• Home Automation,  Mac OS X,  WordPress

    Easily Automating and Simulating Web Traffic

    There are a variety of applications out there that will simulate web traffic. But there’s nothing like the idea of true traffic. Load a page, click on a link, wait for the next page to load, click on another link, etc. Traditional load simulators simply are not real world enough in most cases. There are a variety of more real world simulators but they are typically cost prohibitive for the use I recently encountered a need for. So I started looking at using Automator. In its simplest form, you can just fire up Automator, click on the Record button and then perform an action. However, this is going to perform…

  • sites,  WordPress

    reCaptcha and Comments

    After talking with the folks at Xsanity I have decided to try and open up comments to the site. You can still auth and post comments if you have an OpenID account, but you can now do so through the standard WordPress method provided you fill in the Captcha info. We’ll see how this works. Last time I tried comments there was simply too much spam. I’m willing to give it a second shot though, especially with the fancy-schmancy OCR whatnot enabled… To get Captcha to work I used the WP-reCAPTCHA plug-in available here. In order to activate it you need an API key from recaptcha but once you paste…

  • sites,  WordPress

    MySQL and WordPress Problems

    Turns out my WordPress update didn’t go nearly as well as I thought. Pretty much none of the posts that I had made since the update were showing up as they were stuck in the Unpublished Category. So I restored from my pre-upgrade backup and re-did the upgrade process. Worked like a charm this time and is clearly moving items out of Unpublished as it should, so things should be back to normal. I am now tracking down the missing posts and republishing them. Sorry for the inconvenience.

  • sites,  WordPress

    Upgrading WordPress to 2.7

    Well, it’s that time of the year that I need to do a little spring cleaning of the ‘ole site.  So I figured I’d post how to upgrade WordPress.  It’s pretty straight forward.  But before getting started back up your install.  This includes the files and the database.  First off, the files.  For that just back up the root of your Apache home directory.  If you’re on a shared host this is often the public_html or www folder.  If you’re on a Mac Server this might be /Library/WebServer/Documents.  If you’ve customized your css and themes, etc you will most certainly want to triple-check that you’ve gotten your wp-content folder. Once…

  • Mac OS X,  WordPress

    https://krypted.com/ Widget

    Tired of firing up a browser to view my site?  Well, here’s a widget you can use to quickly view content without ever having to open the site.  Simply download the widget here, double-click on it and you will then be able to view the articles on this site through Dashboard.  

  • WordPress

    Year of Postings (plus some)

    So on 9/17/07 I posted that I’d be updating this site daily for the next year, after updating it daily for about a month at that point.  So far I’ve been pretty on-track.  There might be a missed day here and there but there are not a lot of postings a year and a couple of weeks later.  Fun stuff.

  • WordPress

    WordPress: AdSense Integration

    So there are a ton of modules out there for Joomla!, Mambo, WordPress and even Moodle that allow you to integrate AdSense into your site.  However, most of them are about as much a pain as just pasting the code into somewhere that it will fit.  For example, if you are using WordPress and you go into your Theme Editor then you, let’s say, edit the theme for Sidebar then you can just paste the code from your Google AdSense portal into a new <div> </div> section, or into an existing one.  It can take forever to figure out how to install, manage and use the various Google AdSense managers…

  • WordPress

    WordPress: flickrRSS

    Wanna’ put some images in your blog without creating tons of traffic.  Well, consider dumping the traffic off to flickr using this plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/flickr-rss/