noel alanguilan

i was wondering how fireworks would look like in black and white.

wordpress 2.7 introduced me to post revisions — these are draft copies of your posts. these copies are saved in your wordpress database along with your posts, comments, etc. sometimes my revisions it gets to be ridiculously too many. apparently, the revisions are retained even after you have published the post thereby occupying unnecessary space in the database. so far, there is no built-in point-and-click method of getting rid of these revisions from the database.

i’ve found two ways to delete these revisions.

first, the hard way. fire up your phpadmin; choose your wordpress database; click on the sql icon and a window will pop up where you can enter and sql command:

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = "revision";

then click on ‘go’.

phpadmin will tell just just how many revisions were deleted. you’re done.

of course, there’s always the easy way. download and install a plugin called wp-optimize. this plugin can remove all post revisions plus optimize the database tables–the two functions that i usually use phpadmin for the maintenance of the sql tables (aka wordpress databases). other plugins have more database features but more is not necessarily better. its just more. this one’s right for my purpose.

i was looking over the plugins page of one of the blogs i manage and the plugins program is telling me that it had disabled a plugin — reporting a file with an unfamiliar name and a series of ‘../’ before it. hmmm… alarm bells rang in my head.

a little looking and i find the file under the tmp subdirectory in my server. i tried deleting the file and the server kept giving me that ‘permission denied’ message. more alarm bells. i downloaded the file and changed the permissions to none executable and the only by owner and group — no public access and no one has write access.

taking a look at the file, i found that its a php file and the rest are hexadecimal values which leads me to conclude that its a malicious file and that its hiding it’s digital purpose — nothing good by the looks of it. i, myself, do not have the time right now to decode it so if someone out there is willing, i can send you the file. just leave a comment and i’ll send the file to you.

i’ve been wanting to post these photos for a while now. this was the time when tito pacing, rosie and randy came with us when we visited san pablo city. we took them to a short trek to lake pandin — one of the seven lakes in the city proper. we also had a ride on a large bamboo raft — my first in this lake. all in all, i think tito pacing and the others enjoyed themselves.

robin took a swim after the ride but with a life vest.

this post is an experiment in using a wordpress photo gallery plugin.

trek to lake pandin

it was drizzling when we started the trek to lake pandin.

we have arrived

we have arrived

yambo

lake yambo is just beyond that 'v' at the far end of the lake. pandin and yambo are often called the twin lakes.

horsie

tito pacing and randy

tito pacing and randy

tito pacing

randy

robin wants to swim

robin wants to swim and we didn't allow him to hence that face. rosie and cherry is at the back

bamboo rafts

we rode the bamboo rafts to the the far end of the lake.

fiddling with the camera

tito pacing on the raft on the lake fiddling with his camera.

other visitors

there were other visitors too

randy and the pose

nearing sunset

nearing sunset and about to take our trek back.

ducks

ducks. mates i guess

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i have been getting a number of comment spam in one of the wordpress-powered sites i manage. i say “wordpress-powered” because its not exactly used as a blog and its not entirely a cms either. well, not yet anyway.

the “blog posts” are actually the upcoming events of the organization. comments and trackbacks are open so that people can ask questions about the event and maybe refer the event to their friends by blogging about it. unfortunately, the spam comes in via the posts that were made several months or even years ago. i have askimet installed and it catches the spam 99% of the time (the rest is caught in the moderation queue) and i really shouldn’t be all worked up about it but it still nags me a bit. but that’s just me. i just like to close doors that are unnecessarily open.

i’d like to suggest a plug-in or a feature incorporated in one of the versions of wordpress in the coming decade is a way to turn comments and/or trackbacks (pings) off or on en masse — check or uncheck boxes and click on “apply”. it may also be possible to have an option to edit a comment then and there.

i was looking over the database structure and it seems that the wp_posts table is the one to be modified, changing the contents of at most two fields — comment_status and ping_status — from “open” to “closed” or vise versa. i am out of practice with my sql but it seems easy enough to change these fields 10 to 20 rows at a time using a single update statement. maybe i could write a plug-in but i’m not good at php. yet.

table wp_posts
– comment_status: open/closed: varchar(20)
– ping_status: open/closed: varchar(20)

references:
– id: bigint(20)
– post_type: post/page/attachment: varchar(20)
– post_date: datetime

i have been using amaury balmer’s simple tags plugin to extend wordpress‘ tagging feature since wp 2.3.x and it has been great so far. i recently had a glitch which prevented me from installing the latest releases of simple tags. to be fair, its not the plugin’s fault. the problem stems from my hosting server, yahoo — it doesn’t allow a dot (.) in a subdirectory’s name. the plugin has two subdirectories named “2.3″ and “2.5″ and when the ftp program tries to create those subdirectories it receives an error. the result is the plugin doesn’t work because some of the needed files doesn’t get uploaded.

as a workaround, i dove into the code of simple tags and just changed the directory references from “2.3″ or “2.5″ to just “23″ and “25″, respectively. of course, i had to rename the directories as well before uploading the whole simple-tags directory to my wordpress plugins subdirectory.