This weekend I’ve made a few upgrades to the site, a software upgrade, a few new plugins as well as some tweaks to clean things up. Hopefully these changes will make the site a bit more useful, and remove some clutter from the main page, so that you are presented with content, and all the ’extras’ will be tucked away.
I’ve upgraded to the newly released WordPress 2.0.5, the software that power this site. As a rule, WordPress is an extremely easy install. This upgrade would have been simple, had I not forgotten about a few core files that I modified. After reverting to the previous version, I had the files patched and uploaded within a few minutes.
All in all, this process went quite well. The database performance updates made the install well worth it.
I’ve added a couple new plugins to add some additional functionality, here’s the list:
- Auto Shutoff Comments – This is a handy plugin that closes comments after 30-days, this will help cut-back on the spam that comes through.
- Related Posts – This, in theory, adds links to similar posts below each post (when viewed on its own page, not on the home page). So far I’ve not been completely impressed with the links, but I’ll leave it for a while and see how it does.
- Socible – This is one I really had to debate, there’s not much more I hate than sites that remind me of a NASCAR race car. I’ve set this up to only display on the single post view, and will only offer Reddit, digg and del.icio.us. This is another one I’ll keep for a bit then see if it’s worth keeping around.
I’ve rebuilt my about page to include some additional data and take a more readable format. I’ve also added a new page that details my bayonet collection. To clean things up slightly, I’ve updated the code that adds the Technorati tags so that it will only show in the single post view, and no longer appear on the main page.
I recently became curious just how much time I had spent working on content for this site, which led me to an idea: it would be great to have a page that listed some useful data about the content, and how much effort was put into it. I had some hope that I could pull some of this directly out of Hugo, though unfortunately it didn’t expose the information I wanted (and certainly not in an efficient way).
During my Christmas vacation last year, I converted this site from WordPress to Hugo; while I’ve been happy with the change, a couple of features are missing. One of these is that there was a section with related content at the bottom of each post. I wanted to get it back.
Thankfully Hugo has native support for Related Content, so while I was hoping this would be a simple task, there’s a note that made things substantially more complicated:
While looking into PL/SQL Developer – a very popular tool for working with Oracle databases, to see how it encrypts passwords I noticed something interesting. When testing Windows applications, I make it a habit to have Fiddler running, to see if there is any interesting traffic – and in this case, there certainly was.
PL/SQL Developer has an update mechanism which retrieves a file containing information about available updates to PL/SQL Developer and other components; this file is retrieved via HTTP, meaning that an attacker in a privileged network position could modify this file.
In a somewhat (but not entirely) surprising announcement, Google is removing support for H.264 video from Chrome. This change to their implementation of the often controversial HTML5 <video> tag is both a major step by Google and a furtherance of the already complicated world of video online.
… To that end, we are changing Chrome’s HTML5 support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project.
When you move on to your next challenge how will those that inherit your code think of you? Noble or notorious, innovator or insane? This is a question that all developers should ask themselves frequently; though too few ever do. You should always write with the assumption that someday a new developer will take over your code, and they will question every decision and assumption you’ve made. When this happens, what will they think of you?
