I recently updated one of my Wordpress blogs to v2.3
All seemed to be going well until I tried to post a new entry using Windows Live Writer (v12.0.1277.816) and it had an issue. Live Writer would post the entry yet come back with an error. It would not know it had posted the entry and would therefore save it as a draft. Also, republishing the same (draft) entry would result in an entirely new copy being published on the blog. The error was this:
Invalid Server Response
The response to the metaWeblog.editPost method received from the weblog server was invalid:
Invalid response document returned from XmlRpc server.
I hunted high and low for a solution. I did not find one. Then I thought perhaps there was an issue with my plugins. After disabling all plugins and then one-by-one reactivating them, I discovered the one causing the issue: Google Sitemaps v2.7.1
Looking up this plugin on the Wordpress 2.3 plugin compatibility list I see it is not compatible and that there is an updated version (3.0). I deleted the 2.7.1 version (just one file called sitemaps.php) and installed the folder and files for v3.0
After activating this new version I no longer get the publishing error on Windows Live Writer.
The lesson here is to check that all activated plugins are compatible with the latest version of Wordpress.
Looking for a CAPTCHA system to stop comment spamming on your blog or other web application?
It has been calculated that about 150,000 hours of human labor is spent filling out CAPTCHA requests on web sites wishing to reduce spam. Yet another waste of time and energy expended on dealing with idiots the persist in proliferating unwanted advertising material in this world.
The reCAPTCHA project doesn’t have the answer to eliminating website spammers but it does have a solution for putting the time spent filling out CAPTCHA questions into productive use. Every time the reCAPTCHA system dishes out CAPTCHA words it is in fact using this people-power to convert scanned copies of archived books into digital format. Click here to read more about it.
If you didn’t know about the huge online media archive over at www.archive.org you may like to check that out also. There you will find a vast library of free ebooks that are digitised copies of old books that are no longer under copyright protection. There are also many other resources at this site, including archives of millions of web sites.
So here’s my first post from the new Live Writer V1 (Beta) (12.0.1183.516)
Cosmetically it has been brushed up to fit in with Vista. I don’t use Vista so that’s nothing I am particularly interested in. But it does look nice. Of course, functionality is most important, then looks.
- It has spell as you type. Nice
- It has a “link glossary”. This allows you to set up link text that will be converted into a link
- There are many great plugins to add various features. For instance, plug-ins to:
- Insert video
- Insert social bookmarks
- Insert code
- Insert formatted text
- Insert non-formatted text
- etc.
- I am yet to find out it it will clear the current post after publishing, whilst leaving Live Writer open for writing the next post. I’ll know this in a moment
Missing features?
The main one, which I previously told MS about, is the ability to increase/decrease the font size with a button for each. This is much like the feature available in Word 2007. To change the font size and face in WLW we have to go to the FORMAT menu, the FONT, and change it in there.
This one issue aside, I still consider WLW to be the nicest blog editor around.
You can get it from http://get.live.com/betas/writer_betas
There is a new version (at long last) of Windows Live Writer available. I’ve not tried it yet as I am just downloading it now. If you want to check it out go to http://writer.live.com/
As mentioned in a previous post, having tried nearly all of the various desktop blog editors available (paid and free) I considered Live Writer (the version I am typing in now) to be a close contender as the best one to use. Let’s put it this way, it’s currently the only one I bother to use. Hopefully the new version will fill out the various “missing features” I wanted. I’ll let you know.
Jonathan
There is a great list of Wordpress plug-ins over at the ditii.com web site. You’ll find them here. (http://www.ditii.com/blog/2007/04/11/dtwl-best-wordpress-plugins/)
I think most of my favorites are there, along with numerous other plug-ins many people will find useful.
MySQL is a popular database system used in the backend of a huge number of web applications. Just about every database driven PHP application I have seen has MySQL working alongside it. There are various tools available (usually provided by your web host) for managing MySQL databases online (phpMyAdmin for instance). I have found that having a desktop manager can be very useful. I’ve found it particularly useful when I need to manually edit data within a range of tables and records.
The following tools are worth checking out if a desktop MySQL manager is what you want:
OPEN SOURCE
- HeidiSQL (formally SQLFront — an old favorite of mine)
HeidiSQL is an easy-to-use interface and a “working-horse” for web-developers using the popular MySQL-Database. It allows you to manage and browse your databases and tables from an intuitive Windows® interface.
With HeidiSQL you will also be able to
- generate nice SQL-exports
- synchronize tables between two databases
- manage user-privileges
- import text-files
- export table-data as CSV, HTML and XML
- browse and edit table-data using a comfortable grid
- batch-insert ascii or binary files into tables
- write queries with syntax-highlighting (next version will have also code-completion)
- monitor and kill client-processes
- and much more
- MySQL Administrator and MySQL Query Browser (from the makers of MySQL)
Avaialble for Mac, Windows, and Linus
I find the Heidi system to be easier to use
COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS
It’s important to backup content and databases we have online. Whether you run a blog (such as Wordpress) or other applications on a website, there are often many individual files to download if doing a backup manually via FTP. This can be slow and tedious if a quick backup is what you want (and why wouldn’t you?). phpMySQL has build in backup functions if you need them, although the following tools provide an easy one-stop solution.
Check out the following great tools for backing up your site content and MySQL databases.
- phpMyBackup Pro is a very easy to use, free, web-based MySQL backup application, licensed under the GNU GPL.
You can create scheduled backups, manage and restore them, download or email them and a lot more!
Major features:
- backup of one or several databases with or without data, table structure, …
- three types of compression (no compression, gzip or zip)
- scheduled backups (by a small PHP script which must be included in an existing PHP script)
- interface for management of the backups (viewing, restoring, downloading, deleting)
- backup directly onto FTP server and sending of backups by email
- platform independent - only webserver and PHP needed to run e.g. on MS Windows, Linux or Mac
- shell mode (to use manually or by cron script)
- backup of whole file directories (on a FTP server).
- backup databases from different accounts on several MySQL servers
- one installation can be used for all MySQL users of one MySQL server (used by webhosters)
- highest security through two alternative login methods (HTTP or HTML authentication)
- easy to use interface and very easy to install
- several language packages available
- PHP WebSite Backup
- PHP MySQL Backup
Published on October 11, 2006
in Blogging.
If you use the Performancing Metrics (www.performancing.com) sidebar plug-in for Wordpress (created by Dave Reid) you may find you get the following error (particularly when clicking UPDATE STATS):
Performancing Metrics
Warning: curl_setopt() [function.curl-setopt]: CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION cannot be activated when in safe_mode or an open_basedir is set in /home/feal/public_html/blog2/wp-content/plugins/pmetrics.php on line 375
Warning: curl_setopt() [function.curl-setopt]: CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION cannot be activated when in safe_mode or an open_basedir is set in /home/feal/public_html/blog2/wp-content/plugins/pmetrics.php on line 375
Warning: curl_setopt() [function.curl-setopt]: CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION cannot be activated when in safe_mode or an open_basedir is set in /home/feal/public_html/blog2/wp-content/plugins/pmetrics.php on line 375
Warning: curl_setopt() [function.curl-setopt]: CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION cannot be activated when in safe_mode or an open_basedir is set in /home/feal/public_html/blog2/wp-content/plugins/pmetrics.php on line 375
Warning: curl_setopt() [function.curl-setopt]: CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION cannot be activated when in safe_mode or an open_basedir is set in /home/feal/public_html/blog2/wp-content/plugins/pmetrics.php on line 375
Warning: curl_setopt() [function.curl-setopt]: CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION cannot be activated when in safe_mode or an open_basedir is set in /home/feal/public_html/blog2/wp-content/plugins/pmetrics.php on line 375
Visits: »
Today: 12
Yesterday: 18
This Week: 30
Last Week: 54
Total: 1442
Fetched at: Oct 9, 16:58
Options | Update Stats
I have found that the solution is to edit the following code, which is around line 375 (or whatever line mentioned in the error as shown above).
// Initiate cURL and set options
$ch = curl_init();
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, FALSE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, $header);
Set this line to FALSE (it will be set to TRUE initially):
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, FALSE);
That fixes the issue. I am not sure what other effect this has, but the plug-in seems to continue working fine as far as I can tell.
This is some discussion on this issue which I raised on the Performancing.com website located here.
Technorati : Performancing
Del.icio.us : Performancing
Ice Rocket : Performancing
This little plug-in has a very simple, silent, and useful feature. Essentially it ensures that your blog will only ping the various blog tracking servers when you publish a new blog entry, and not when you edit an existing entry. There is really no reason to ping these servers when you have updated.
This plug-in can be found at: http://www.daven.se/usefulstuff/wordpress-plugins.html
This particular post is being written in a free WYSIWYG blog editor called Zoundry. So far it looks pretty good—in fact I would say it is the best offline blog editor I have tested. Here’s some of the key things I think it has going for it:
- It has a good range of dictionaries for spell checking, such as the UK English that is missing from w.Blogger. The languages options built into it are English UK, US, CA; Dutch; French; Swiss French; German; Swiss German; Italian, Norwegian; Russian; Spanish; Swedish. It will automatically download the dictionary data file for which ever language your choose.
- Very feature rich. The only feature I like to have on hand which is not here is the ability to manually define the Wordpress post slug. I’ve not found an offline editor that allows me to do this as of yet.
- Nice interface, with great support for multiple blogs, blog accounts, blogging systems, etc.
- Great storage system for existing and unpublished entries.
- A built in code (XHTML) validation tool. It’s a little slow but does the trick for those that want to know their XHTML status.
- A nice preview system that allows you to import or download your template
- It has a localisation function in it, which I’ve not tested as the default is English but I assume non-English users can download localisation files in their language.
- You are able to specify a “media repository” where Zoundry will upload your media files to for linking to from within your blog entries.
Zoundry also provide an affiliate sales system. Essentially Zoundry is an intermediary for a range of affiliate providers. The current options are Amazon.com, Buy.com, and Cooking.com. I understand they will be adding more in the future. The Zoundry editor is set up to allow the easy insertion of items from any of these affiliate stores. You then get a percentage of the affiliate commission and Zoundry keep some for themselves. It ranges from 70% - 80% for you and 20% - 30% for them. Might come in handy for those that want an easy solution to reviewing items on the net and generating affiliate sales.
For now Zoundry is my preferred offline blog editor. The others I have tried are w.Blogger (nice features but no UK English spell checking), and Blogjet (UK English but bare minimum of formating features).
UPDATE: 14 Nov 2006
Zoundry continues to be my prefered desktop blog editor.
If you would like a way to easily post blog entries via Zoundry from your browser check out the various browser extensions here.
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