Author: Paul Tomblin

Last night I had an idea. And typically for me, I couldn’t sleep properly as I kept trying to remind myself about the idea. I should have gotten up and tried it, but if it hadn’t worked I would have gotten even less sleep.

Anyway, the problem I was having with the OpenID plugin is that I forgot to make the plugin’s temp directory group writable. Most people seem to be ok with just making all their blog files writable by the web server, but I worry about the number of security holes that seem to pervade PHP applications so I make all the WordPress files belong to the user “blog” and only the ones that the web server has a legitimate reason to write belong to the group “www-data” and are group-write. When I installed this plugin, I made the tmp directory belong to the group “www-data”, but I forgot to “chmod g+rwx” on it. Duh. Even more “duh” worthy, I see that the plugin page has a FAQ that has that as item 1.

It seems to be working now. Let me know if you can’t comment.

I think this should do it. Famous last words. Last test got the correct comment one *and* the -1 comments thing. This should get rid of the “-1 comments”.

If this works, I’ll look into OpenID commenting (thanks for the suggestion, Jen) and I’ll strongly suggest everybody who has currently LiveJournal friended “ptomblin”, “ptomblin_rss” and “rantsnrevels” to unfriend them and friend “ptomblin_lj”.

Got the comment count thingy working, but it didn’t push to LJ correctly. Try again.

Thanks to a post in rich text, I’ve discovered a pretty cool little plug-in that should cross post all my posts here over to my fake blog on LiveJournal. Even better, another plugin puts a comment link on the bottom of my fake blog that directs back there so I don’t have to check there and here for comments.

In other blog news, I installed Akismet which supposedly works with SpamKarma2 to further reduce the spam problem. But for some strange reason it seems to be double counting the spam. I wrote down what my SpamKarma “spams killed” count was when I started, and since then the Akismet count has been increasing at almost, but not quite, double the rate the SpamKarma2 count has been. The SpamKarma2 count delta also agrees with the number of spams I see in the review and clean-out pages that both SpamKarma2 and Akismet present. Very weird.

Speaking of blog spam, another thing I’ve noticed recently are trackbacks where some site has copied my entire blog post and surrounded it with advertising. I don’t know what they’re playing at, but every time I see one I mark it as spam and delete the trackback. I notice that other bloggers, David Megginson for instance, don’t delete them. They probably should – I can’t see these things as anything other than an attempt to confuse search engines into directing people to their site instead of yours. It’s hard to draw the line between these trackback spammers and a legitimate “Planet” site that puts your RSS feed on a page with other blogs of a similar interest group – for instance I know my blog appears on “Planet LUGOR” and “Planet Linode”, the first because I’m a member of LUGOR and the second because I’m a former customer of Linode’s virtual private servers. It’s hard to draw the line, but I know the difference when I see it and I do draw the line.