Tonight I downloaded the WordPress app for iPhone from the iPhone App Store. I was full of hope that it would make blogging by phone a little easier. Sadly though I couldn’t even get the app set up and I’m glad I didn’t have to pay for it.

First off the app couldn’t find a file called xmlrpc.php. Turns out Namesco deny access to that particular file. Duly renamed as recommended the app still struggled to save my blog settings. Every attempt to set it up resulted in the app self-closing. After around 10 attempts I gave up and deleted the app.

When an app is this unreliable in simply getting it set up it doesn’t inspire confidence that it will work eventually. Imagine spending an hour writing a blog post then the app shuts down unexpectedly before your post has been published.

It would appear that for now it is easier and safer to simply use your regular wordpress interface through Safari. You’ll need to put the text editor into HTML source though before you can type but it’s no great hardship. And that is exactly how this post was written.

Many people using WordPress to build themselves a website these days use an automated installer system provided by their server company. These are handy tools but I have 2 problems with them:

1. The version of WordPress is rarely the most up to date

2. There is what seems a throwaway question that is actually very important in the installation process

It’s the second point I want to refer to here. When installing WordPress there is a question that asks whether you want to allow search engines (Google, Technorati) etc to access your blog. Many internet users trained to say NO to any privacy questions (Do you want to sign-up for our newsletter? Can we give your email address to anyone we please?) will automatically say no to this question too.

Those budding site builders then go on to create a fine site and great content but they’re just not getting anywhere in Google. There’s a reason. Saying no to the installation question about search engines inserts a Noindex, Nofollow tag into the website source code. This means that no matter how hard you try to get into Google it’s just not going to index you.

Thankfully though there’s a quick fix. If you go to the Settings > Privacy section of your blog admin menu you can find the setting in there and give access to the spiders who really want to index your site. Then, providing you’ve got a few links pointing at your site, the spiders should be around to visit soon and your listings should appear shortly after that.

This blog was moved a while ago to a Namesco server and it has been an amazingly reliable service compared to the last one I had. Uptime has been 100% as far as I can tell, and the service is fast and easy to use.

However, one thing that was bothering me was not being able to change from the WordPress default URL’s because doing mod_rewrite through .htaccess doesn’t work on Zeus servers. YOu’ve got to use their rewrite.script to rewrite URL’s and I wasn’t sure where to start with that.

Last week, thanks to a comment from @andrewburnett on Twitter, I thought I would figure out how to solve the problem and get some friendly URL’s up there.

I tried a few different bits of code but this one was the one that worked, found in this WordPress forum post.

RULE_0_START:
# get the document root
map path into SCRATCH:DOCROOT from /
# initialize our variables
set SCRATCH:ORIG_URL = %{URL}
set SCRATCH:REQUEST_URI = %{URL}

# see if theres any queries in our URL
match URL into $ with ^(.*)\?(.*)$
if matched then
set SCRATCH:REQUEST_URI = $1
set SCRATCH:QUERY_STRING = $2
endif
RULE_0_END:

RULE_1_START:
# prepare to search for file, rewrite if its not found
set SCRATCH:REQUEST_FILENAME = %{SCRATCH:DOCROOT}
set SCRATCH:REQUEST_FILENAME . %{SCRATCH:REQUEST_URI}

# check to see if the file requested is an actual file or
# a directory with possibly an index.  don’t rewrite if so
look for file at %{SCRATCH:REQUEST_FILENAME}
if not exists then
look for dir at %{SCRATCH:REQUEST_FILENAME}
if not exists then
set URL = /index.php?q=%{SCRATCH:REQUEST_URI}
goto QSA_RULE_START
endif
endif

# if we made it here then its a file or dir and no rewrite
goto END
RULE_1_END:

QSA_RULE_START:
# append the query string if there was one originally
# the same as [QSA,L] for apache
match SCRATCH:ORIG_URL into % with \?(.*)$
if matched then
set URL = %{URL}&%{SCRATCH:QUERY_STRING}
endif
goto END
QSA_RULE_END:

The above goes in your file called rewrite.script in the root folder.

Once I did that I went to the WordPress settings > Permalinks and told it to do a custom structure permalink:

/%category%/%postname%/

The default permalink structures had went along the lines of /index.php/%category%/%postname%/ but this just wouldn’t work until I’d removed the index.php from the equation.

This might not work for everyone, but I just thought I’d relay the experience incase it can help someone out.

I’ve just upgraded this blog to WP 2.6 and only had one headache with it. When I updated the database, all my category names disappeared. WP still kept the cat_id numbers on each post but the categories had no name so you couldn’t click through on them.

Investigation in MySQL Admin showed that the table wp_categories had disappeared and the table wp_terms had appeared. Luckily they had the same number of rows so for me it was a case of taking the data from my sql backup and hand inputing it into the relevant rows in the new table. I only had 19 categories to fix though.

Found some more info on it here.

I’m currently about to redevelop a site and want to use WordPress 2.6 as a full blown CMS. Has anyone done this and what plugins would you recommend in terms of building navigation etc? I don’t really want the thing to look like a straightforward blog so was going to use the pages and sub-pages route to build it, then hopefully style it to make it look like a standard site. Comments will be still be allowed but will be renamed reviews on the products that the site features.
So can you use WP as a full CMS?

This question comes up over and over. I guess it’s because WordPress include Akismet in their version 2 but you can’t actually activate it without the WordPress API Key.
Here’s what you do for that API

• Go to www.wordpress.com
• Sign up for an account there. They make you take up a blog on wordpress.com but don’t worry about it, you don’t have to use it
• Once logged in, go to the menu in the top-left of the page My Account > Edit Profile
• Staring you in the face should now be your API key above your personal details. You can use this on all your non-wordpress hosted blogs to enable Akismet

My current bugbear is going to sites (web 2.0 sites especially) and registering, or adding a link or doing something else that gives that site more content then seeing that the link back to my site has had a nofollow tag put on it.
If you want someone to take time to use your site and help you out then you should be prepared to give them a link back. Yes, I know that the spammers would zero in on the site and pound it, but if you put in other ways to keep them at bay then your real users would be in with a chance of getting something back from you.

So for this reason I’m removing the nofollow attribute from this install of WordPress.

I thought this would be a simple task of flicking a switch somewhere in the WordPress control panel, but no, it’s never that simple in WordPress.

First off I found some code to remove the nofollow tag here.

Then it was going on about putting it in the my-hacks.php file which I couldn’t find in my install of WordPress. No worries though, this wiki has all the info on switching on and adding a my-hacks.php file.

I decided the time was right for this as I can moderate all the comments that come in anyway. Akismet is installed to take out the blatant spam, and I want to give something back to anyone who takes the time to write a comment.

So please go ahead and leave comments now and know that you’re getting some link-love back.

Interesting thing this morning with WordPress hanging on a standard install. Lots of people are having trouble with getting to the dashboard on their own domains. This would appear to be connected with the site wordpress.org being down.
The dashboard page calls external info which must be hosted on wordpress.org – when the info doesn’t come through your browser hangs.

Try entering your login info then after waiting for a while, change the browser address to:

http://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin/post.php

That let me into the admin section.

Next thing will be to comment out the external data calls within the code for the dashboard page so that this doesn’t happen again.

I decided the best comment spam protection for this installation of WordPress was Akismet. It’s dead easy to install and really looks like it will run in the background no bother at all. Now I can remove “Delete comment spam” from my list of things to do each morning. The one issue was that you have to sign up for a WordPress account on the WordPress site to get a code that unlocks the plugin, regardless of whether you run your blog on your own server. Not exactly a drama though.

Well the spam has finally got out of hand. Up to now I’ve been deleting a few spammy comments each morning but this morning I logged in to find 82 spam comments for various pharmaceuticals. I have no idea what these pills do or why they want a nofollow link from an SEO site but it must float their boat somehow. I know I’m being naiive and it’s all done using bots but I thought this comment particularly applicable:

Your site is very cognitive. I think you will have good future.:)

It made me laugh.

Anyway the time has come to look into what spam plugins I can get for WordPress. I know Matt Cutts has a number verification one working on his site and I think that’s the way to go. There are a number of third party scripts and I’d just like to find the best one so that I don’t wake up to 82 comment alerts from this site alone in the morning.