Monthly Archives: September 2008

Automatically Keep Your SVN Checkouts Up To Date In Windows – Rev. 2

This is an improvement upon my earlier post on how to keep SVN checkouts automatically up to date.

DD32 used his awesome Googling skills to find this page in the TortoiseSVN docs that talks about automation. Turns out you can launch TortoiseSVN via the command line, have it update the folder(s), and then close when done. So here’s an updated guide.

These instructions are for Vista, but they are likely similar for XP.

  1. If you don’t already have TortoiseSVN installed, download and install it.
  2. If you don’t already have a copy of WordPress checked out to a folder, do it. WordPress’ in-development SVN URL is http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk/
  3. Start -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Task Scheduler
  4. On the right, click on “Create Task” (not the basic one)
  5. Fill out as follows. Paths will likely be different! Click for bigger versions.

Done!

To test it to make sure it’s working properly, delete a few non-custom files from your SVN’ed folder. wp-trackback.php, xmlrpc.php, etc. are good test files. Then click on “Task Scheduler Library” in Task Scheduler (it’s on the left), click once on your new task, and then click “Run” on the right-hand side. If it’s working properly, the files your deleted will be restored.

Viper’s Video Quicktags v6.1.0 Released

I’ve released a decent sized update to my Video Quicktags plugin that incorporates many features requested by users after the release of 6.0.x.

  • YouTube: Can now choose between high quality FLV and high quality MP4 formats.
  • FLV: Bundled skins.
  • FLV: Improvements on how custom colors are set.
  • TinyMCE: Can now choose what line number to display the buttons on.
  • TinyMCE: Automatic browser cache breaking when the plugin is (de)activated or the line number is changed.
  • General: SWFObject calls moved to bottom of posts rather than theme footer.
  • General: Admin notice warning about automatic plugin upgrade breaking SWF files, etc. (ASCII vs. binary).
  • General: Ability to set custom feed text via settings page.
  • General: Image pre-cache URL fix.
  • General: Settings page improvements for users without Javascript.
  • General: More translations and translators added to credits page.
  • General: Redid admin warning message for users without the head hook.
  • Flash: Aliased “kml_flashembed” shortcode and “movie” parameter now used if it’s there. This is to support Anarchy Media Player.
  • Other various bug fixes.

If you find any bugs, please report them via my support forums or the plugin’s homepage. Thanks!

Be Careful With Where You Get Free WordPress Themes From

This is just a reminder: please only download WordPress themes from reputable sources such as WordPress.org.

Someone just came into #wordpress asking for help modifying their theme a few hours ago. I found the URL to the theme’s website via their style.css and downloaded the theme in an attempt to help them figure out which file to edit to do what they wanted.

What I found inside the theme’s footer.php file though was tons of malicious code. The entire contents of the file was heavily encoded (it was encoded with gzinflate(), str_rot13(), and base64_decode() around 150 times) and a ton of eval()‘s. Since I was curious what it was doing, I wrote some PHP to decode it without using the nasty (and unsafe) eval()‘s and I finally ended up with the HTML for the footer file (I assume to stop people from removing the code) and some more crazy eval() PHP code to display links to websites.

Luckily the code was just there to insert links (although using such a theme is a good way to get banned from Google), the PHP could just as easily have stolen passwords and other things. Remember, themes are exactly like plugins — they can execute code. You wouldn’t download a random program off and Internet and run it on your PC, so why would you do it with a plugin or theme?

So please, only download themes and plugins from reputable sites such as WordPress.org. If in doubt, don’t use it.

And if you’re wondering, qualitywordpress.com is the site where the user got the theme from. I have only posted the URL to that website in an attempt to prevent people from using it’s themes. Do not use the themes from that website.

Man I Hate iTunes

More fun experiences with iTunes today. Trying to upgrade my iPod Touch’s firmware after manually downloading iTunes 8.0 (automatic update kept failing) only to find I need to upgrade to iTunes 8.0 from 8.0 in order to upgrade my firmware.

Clicking on “Download iTunes” does nothing. Awesome.

How I Stopped 99.9% Of Spam From Even Being Posted

I’ve just released Disable Trackbacks, a plugin I’ve been using for a while now.

The vast, vast majority of pings sent from other sites are done via pingbacks, not via the old trackback system (I think I’ve gotten like 3 legitimate ones this year or something). However, spammers just love them to death and is pretty much the only ping system they use. So, I wrote this plugin a week or so ago and enabled it on my blog. I’ve gone from a few thousand spams a day to next 0-5 a day. A worthy tradeoff if you ask me (ignoring the couple legitimate ones a year to avoid literally hundreds of thousands of spams).

I also run Cookies For Comments to avoid regular comment spam. In order to post a cookie comment on my site, you must have stylesheets and cookies enabled. Since this is a personal website that isn’t mission critical, I can make that requirement.

Finally Defensio picks up any spams that make it though which are mainly pingbacks from spam blogs (aka splogs).

Spam problem solved, at least for now…

Twitter

Finally signed up for a Twitter account. You can find me here. No clue if I’ll use it long term or not, but it seems to be a good place to post random crap like plugin progress, etc.