Chris Wiegman

Archive for the ‘Web and Social Media’ Category

We finally made some headway today in our redesign of http://www.aviation.siu.edu. In a meeting with the departmental executive committee it was finally agreed upon that we must take the actual content of the site seriously. This is a big move as for the last 10 years I have almost never received any feedback on any change I made. In addition, there was a general agreement that the site has become a virtual pack-rat with features and content that have long outlived their usefulness.

Although these may sound like trivial items to many groups, unfortunately the powers that be where I work have not, until recently, been convinced of the power of online marketing and started to take it seriously. Now in many ways this shift does make my work a little harder with added oversight and more pressure, but it is a challenge I have looked forward to for years.

It has been a good day!

I’ve been with Bluehost for over a year now, but it might be time to move some of my sites away. The CPU throttling is simply becoming too excessive (up to 600 seconds some hours) and, in my opinion, unwarranted for a few sites that collectively receive very little traffic. Anyone have any suggestions on someplace else to look at?

Wordpress MU is a great system, but as with all systems their are drawbacks. One such drawback I’ve had problems with is the lack of available customizations for the sign-up/registration page. Whether you just want to change the style, or change the very text itself there really isn’t anything you can do with it without hacking the Wordpress MU core which can be a nightmare come upgrade time.

My solution to this problem has been to use my own wp-signup.php page within my sign-up theme. Here’s how it’s done:

Before you start, make sure your server supports Apache mod-rewrite. An easy way to do this is to simply go to a post on one of your blogs. If you don’t see ?= anywhere in the address you should be OK. If not, go to http://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin/options-permalink.php and see if permalinks are available on your server. If they are not you will need to get this enabled by your server administrator before going any further.

Next, the most important part, open up the .htaccess file in the root of your Wordpress MU installation in your text editor. You may need to create the file if you haven’t been using any redirects previously.

Find the line:

RewriteBase /

Right below it (before anything else) add the line

RewriteRule ^wp-signup\.php(.*)$ wp-content/themes/[your theme name]/wp-signup.php$1

Save the file.

Finally, copy (don’t move) wp-signup.php from the root of your Wordpress MU installation to your theme directory (usually wp-content/themes/default). Make sure you leave the original file in place. Moving the file alters the Wordpress MU core installation which is never a good practice.

Now you may edit the wp-signup.php file to your heart’s content. Redirects to the new file should be seamless to your users.

If you would like to see how I’ve used this take a look at http://blogs.aviation.siuc.edu/wp-signup.php. Now my needs were simple, we just wanted to clarify some of the text to reduce confusion for our users. There is a lot more that can be done to make this form yours.

* edited Feb 27th, 2010: added a couple of important lines *
Never write on a deadline when you don’t have to. I forgot to change 2 important line.

In your new wp-signup.php page (the one in your themes folder) find the following 2 lines:

require( dirname(__FILE__) . ‘/wp-load.php’ );
require( ‘wp-blog-header.php’ );

and replace them with the following:

require( ‘../../../wp-load.php’ );
require( ‘../../../wp-blog-header.php’ );

This will ensure that Wordpress MU can find the files it needs to process your data.

Anyone who uses Wordpress knows there are plugins for almost anything and, in many cases, multiple plugins to do the same thing. These plugins, often created to help with a specific task on a specific site, are all good in their own right, however few of them are usable for anyone outside of the site for which they were created or in their tiny niche. When we look at all Wordpress sites as a whole there are only a handful of plugins that can be usable on nearly every site out there. These plugins, often involving security, SEO, or other similar functions are suitable for everything from the simplest blog to the most complex Wordpress site and in many cases could even qualify for inclusion into the core product. They are stable, well supported, and offer functions that are fundamental to a solid installation of any website. So which plugins are good enough to make the list this year? Here are 5 I don’t think any site should go without:

1. Akismet
   The one plugin that is now included with a base install of Wordpress, Akismet is the ultimate in Wordpress Spam protection. It creates a “Spam” box in your Wordpress comments and has the unmatched distinction of being the only spam blocker in any app I use to not miss a bad comment.
2. WP Security Scan
   Every new Wordpress installation has it’s problems. Whether it’s weak passwords, file permission problems, or some other glitch it doesn’t take much for an attacker to exploit an insecure Wordpress installation. WP Security Scan will find the most pressing problems and offers instructions and scripts for repairing them before they bring down your site.
3. Login LockDown
   Another security plugin, login lockdown prevents brute-force attacks on your Wordpress administration pages by locking any account after a specified number of bad login attempts. After using Wordpress MU in a public University I can tell you first hand that Login Lockdown not only improves the security of your site, but can also help reduce server load by reducing the number of allowed bad login attempts.
4. Header and Footer
   Header and Footer is a handy little plugin allowing for inclusion of custom code in the header and footer of all your pages. Items such as Google Analytics code, Yahoo Site Explorer meta tags, and numerous others can be added, removed, and changed at ease with this simple little plugin.
5. Clean Options
   I’ve added Clean Options to the list somewhat reluctantly as it may be a little much for some novice users. However it is an incredibly handy tool to have on any blog or site that has been out there for more than a little while. As other plugins are updated, added, or removed many of their options stay in place in your database. Do this enough times and it can start to impact the performance of your MySQL database. Clean Options fixes this by removing unused and obsolete options from the database allowing for a much more streamlined options table.

Of course these aren’t the only good plugins out there, and in fact putting this list together wasn’t as easy as I originally thought. A few of the plugins that didn’t make the cut include: All In One SEO Pack, Wordpress Mobile Pack, and Wordpress.com Stats among others. Have something else that I missed? Let me know so I can give it a try.

So the Holiday break is finally here. After what has been one of the most hectic semesters of all it couldn’t have come soon enough. The down time, while a needed break, also affords me the time to contemplate what will be next and, maybe more importantly, what I’ve accomplished.

Looking back there are a number of goals completed, a number still to go, and a few that I never even anticipated. In the case of our redesign we started in April, the main site is still to be done. This is due primarily to the uncertain outcome of our university’s web standards committee. We don’t want to over-invest in a product that will not meet whatever standards they decide to come up with. While waiting however I’ve had time to really refocus and expand our web presence while [hopefully] being able to provide a far more useful product to all of our customers. We’ve installed and launched Wordpress MU for individual, group, and class sites. We’re nearing the launch of a MediaWiki installation to be used as our local intranet. Finally, we’ve greatly expanded our social media presence and finally convinced the powers that be that our marketing dollars are better spent on the web than limited magazines and other media.

Stepping away from the web I’ve made a lot of headway in a number of projects. We launched (and then decommissioned) a Squid proxy to restrict internet access during the day due to very limited bandwidth. It worked almost too well and was quickly removed for mostly political considerations. We’ve also begun the rollout of non Microsoft desktops to our faculty and staff in the form of Ubuntu as the primary OS. Only 3 desktops and our webserver have been migrated so far but considering that we had never looked away from MS before that it is definitely a good start. Finally, we added a windows update server to provide more control and better use of our bandwidth while still maintaining the ability to make sure all systems are completely patched.

Now on to the future. My first priority is, as always, our web presence. Pending the outcome of the campus web standards committee I hope to get a new main site in place very quickly. In addition, depending on current content contributions, I would like to see our new Wiki launch at the beginning of the Spring semester. It has been in the making for a little while now and promises to provide a much more complete and, more importantly, standardized method of intra-department communication. Beyond that I would like to see our file services migrated to Samba and Linux away from MS Active Directory as well as continue the gradual migration of departmental desktops to the Linux platform.

With all that I’m sure it will be another busy semester. However as with every semester I look forward to the challenges and can’t wait to see the outcomes!