A Developer's Blog » WordPress

Using Google Reader As Your Blogroll Source

Valentino Vranken — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 20:46:24 +0000

If you’re using Google Reader and you’ve got a WordPress blog then I’ve got a really useful tip for you!

Especially if you want to save time maintaining all those links in your blogrolls.

You can synchronize your blogrolls on your blog with folders in your Google Reader. Which means zero maintenance for your blogrolls: they’re automatically updated when you update your Reader subscriptions.

I actually found this solution on another site so I’ll just point you there: http://www.adashofbitters.com/2009/01/02/blogroll-google-reader-wordpress-easy/

You can see it in action in my sidebar on the right. Several of those link lists are being fed from Google Reader, such as the one called "SQL Blogs @Microsoft".

Happy blogging!

Valentino.

WordPress Spam

Valentino Vranken — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 08:57:52 +0000

I wasn’t getting a lot of spam on this blog until recently – I guess the URL has entered some kind of “Spam Test Targets: Rookie Level”-list – so I decided to do something about it.

WordPress comes with a spam blocker called Akismet. By default this plugin is not active. To activate it you need to register @ wordpress.org. This gives you a unique API key which you need to enter when activating Akismet.

Since I activated it yesterday it has intercepted 43 spam messages. Way to go Akismet!

Thanks go to the writer of this list of tools for fighting spam in WordPress. If Akismet is not enough, check out the other tools mentioned on the site.

WordPress and Google Analytics

Valentino Vranken — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 12:28:32 +0000

When you add your website to Google Analytics it tells you to add the tracking code right before the closing tag.

Now, the website that I was adding was this WordPress blog so my first question was: where on earth (or server) is the PHP file that contains this closing tag? And after a bit of PHP code reading I found it.

The file is called footer.php and this file is located in /wp-content/themes/[YOUR_THEME]/. Being located in the themes folder this means you need to remember to re-add the code when you decide to change your theme.

WordPress config changes for Windows Live Writer

Valentino Vranken — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 10:36:04 +0000

I’m using Windows Live Writer (version 2008, build 12.0.1370.325) to write my posts on this WordPress 2.6 blog. To be able to do this I had to make a couple of changes to the default configuration of WordPress.

Activate XML-RPC in Settings > Writing, by default this is disabled.
Modify the upload folder in Settings > Miscellaneous. By default this was “wp-content”. I changed it to “wp-content/uploads” and I created the uploads folder manually on the server (with 777 rights). This is the folder where the images will end up.

After these two changes I was able connect to the blog with WLW and post the article about the black background issue (which contains an image).