info.michael-simons.eu

A muzzle for WordPress 2.3 and the Akismet Plugin

As reported here and elsewhere, Dexter is somewhat talkative.

I recommend the following 2 steps program:

Stop sending your url

If you already have used WordPress 2.3, use the 123 Anonymer Versionscheck 0.10. It will anonymize your data, but a minimum of 1 request with personal data will happen, that is while using the plugin page.

If you do a fresh install of WordPress 2.3, i’d go with the my-hacks.php solution, because that way, no personal info will be send.

Lots of unnecessary Akismet informations

After finding the update problem this morning at Lumières dans la nuit, i read the following group. To my surprise i’ve learned, that the Akismet Spamchecker sends all of the $_SERVER environment variables from your server to the Akismet server. W T F?? I myself use Akismet in a custom project, there is absolutely no need to send this information. To stop sending this information, open akismet.php in your favorite editor, search and remove the following lines:

foreach ( $_SERVER as $key => $value )
    if ( !in_array( $key, $ignore ) )
        $comment["$key"] = $value;

Filed in Wordpress | Comments (1) »

WordPress uptodate checker

Yesterday i’ve installed WordPress 2.3 without too much problems. The new uptodate check for plugins is nice, out of question, but already yesterday i thought: hm, everybody is whining about Microsoft products phoning home, nobody gives a shit about wordpress doing the same.

The Nighwatchman has an in depth analysis about the data transferred to api.wordpress.org, read it here: Datenschutzproblem in WordPress 2.3 (Privacyproblem in WordPress 2.3).

I will use the following hack to omit my URL. Alternatively, uptodate checking can be completely disabled with this plugin.

Filed in Wordpress | Comments (1) »

Upgrading to WordPress 2.3 “Dexter”

In the first place, i wanted to wait to here some more news about the latest release of WordPress, called “Dexter” (I don’t think about some saxophonist, but about Dexter Morgan). But, as you know, curiosity killed the cat, i couldn’t wait and with the announcement yesterday, i created a patch file (they forgot the link at wordpress.org) and patched my blog.

As danger is my second name, i didn’t backup or anything especially for upgrading (ok, honestly i have a nightly cron’ed backup) and run the patch with

patch -p2  diff-from-tags_2.2.3-r6166-to-tags_2.3-r6166.diff.txt

from my install dir and boom, i had 2.3 (get the patch file at the wordpress trac (for upgrading 2.2.3 to 2.3)).

Things, that didn’t work but didn’t break the blog either were: Ultimate Tag Warrior. It’s still there and still working. Things that didn’t work were my theme and the Extended Live Archives by Sons Of Skadi.

For testing purpose, i completely disabled wp-cache.

Luckily, someone had already patched ELA, you can download a modified version here, see it in action here. Be aware, you also need the original release from above. Before this thingy works, you need to clean it’s cache. Otherwise you’ll get some weird error messages.

Things i need to fix in my theme were UTW related. I imported my tags into the new taxonomic scheme and finally, dumped the warrior. The import worked well, but it killed the blanks in tags and replaced them with underscores. Thanks for that :/

I did the following replacement in my theme:

UTW_ShowCurrentTagSet

single_tag_title('');

UTW_ShowTagsForCurrentPost("commalist")

the_tags('',', ');

UTW_ShowWeightedTagSet("sizedtagcloud")

wp_tag_cloud('smallest=70&largest=130&unit=%&orderby=count&order=DESC');

The arguments to the functions corresponds with my former UTW settings. Speaking of which: WordPress 2.3 tagging system is completely naked. There are no settings and what is worse, there is no such thing as a dropdown thingy while writing, just a plain text field. As a first solution, i’ve tried the Advanced Tag Entry WordPress Plugin. Seems to work fine, but not as comfortable like UTW.

All other plugins i use, seem to work fine:

In the meantime, i have the impression that 2.3 is somewhat slower than 2.2.3, but i can be wrong.

I’m in doubt about upgrading my other blog planet-punk.de. I like and do use tags a lot, but for the time being, the greatest db scheme doesn’t help a somewhat unusable ui. Don’t get me wrong, i really like the changes in the scheme going on, but for now, i see little benefit.

Another nice post with the same title as mine has some suggestions for people who ran into problems: read it at the Weblog Tools Collection.

Filed in Wordpress | Comments (3) »

Grails 0.6: Modifying JavaScript Libraries

Grails has a good mechanism for including JavaScript Libraries to do all that fance Ajax stuff. It all starts with:

<g:javascript library="scripaculous" />

Library can be one of yahoo, prototype, dojo, scriptaculous or rico. It’s a nice fact, that Grails doesn’t force you to use any special of these.

I wanted to change the included javascript source files (I use yahoo and wanted to get the latest release from their servers). In Grails 0.5.6 the core plugins were copied to $APP_HOME/plugins and i could modifiy them inplace. Grails 0.6 cleaned up some stuff so that the core plugins do not flood into the application tree.

I could hack the Grails source files or i can just modify the static member LIBRARY_MAPPINGS in JavascriptTagLib while starting up the application like so:

BootStrap.groovy in $APP_HOME/grails-app/conf

class BootStrap {
     def init = { servletContext ->        
          org.codehaus.groovy.grails.plugins.web.taglib.JavascriptTagLib.LIBRARY_MAPPINGS.yahoo.clear();
          org.codehaus.groovy.grails.plugins.web.taglib.JavascriptTagLib.LIBRARY_MAPPINGS.yahoo + ['anylibrary_file_you_want.js', 'anylibrary_file_you_want2.js', 'etc.js']
     }
     def destroy = {
     }
}

Furthermore, Grails 0.6 introduced the “base” attribute to g:javascript. Base denotes the full path that is prepend to the library file in question. So its possible to use any js file from wherever you want.

Filed in Java | Comments (0) »

Sad things in germany

Haltet die Fresse! Glotzt mehr TV!

“Shut up and watch tv”: Martin Schmitt ends his witty blog as a result §202c StGB that forbids “Hackertools” like wireshark, nmap and co as well as instructions for penetration tests for example.

German Heise News.

The post is well and sad written and i can totally understand him, although i really liked this blog. 🙁

Filed in Shortcuts | Comments (1) »