Tag Archives: wordpress

WordPress, WP-Hackers, RSS Feeds, and More

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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At NeoSmart, we’re all about WordPress. Hands-down, it’s the most powerful, most flexible, and certainly most popular blogging platform available, and it’s free. We do what we can to help (which isn’t much, really), but we’re planning on getting a bit more “involved,” so to speak. Besides the couple of (hopefully useful) WordPress plugins that’re in the making, we also have several WordPress-centric articles coming up, and we hope you’ll enjoy them.

For now, here’s a quick one: Did you ever hear of “WP-Hackers?”
Well, those guys are the 1337 WordPress users, and they know all about WP, and what makes it tick. They have a mailing list you can subscribe to if you want to participate in all the fun, but what if you don’t want to (or can’t) join in the discussion? And since you don’t require a bi-directional form of communication, why use clunky email anyway?

We took the WP-Hackers mailing list archives, added a RSS feed to ‘em, and churned it through FeedBurner, the result is the WP-Hackers Live Archives – where you can find out what WP is all about and pick up all the tricks of the trade without divulging your email, filling up your inbox quota, or worrying about privacy. Just click and subscribe!

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WordPress-in-the-Name Issues

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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The inevitable has happened, WordPress has gotten too big for its supporters’ boots. Copyright issues have always (respectfully) existed, but now it’s witch-hunt time. As always, these things are rarely directly-sponsored by the actual copyright holders but rather by a gang of loyal zealots errr fans. They tend to cause unwarranted panic and anger, and normally carry things far overboard — certainly more than their creators intended.

This time it’s WordPress bloggers on the rampage, and by the looks of it, they’e making a far bigger deal out of things than they need to. According to Lorelle, at the moment just anyone that has the term “WordPress” in their domain name (not title) needs to get rid of it. Immediately.

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Workaround for Akismet on SVN

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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WordPress has lost the domain that Akismet was hosted on — and SVN users are stuck. Since the domain is no longer valid, when your SVN client attempts to query it for the Akismet plugin (which is included via something know as “svn externals“), it gets a HTTP 501 error, and the entire SVN update fails. For some, that might be OK, if all you have on SVN is WordPress, your plugins just don’t get upgraded. No biggie.

Some of us however depend on SVN for a lot more than just WordPress. NeoSmart Technologies is such an example: we jumped on to this great CVS replacement the minute we heard about it — it’s that great. At NST, we have our Gallery, Blog, various small scripts, and most importantly, our download system on SVN. We don’t even use FTP anymore, just SVN the files from our side, SSH into the server, and update the repo. It’s that easy.

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Bad Behavior Patch for Opera Users

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Bad Behavior is an excellent ‘profiling’ plug-in that deters most spam bots and attacks on web-based scripts, especially blogs, wikis, and forums. It uses a very detailed and sophisticated combination of checks and algorithms to create a ‘spammer’s profile’ and if a visitor to your site fits it, it’ll block them.

The algorithm is so good that there are almost no false positives, and together with a decent spam plug-in like Akismet or Spam Karma 2, you’re blog will be forever clean. But it has a problem with Opera. Most builds of Opera trigger a false alarm, leaving your blog reader-less, especially with the release of Opera 9, an excellent browser in all rights, but there is a solution. Continue reading →

CompleteRSS: Content-Complete Feeds Raring to Go!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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NeoSmart Technologies is proud to announce the release of CompleteRSS 0.1 Beta.
CompleteRSS is the only WordPress plugin used to guarantee complete article text in RSS feeds. Some of the things it does are things that end-users can change on their own (such as selecting full-text entries), but it’s biggest feature is a work-around for the much-contested ‘upgrade’ for WordPress 2.1: RSS and Atom feeds will not show text past the <!–more–> tag!

CompleteRSS is the only way to get WordPress 2.1 to display the full article content to display in your feeds, since there are no options to disable this ‘feature’ of WordPress 2.1. CompleteRSS is also the only way to display your feeds entirely free of the heavily-abused ‘content:encoded’ tags.

CompleteRSS has been implemented here on The NeoSmart Files, and you can check it out in our proudly FeedBurner-powered Atom feed: http://neosmart.net/blog/feed/

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JavaScript “Protection:” Don't Fall for it!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Every once in a while it comes up again. JavaScript – used totally wrong. This times it’s Hivelogic’s “Enkoder” script reborn for Wordpress. What people just don’t get is: JavaScript was never meant to be used as a heavy cavalry, a knight in shining armor, or else a bit of code that can may be used to do anything – because it’s not.

JavaScript can do a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean it should be used that way. But that’s not the problem – not this time. The problem is that people are still insisting on believing that using JavaScript to hide text means that the bad guys won’t ever see it. But that’s just not true.

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Word 2007’s Blogging Issues

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Following our article about Word 2007 introducing a fairly powerful desktop blogging client that actually produces clean code, it turned out most bloggers didn’t care so much for the client part as much as they did about whether or not it was 100% XHTML compliant.

From what we’ve been able to piece together, the Word 2007 blogging tool outputs XHTML 1.1 compliant code almost all of the time (we have yet to see it break, but nothing is bulletproof), with one (rather important) exception: it doesn’t know encoding!

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NeoSmart Live!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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No, we haven’t lost our minds, nor have we decided to take on the now very much trite Microsoft naming scheme, but we are testing certain “Live!” features on this site, and we’re looking for some feedback.

AJAX certainly is cool, but only if it’s not overdone, and it’s used to make something better, not just for the hell of it – and especially if the JavaScript involved is kept down to a minimum (read more about our hatred for JS). A long time ago we had a couple of AJAX features on the blog, but we took them down when we realized it was too much and too incompatible. But now we’re back, and we want to know what you think.

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Word 2007: Blogging to WordPress

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Microsoft has long led the fields of desktop innovation with Microsoft Office, and have done an amazing job with what they have. After developing the technology, Microsoft has proved time and time again that they are capable of protecting their position via sheer innovation and creativity – even if the Windows® line of products never matched the same bill.

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Bye-Bye Akismet

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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It's been a hell of a month for Akismet on our site; for some reason we've had more false positives than real spam stuck in the filter, and more spam in the comments than real replies.. So we've decided to give Spam Karma 2 a chance.

I've noticed it has a helluva lot more options than Akismet, and at the very least the logic remains on our server and does not await a reply from a heavily-hit server on Automattic's end. We'll see if this does the trick, but we have high hopes!