuned to a large degree on all sorts of parameters. And of course, they could also do well on stand-alone WP sites, as well. » Posted By Dougal Campbell On November 14, 2011 @ 1:22 PM Removing Links In Favor Of Menus? Back at the last WordCamp Atlanta (Jan 2010), I heard Jane Wells and some of the core devs discussing the possibility of ditching the Link Manager, and replacing it with something based on Custom Post Types. Shortly after, the Menu system was added, so I figured that must have been what developed from that discussion. And I was surprised that we hadn’t seen some sort of conversion tool to convert Link Manager data into Menus. But I’m thinking it’s still possible that the old Link Manager could remain in the system and evolve as mentioned here. Moving links out of separate tables and leveraging all the CPT functionality would certainly open things up to some interesting possibilities. All it needs is a slick and friendly UI, and a conversion tool, and we’d be good to go. Such a move might break a few plugins that interact with the links system, but probably if they were doing some sort of end-run around the API and dealing with the db tables directly. » Posted By Dougal Campbell On September 30, 2011 @ 2:41 PM @Ipstenu – I’d agree with that sentiment. I have ads on my site, and I get money from them, but I’d hesitate to say that my site “makes money”. I do earn a little more than my hosting costs, but not by any significant margin. That said, I don’t have any problems with them tweaking the signup process to encourage more people to thinking about what the service is worth to them. I’m sure that the Akismet service uses more resources than most people realize. » Posted By Dougal Campbell On March 15, 2011 @ 8:01 PM Jason Schuller Did It – I Can Do It To @Ian Stewart – That’s a good point! Jeff, if you’ve got good organizational skills, you can basically be a project manager, and outsource the technical bits. Charge clients $50-75/hour (or whatever your market will bear), pay out about 60-70% of that to your outsourced help for their time, and any overhead time (paperwork, conference calls, etc.) you keep all to yourself. The hardest part is reeling the clients in, and making decent time estimates. Learning to recognize problematic clients and tell them “no” is also essential. :) » Posted By Dougal Campbell On May 6, 2010 @ 3:24 PM MattNote From WordCamp San Francisco Wish I could have been there. Sounds like everybody had an awesome time, based on last night’s tweets! ;-) » Posted By Dougal Campbell On May 2, 2010 @ 3:08 PM Who’s Right? Network Solutions Or Matt @Charlie – …the WordPress security has proved it’s not up to par with other big CMS systems like Drupal. As I pointed out in my comments on the ZDNet story, this was not a WordPress-specific problem — the attacker could have targetted Drupal’s As Matt pointed out on the dev blog, the web server has to be able to get the database connection credentials from somewhere. Anybody who is able to run web code in the same sandbox as you is going to be able to sniff that information somehow. The solution to this problem has everything to do with how the web server and OS are configured, and pretty much nothing to do with WordPress itself. In a shared hosting environment, the hosting provider must do everything possible to isolate users from each other, and prevent one user from gaining access to another user’s files, no matter what avenue they might try to go through. Typically, this is done through ‘chroot’ or ‘jailed’ environments. » Posted By Dougal Campbell On April 14, 2010 @ 10:50 AM WordPress Dev Chat For 4-01-10 Thanks for the summary, Jeff. I often miss the IRC dev chats because they happen about the time our kids get home from school. So it’s a major break time in my work-from-home day. :) A summary like yours is much easier to digest than just reading the raw IRC logs. I appreciate the effort. » Posted By Dougal Campbell On April 1, 2010 @ 5:51 PM I’d like to see a new default theme which has an options screen that allows end-users to easily reformat the basic layout. Choose how many sidebars, sidebar placement, allow them to easily change color schemes, and/or upload a header image. A selection of different font-stacks to choose from might be cool, too. Kubrick was great when it first came out (particularly compared to Classic) — it was clean and well-structured. But so many people just never changed it, that it practically became a joke. Building in some variation would be one way to add some freshness. » Posted By Dougal Campbell On December 14, 2009 @ 3:25 PM Supported Legacy Branches For WordPress.org? @Viper007Bond – Sure, anybody could try backporting patches, filing a ticket, and nudging a committer. In some cases, that process works. A few versions back, I contributed a patch to let us mass-reenable plugins after deactivation, argued my use-case, and got it committed — a couple of versions later. But stuff like that was much faster and easier when I had direct commit access :) But I think people want the reassurance of “officially committed support”. They want a black-and-white public statement that there will be “support” for a given version (at least in terms of bug/security fixes), and that a process is in place to ensure that it happens in a reasonable way. The reason for suggesting additional committers is to address the “extra workload” that such backporting might theoretically generate. In cases where the current-branch patch applies cleanly to the previous-branch, the extra work is pretty light. But in cases where the code involved changed too much between versions, it seems like having some extra help dedicated to the previous-branch work would be a boon. And note that I didn’t ask the core devs to simply do more work — I volunteered to step up and help. My free-time is pretty minimal, but I’m not suggesting anything that I’m not willing to help out with, if possible. » Posted By Dougal Campbell On September 23, 2009 @ 6:15 PM The core devs have said previously that they don’t support the idea of a “Long-Term Support” version. I assume that this is primarily due to the amount of work involved as the newer code evolves. But I have also thought that maintaining the “penultimate branch” (previous release branch) should be doable. This would mean that at any given time, there would be work done on three code branches simultaneously: The current release branch (security, bugfixes), the previous release branch (security, the occasional major bugfix), and the development branch (trunk — new features). It wouldn’t give an 18 month window for testing/updating sites, but it would at least give a 3-4 month window (based on the current development cycle), which is better than nothing. When a new version came out, you could stay on the previous version while you tested your plugins and themes against the newest stable release, only upgrading your production sites after you verified functionality. If anything was broken, you’d have time to contact plugin authors or contractors to work on fixes against the new core version, while still being comfortable that you would get security updates on your live sites. Betas and Release Candidates are great, but the testing window for those is typically pretty short. I can see how it would be impractical for somebody maintaining dozens of client sites to do property testing in the time between the first RC and the official release of a new version. I might also suggest that they should add some more committers to the core team, even if they limited some them to just backporting security updates to the previous version branch. Surely they could recruit a couple of trusted people that they could notify when they make security or major-bugfix changes in the main code, and have them backport them to the previous version. There would be plenty of volunteers for such duty (heck, I’d do it). » Posted By Dougal Campbell On September 23, 2009 @ 4:22 PM @scribu Yeah, they should implement a function that takes time into account. Like this: I thought about turning that idea into a ranking system for blog comments (we’ve already got the unused “comment karma” field available for storing the info). But I’m lazy. Oh, and I don’t have a lot of free time. :) » Posted By Dougal Campbell On September 8, 2009 @ 2:24 PM Vote For WordCamp New York Logo My favorites were 12 (voted for), 10, 31, and 34. And several of the others were quite good, too. I’m not terribly fond of #2, personally. The Statue of Liberty looks squashed, and the overall design just doesn’t have very good visual balance. » Posted By Dougal Campbell On September 4, 2009 @ 10:04 AM Which Theme Company Has The Best Word Of Mouth? @donnacha | WordSkill – I dunno. Voting in the poll because somebody asked you to would pretty much fit the definition of “word of mouth”, wouldn’t it? The poll doesn’t ask “which theme provider do you like the best”. If it had, I might have chosen StudioPress instead of WooThemes. I voted for Woo in the poll because I see their ads every-freaking-where. Their name is in my face all the time, therefore, that’s the one I thought of when I heard the poll question (before I even saw what the choices were). I must conclude that advertising works. » Posted By Dougal Campbell On September 3, 2009 @ 2:54 PM HookPress – Seems Like A Great Idea I wrote about Hookpress a few weeks ago, and I think the idea has some potential uses. Mainly, though, I think it might be useful for someone who just isn’t familiar enough with WordPress and/or PHP to write their own plugins directly, or for someone who already has an external event service set up and available via HTTP. But also, if enough stand-alone services pop up using the webhooks idea, it could catch on for certain tasks. Granted, it’s not something that tons of people are bound to use for lots of tasks, but I can definitely see it being a really quick way to let WordPress events trigger external scripts, rather than writing a full-blown custom plugin, and dealing with the extra memory and blocking time, or having to re-invent the wheel every time.l I think if you read Anil’s Pushbutton Web post, the key point is that this concept “pushes complexity to the hub”. » Posted By Dougal Campbell On August 31, 2009 @ 5:38 PM @Jeffro You should definitely keep your ears in there. And even if you feel like you should refrain from making suggestions that might not be core-related, share your opinion if something comes up that you have suggestions about. I for one wish I had time to participate more. But my work and family commitments make it difficult to sit in on the IRC chats. Your podcast is one of my regulars for my work commute, so when you report on some of the highlights, it helps keep me in touch with where things are going, beyond what might come up in the mailing lists. » Posted By Dougal Campbell On August 19, 2009 @ 11:12 AM WordPress Dev Chat For 7-30-09 @_ck_ – Granted, I’d like to know more about the stats from Automattic, too. Did they just use a raw count of every blog that phones home? Did they do any adjustments for multiple blogs running from the same host? What about multiple blogs on the same host, but some are using PHP4 and some on PHP5? Did they lump all users at a particular hosting provider together? How many of those blogs currently on PHP4 already have the option to upgrade to PHP5 via their host’s control panel? All these factors could affect the statistics. And keep in mind also, PHP4 has been unsupported for, what, a year now? There are no more updates coming, not even security-related, for PHP4. And it’s not like that news came out of the blue, hosts should have known about it and been preparing for it back then. I’m glad that WP is finally making a move to officially drop support for PHP4. » Posted By Dougal Campbell On August 4, 2009 @ 9:43 AM @_ck_: I think Automattic’s stats on 13M WP installs trumps your 6K. Also, 95% of all statistics are crap. No, really — I’ve got numbers to back that up. Migrating WP to require PHP 5.3 isn’t likely to happen for quite a while. PHP 5.0? Yes. And 5.2 might not be *too* far off (comparatively speaking). But 5.3 is a *major* change, and as mentioned in the chat log, even a lot of developers don’t have 5.3 installed on their dev servers yet. It’s not only brand-spanking new, it has some pretty major changes under the hood that can break compatibility (or certainly at least cause new warning to be generated). Any web host still on PHP4 that doesn’t at least offer PHP5 as an option BY NOW is just asking for a world of hurt via lost customers. » Posted By Dougal Campbell On August 3, 2009 @ 3:11 PM Listener Poll: What Day Of The Week Should I Record WordPress Weekly? If you switch days, do you think you’ll finally get Sam Bauers to call in? :) » Posted By Dougal Campbell On August 4, 2009 @ 9:49 AMComments Posted By Dougal Campbell
settings.php file just as easily. Drupal stores the database connection credentials in plaintext, as well. Just like almost every web application out there.
http://www.evanmiller.org/rank-hotness-with-newtons-law-of-cooling.html
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