WordPress

If you use WordPress, you may occasionally run into the “HTTP error” problem when uploading images. Search online and you’ll find all sorts of explanations — some say it’s a file permission issue, others say you need to add a snippet of code to your theme. In fact, all of these are “possible” causes. The most correct approach is to check the server’s error log to determine what the actual cause is. I happened to run into this problem today, so let me put together my solution along with other possible causes! ...

Anyone who builds a site with a CMS (such as WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla) has probably heard the saying: use fewer plugins and your site will load much faster. For example, if I want a Lightbox effect on my site, I can manually add the jQuery code, or I can just install a plugin. Both methods achieve the same result, but they can make a noticeable difference in how fast the site loads. ...

Maintenance mode seems to have been introduced around WordPress 3.0. When your WordPress is being updated, it automatically enters maintenance mode to keep visitors from seeing error messages. I had actually been looking forward to this feature for a long time, because almost every other mature CMS has it — Xoops, for example, lets you temporarily shut down your site, and the well-known forum software Discuz! can also temporarily close a forum and restrict access to specific users. WordPress's maintenance mode, though, isn't very good yet: you can't enable it manually. It only turns on automatically while files are being updated. This article will show you how to enable maintenance mode by hand....

Someone asked me the other day what WordPress can do. That's actually a hard question to answer, because WordPress is extremely extensible — you can use plugins to add all sorts of features to your blog, and you can even make your blog not look like a blog at all ^^ WordPress also lets users install themes to dress up their blog nicely. If your skills are good enough, you can design your own theme too, but that's not what this article covers. This article is mainly about how to install plugins and themes. ...

You ask me how deep my love is, how much I love you? (just kidding~) You ask me what I think is the best blogging software in the world for building a site? I’ll definitely tell you it’s WordPress. It’s not just because my own blog is built with WordPress that I say this. Back when I was choosing what software to use to build Wind Chaser, I considered using something like Xoops paired with plugins to construct a blog, and I also tried LifeType, the blogging software the school uses, but neither was very good. LifeType’s interface in particular was really unbearable, extremely unfriendly, and it had our English teacher dropping by every so often to ask me how to read replies, how to publish a post… On top of that, LifeType’s extensibility isn’t as good as WordPress’s. Anyway, WordPress is just the best ^^ If you don’t believe me, try installing it yourself~~ ...

When you look for files online, you often run into an annoying situation: you finally find the file you want, click the link, and get… “This page has been removed. Please contact the site administrator.” It’s really frustrating. But it’s not entirely the webmaster’s fault. Once a website grows, it has a lot of outgoing links, and the webmaster can’t check every one of them by hand. Some webmasters ask users to report broken links, but I don’t think that works well. Someone who has already hit a dead link is annoyed enough. Why would they bother reporting it? Here I want to introduce Broken Link Checker, a plugin made specifically for WordPress. It automatically checks your WordPress blog for broken links and broken images (the broken-image icons that Chinese speakers jokingly call “steamed buns”). Broken Link Checker can also email you when a broken link appears on your blog. It’s very convenient, but I’d recommend that first-time installers don’t turn that feature on right away. Many people find over a thousand broken links or images the first time they run it, and their inbox gets flooded XD ...

After I got up today and logged into 逐風者, I saw a very important message on the login screen - WordPress 2.9 has been released. And this time it isn’t just a bunch of bug fixes; quite a few features have been added too. Based on my own testing, WordPress 2.9 doesn’t have any major problems, so everyone can go ahead and update right away!! ...

As the saying goes, the tall tree catches the wind. WordPress is the most widely used blogging platform in the world, so it's also a prime target for hackers everywhere. Strengthening your WordPress security is something every blogger has to do. WordPress releases security updates every so often, but keeping your site safe also depends on you. A Japanese organization once studied computer incidents (computers being attacked) and found that a large share of them came from user mistakes rather than from problems with the system itself. So in this post, I'll borrow an article from the Chinese blog Moonlight Blog to show you how to check whether your WordPress installation is secure enough. ...

WP Security Scan is a WordPress plugin that scans your site and reports WordPress vulnerabilities. If you host your own site, you probably already know that before setting things up you need to configure file permissions — things like 777 and 655. What WP Security Scan actually does is check whether your file permissions are set correctly, and it can also check and change your database prefix. It's a great fit for beginners....

In this post I’ll show you how to enable WordPress’s Gzip feature with the Gzippy plugin. First, a heads-up: not every hosting account supports Gzip. If your host doesn’t support it and you install Gzippy anyway, your site may break. If that happens, just remove Gzippy via FTP! So what’s the benefit of installing Gzippy? Of course there is, otherwise why would I bother XD. Gzip is simply web page compression. It can make your web pages smaller. A page that’s 100K might shrink to about 30K after Gzip compression, which makes pages load a lot faster. Plugin name: Gzippy Official website: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gzippy/ Download link: http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/gzippy.1.0.2.1.zip ...