When doing updates in WordPress, upgrading the WordPress version or the Plug-Ins causes the site to enter into Maintenance Mode. While in Maintenance Mode, a message appears that says “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.” rather than the actual site. Sometimes, especially if you’re using the automatic updating functions, an update might fail and the site may be stuck in Maintenance Mode. WordPress looks at the root level of a directory for some hidden files that can tell a site to operate in a different manner. If there’s a file called “.maintenance” then the site will display the message above. When an update of a Plug-in fails,…
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WordPress and Spam Bots
There are a number of ways that you can protect your WordPress site from spam bots. The first is to only allow authenticated users to post comments. Doing so can still be a bit unwieldy, but this feature is built into WordPress and so pretty straight forward to use. Some, who deal with large amounts of spam bots then choose to completely disable the commenting feature outright (Settings -> Discussion -> Uncheck Allow people to post comments on new articles), but comments can still be made on existing articles and commentary is one of the best features of WordPress for many. To stop comments on older articles, also disable commenting…
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Running SSH on 1st Revision AppleTVs
Sometimes it can be really useful to have an SSH connection into your AppleTV. If I need to explain why then you probably won’t want to do it. Unless of course, you’re just after getting something like Boxee running, which we’ll look at as well. Before we get into doing anything to your AppleTV, when we’re done I do not know how Apple will feel about your warranty moving forward, so do this stuff at your own risk (but that’s pretty much true for many articles on this site)… So first up, let’s install SSH. To get started, plug in a jump drive you don’t mind reformatting. Then run the…
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Mac OS X Directory Services Plug-ins
In a number of contexts, we hear about directory services plug-ins. A directory services plug-in is a way for a Mac OS X computer to leverage the DirectoryServices daemon to obtain account information (be it authentication or policy information) from a server. This might be an Active Directory server that uses the Active Directory Plug-in or an Open Directory server that uses LDAP. You disable plug-ins that you don’t need and enable plug-ins (ie Active Directory plug-in or third party plug-ins) that you need in order to access directory services of various types. These plug-ins are developed in the form of .dsplug files. The default plug-ins that Apple includes with…
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ProCon Firefox Plug-in Filter
Firefox users who wish to filter browsing (eliminate filtered words, etc) can use ProCon Latte, a Plug-in for Firefox. ProCon is available at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1803 and can easily be deployed alongside Firefox.