To Each His Own

Now that Patrick joined the planet, I decided to collect all steps necessary to make use of our local RPM-based multi-user WordPress (WP from now on) setup so I won’t have to remember all of this next time. When Adrian agreed to running WP here, he insisted (and rightly so) on an RPM based installation (check for WP related CVEs if you wonder why).

To run WP here, perform the following steps:

  • Ask me to create a WP database for you
  • Choose a path underneath your ~/.public_html you want to use for WP
  • cd ~/.public_html/your/blog/dir
  • ln -s /usr/share/wordpress/*.php .
  • ln -s /usr/share/wordpress/wp-admin .
  • ln -s /usr/share/wordpress/wp-includes .
  • mkdir wp-content
  • cd wp-content
  • mkdir upload

If you want to upload through WP, you will have to allow apache to write to theĀ upload directory. I would suggest using ssh for uploads instead.

  • ln -s /usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/plugins .
  • ln -s /usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/themes .

If you want to use your own plugins or themes, you can also recreate these directories and symlink to your liking. Note that you will have to take care of security issues for these components yourself then.

  • Now go back to the main blog dir (cd .. if you didn’t do anything fancy)
  • rm wp-config.php
  • cp wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php
  • Edit wp-config.php and adjust all the DB_* defines
  • Let me know the path to your wp-config.php, so I can adjust the global wp-config.php to use yours for your blog
  • Setup your blog just like a “regular” WP installation

Yes, it is a lengthy procedure, but it will give you the freedom of your own, customizable blog with the comfort of regular security updates by root. Oh, and never copy and paste shell commands from forum posts or blog entries.

Reclothe the Mic

So, how do I look? If you’re reading this on the planet you probably have no idea what the hell I am talking about. While I always loved the WordPress default theme Kubrick, I grew bored of it after a while, because it is all over the place (yes, the Internet). After testing some alternatives I finally decided to switch to Kubrick’s successor. Aside of the new looks, I also appreciate the fact that the K2 developers introduced new functionality and easy customization through the use of styles (this is Jolie, by the way).

Oh, and while spelling mic once again, I wondered whether ‘mic’ is the official notation. It seems that there is a lot of discussion regarding this issue and some people really take it it serious. Well, mic is the way I’ve learned it from the booklets, so I’ll keep it that way.

Bug Me Not

I’m not a big fan of registering my email address all over the place, but the latest flood of comment spam finally made me get a WordPress API key in order to be able to activate the Akismet plugin. I’m not a 100% sure how this thing is supposed to work, but it successfully identified spam on a re-scan already.

So, spam bot, if you are reading this – don’t you even try…

Spam

Receiving the first spam comment after 7 days of operation I wondered about the global cost of spam once again. While google will provide a range of high random numbers (with a maximum of $200 billion per year) there’s also this little form that will allow you to compute your individual costs per spam. And by wasting the time to fill out the form you can increase your costs even further!
Unfortunately the form doesn’t cover spam filter tuning nor comment spam so it was not that much of a help after all.

Switched to WordPress

Being fed up with my last-century under construction homepage I decided to switch to something that will:

  • hopefully look good,
  • be W3C standards compliant and open source,
  • require less maintenance,
  • and still provide some useful functionality.

So I chose to give WordPress a try and I really enjoy it so far.