Tag Archives: plugins

Thoughts

Mobile version of site now available

If you happen to browse my site via a mobile device like an iPhone or another web-enabled smartphone, you will automatically see an optimized version of the site that downloads and navigates a lot faster than the regular version on your mobile device.

This was made possible by the folks at MobilePress, who’ve put together a wonderful (and free) WP plugin. My thanks go to them, to Digital Inspiration for writing about them, and to Chris Nixon for sharing that post through Google Reader for me. That’s how I found out about it.

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How To

How I moved all my content from comeacross.info to raoulpop.com

A place in this world

Background info

As midnight approached this past New Year’s Eve, I was busy working on a long-term project. I was about to move all of my content (every article and post I’d written) from comeacross.info to raoulpop.com. There were many reasons for this, but consolidation was the most readily apparent.

As detailed on my About page, I’d already combined my content from other sites of mine onto comeacross.info, but there was one more piece of the puzzle that needed to fall into place. I’d alluded to it already. I was thinking about doing it in 2006, believe it or not. As a matter of fact, when I sat down and thought about whether to start writing at comeacross.info or raoulpop.com, I knew deep down I should choose to start writing on my personal domain, but worried it might be too difficult for people to remember and type the name.

After a year or so at ComeAcross, I realized that the subjects I was writing about were much too varied for a standalone site. I was writing in a personal voice, using a lot of 1st person, and it only made sense to have that sort of content reside on my personal site. Plus, there were so many splogs (spam blogs) on the .info TLD, that I worried whether I would be taken seriously if I stayed on .info. I’d owned raoulpop.com for a long time, I wasn’t really putting it to good use, and it didn’t make sense not to.

I set a deadline of 12/31, and got to work on planning and research. What better time for such a big change as this than New Year’s, right?

I’m documenting this for you because someone else might need to know how to do it. And I figure the thought process that went on behind the scenes is also worth knowing.

Planning and research

My biggest challenge was to figure out how to redirect all of the traffic from comeacross.info to raoulpop.com, reliably and accurately. I needed to make sure that every one of my articles and posts would redirect to my new domain automatically, so that a URL like

http://comeacross.info/2007/12/30/my-photographic-portfolio/

would automatically change to

https://raoulpop.com/2007/12/30/my-photographic-portfolio/

and the redirect would work in such a way that search engines would be properly notified and I wouldn’t lose my page rank.

I knew about 301 redirects, but I wasn’t sure how to accomplish them in the Linux/WordPress environment the way that I wanted them to work. I had worked mainly with Microsoft web servers until recent times, and Linux was and still is fairly new to me. I was using John Godley’s Redirection plugin for WP (it’s an awesome plugin btw), and I knew it could do 301 redirects quite nicely. I had been using it heavily when I changed post slugs or deleted/consolidated posts at ComeAcross.

I worked out a line of Regex code that I could use to create a site-wide redirection, I tested it and it worked fine. In case you’re wondering, you can easily test it by creating a 307 (temporary) redirection instead of a 301 (permanent) redirection. Here’s how to do it:

Create a new 301 redirection where the source URL is

/(.*)

and the target URL is

http://www.example.com/$1

Make sure you check the Regex box, add it, and you’re done.

Just to make sure, I contacted John Godley to confirm whether it was the best way to do things. He said that would certainly do the job, but there was a MUCH easier and faster way to do it, one that saves a lot of the overhead that comes into play when WP gets used. It works through the .htaccess file. He was kind enough to provide me with the code, which is reproduced below.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

</IfModule>

Just paste that into your .htaccess file (remove all other code but make sure you back it up somewhere in case you need it), save it, upload it, and you’re done.

Don’t do anything yet though! Not before you’ve thoroughly backed up everything! Let me outline the steps for you, and keep in mind that I wanted to mirror all of my content from two separate WP sites using the same WP version, and to redirect from the first to the second. These two conditions have to be met in order for my advice to apply to your situation.

  1. Make sure both sites are on the latest and greatest version of WP, or at least they’re on the SAME version of WP
  2. Back up the database from the old domain
  3. Download all site files from the old domain
  4. Upload site files to new domain
  5. Restore database to new domain
  6. Make changes to .htaccess file as shown above
  7. Log into your new domain’s WP admin panel and change the site and blog URLs. Now you’re done! Check to make sure the redirection works properly and all of your content is there.

Upgrade your WP installs

The two sites have to be on the same version, or else things might not work as expected. Upgrade both sites to the latest and greatest, or at least make sure they’re on the SAME version before you do anything else. Go to WordPress, download and install the latest versions. There’s also an Automatic Upgrade plugin, but I haven’t tried it yet, so I can’t vouch for it.

BEFORE you do any sort of upgrade, you need to back up. Yes, you can’t get away from this… You’ll need to do two backups, one before you upgrade, and one after you upgrade, before you transfer the content.

Back up your content

This combines steps 2 and 3 listed above. Backing up your site files is easy. Use an FTP client to access the files on the web server and download them to your hard drive. I always keep a local copy of my site files. It just makes sense.

Backing up your database is a little more involved. Your database contains all of your site content (posts, links, comments, tags, categories, etc.) so you definitely don’t want to lose it. There are detailed instructions on backing up the database on the WordPress site. You can follow those, or you can go to your site’s Admin Panel >> Manage >> Export and download the WordPress WXR file, which you can import into your new site afterwards.

While this is great for backups, restores are another matter. I tried it and found that the import operation kept timing out at my web host. Given that I have thousands of posts, I didn’t want to sit there re-restoring the WXR file only to get a few posts done with every operation. I needed something quicker.

There is a plugin called WordPress Database Backup which lets you download a zipped SQL file of the database. You can use this to restore the database through the MySQL Admin Panel, if your webhost provides you access to it.

What I did was to simply point my new site install to my old database. This is a very handy and easy solution if you plan to host both sites with the same web host. But this still doesn’t excuse you from backing up the DB before you upgrade the WP install! 🙂

Restore your content to the new site

This is a two-step process (see #4 and #5 above) and involves reversing the steps you took during the backups. You will now upload your site files to the new domain, and you will restore the database to the new domain as well. If you’re in my situation, where you’re using the same web host, you can simply point the wpconfig.php file on your new domain to the old database.

Make sure all your content is properly restored before going on to the next step!

Make changes to the .htaccess file

You will need to make sure you don’t touch the .htaccess file before you transfer it to your new domain. Only the .htaccess file on your old domain needs to change. Remember this, or you’ll be wondering what’s going on with the redirects afterwards…

Use the code I’ve given you above, in the Planning and Research section, to make changes to the .htaccess file on your old domain, after you’ve made absolutely sure that all of your content is now mirrored on the new domain. Once this is done, the redirects will occur automatically and seamlessly.

Final checks and tweaks

This is very important. Surf to your old URL. You should get re-directed to your new URL. Do a search in the search engines for content of yours that you know is easily found. Click on the search results and make sure the links get redirected to your new site. Because you’re using 301 redirects, the search engines will automatically change their search results to reflect the URL changes without affecting your page rank, so you shouldn’t lose any search engine traffic if you execute the content move correctly.

There are a few more things you’ll need to check:

If you’d like to make changes to your site feed (and I did), you’ll need to handle that properly. I use FeedBurner, and there are people that subscribe to my content via RSS or via email. I needed to transfer both groups of subscribers to my new feed seamlessly. The FeedBurner folks helped me do just that, and I didn’t lose a single subscriber during the move. I detailed that process in this post.

What about internal links? If you’ve blogged for a while, you’ll have linked to older posts of yours. Those link URLs now contain the old domain, and you’ll need to change all of them at some point, or you’ll risk making those links invalid if you should ever stop renewing your old domain. Fortunately, there’s a Search and Replace plugin for WP that lets you do just that. It works directly with the database, it’s very powerful, and it’s very fast. That means you have to be VERY careful when you use it, because there’s no undo button. You can easily mess up all of your content if you don’t know what you’re doing.

What I did was to replace all instances of “.raoulpop.com/” with “.raoulpop.com/“. That did the trick nicely. I then did a regular site search for all instances of ComeAcross and manually made any needed changes to those posts. (Here’s a thought: back up the DB before you start replacing anything. This way you can restore if something should go wrong.)

Finally, if you’re using the Google Sitemaps Generator plugin, you’ll want to make sure you manually rebuild your site map. You don’t want to have your old site information in the site map as Google and the other search engines start to crawl your new domain.

That’s about all I did for the site content transfer. It occupied half my New Year’s Eve night, but it was worth it. It’s quite a bit of work, but if you plan it out, it should only take you 4-5 hours or less to execute the transfer, depending on your familiarity with this sort of thing, and the speed of your internet connection (keep in mind that upload speeds are a LOT slower than download speeds on most broadband connections).

Given how much work is involved, I was a bit surprised to see Matthew Mullenweg (founding developer of WordPress) talk about doing his own switch to a new domain in “2 seconds“. I think what he referred to is the changes to the .htaccess file and the blog URLs, which are the fastest parts of the process. There is, however, quite a bit of work that needs to take place behind the scenes before those switches can get flipped. And I also believe (someone correct me if I’m wrong) that he pointed both domains to the same web files — in other words, re-used his existing WP install — so he bypassed a lot of the steps that are otherwise required.

Hope this proves helpful to someone!

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Thoughts

Better video

I’ve wanted to be able to post the videos I upload to Vimeo on my blog for some time, but the WP video plugins just hadn’t caught up. I’m glad to say that I found one tonight. It’s called, appropriately enough, WordPress Video Plugin. It’ll work just great for most people, so I encourage you to try it out.

I wanted to take advantage of the full width of my blog’s content column, so I modified the Vimeo code to make sure that my videos get sized to a width of 550 pixels and also stay centered.

I’m happy to say that I really like the results. You can see the modified plugin in action on these three posts:

Since I record my videos at a resolution of 640×480 pixels, it’s only natural that I display them at the maximum width possible on my site, right?

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Thoughts

Something happened to ComeAcross

Something really good, that is. Over the weekend, I worked on improving the site functionality and on presenting a unified front, so to speak. I eliminated some sections, created some new ones, deleted tons of categories, and introduced some new feeds. The best way to explain it is to show you a screenshot of the sidebar. Have a look at it, then scroll past it to read the details.

The new ComeAcross sidebar

First, let me explain why. The gist of this effort is simple, at least to me. I’m trying to build an online brand, and it’s no good to have my online properties looking scattered and isolated, even when they’re part of the same brand. Second, I needed to value my work a little better, and to present it in ways that are easier to digest. I have a ton of content, but it’s not easy to find. I write on many subjects, but most people aren’t necessarily interested in all that I write. Add to that my constant lament about having too many categories, the release of WP 2.3 which allowed for native tagging, and finding John Godley’s awesome Redirection and Headspace plugins for WP, and it all adds up to some serious blog work that I’d been aching to do for some time.

You may remember I had other site sections just a little while ago, sections such as Blog, Photos, Videos, Podcasts and Faves. Those were located on individual sub-domains. ComeAcross resided under Blog, my photos posted to Flickr or Zooomr resided under Photos, and my videos posted to Vimeo or YouTube resided under Videos. The ComeAcross Podcasts resided under Podcasts, and I was using a podcasting platform called Loudblog to publish them. The Faves section displayed my Shared Items from Google Reader. But the problem was that all of these sections were separate. They were part of the same brand, but to search engines, they were different properties. I needed to bring all of my online content under one fold. I decided to do away with all of the subdomains and integrate everything into my blog, and that’s just what I did. I thought long and hard about this, and realized it was best to have everything under one roof, even though that meant my podcasts wouldn’t have a dedicated podcasting platform.

You’ll notice I’m advertising multiple feeds in the Meta section. I’d been sitting on some really good feed URIs from FeedBurner and not really putting them to good use. After re-categorizing my posts, I was able to re-dedicate those feeds to the my various categories, in order to allow you to subscribe to whatever interests you. I’ve got the main site feed, the comments feed, the articles feed, the photography feed, and the podcasts feed. It adds up to more choice for the reader. Incidentally, mouse over the articles and photography feeds, and look at the URIs. Isn’t that awesome? Can you believe I actually have those URIs? 🙂

Related to the feed changes mentioned above: my apologies to anyone currently subscribed to the following feed: feeds.feedburner.com/Information. I’ve been using it for my podcasts, but changed my mind and decided to use it for my articles instead. I know there were some diehard subscribers who stayed with that feed even though I put out no new podcasts in over a year (!), and they’re probably pretty confused right now. If you’re one of those, many thanks for sticking with me, and I’m sorry for switching content on you like this. The new feed for my podcasts is: feeds.feedburner.com/Raoul-Podcasts. And yes, in case you’re wondering, I’m working on a new podcast which I’ll put out soon (this month). 🙂

This brings me to the Categories. At some point, I had over 60 categories for my posts. What I was really doing is using categories as tags, and I shouldn’t have done it. After upgrading to WP 2.3, I decided to use categories as categories and tags as tags. I deleted almost all of my categories, and ended up with only five: articles, photography, podcasts, ideas and announcements. Now each one of my posts goes into only one category. Since I’m using tags as well, you can explore ComeAcross via categories, then click on the tags that interest you to get only the posts that you want. (I haven’t tagged all of my posts yet, that’s an ongoing process. I’m also displaying a tag cloud at the bottom of the sidebar, but I’ve got to work on the formatting of that text. I’m not quite happy with how it’s getting displayed. )

Finally, have a look at the Archives section. This is a small change, but it makes a big difference to the reader. I’m only displaying the years for my posts. This allows you to get a better idea right away of the spread of my content, and to explore the time period that you’d like to see. I still need to do some work on Archive and Category browsing, and on the Search results page.

I’m constantly working to improve ComeAcross, because I really want it to grow into a useful, well-read source of information. Here are just a few of the posts that talk about other changes and progress I’ve made:

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Thoughts

Catching a code injection hacker in the act

Several days ago, I installed the Redirection plugin from Urban Giraffe. It’s truly awesome, in more ways than one. John Godley, you are an amazing programmer! As I re-arranged the categories on my blog, I tracked the 404 errors through the plugin. On Saturday morning, I noticed the following bit of information in my log:

You can click on the thumbnail to view the screenshot at full size. Look at the entries for IP address 65.90.251.169. Notice something peculiar? That’s a hacker trying to inject malicious code into my pages. He was trying to call to code contained in a text file by the name ide.txt located on a possibly compromised domain.

First, I checked out his domain, new-fields.com. It looked legitimate. The text file was another story altogether. Have a look at the screenshots above. I also saved the code to my computer in case it ends up disappearing from the hacker’s website.

I tested the code, and it looks like some pages from the podPress plugin are targeted or affected — at least that’s what the error message given by WP referenced when I ran the code. I had that plugin enabled at the time, and I’ve disabled it since. It seems that the code tries to modify one of the header.php pages, along with checking disk space (?). So I thought, let me find out who this hacker is. Apparently, he’s from Napperville, IL, US, or at least that’s where his IP address lives.

What’s more, I thought it’d be interesting to see who owns that domain name where his text file resides. It turns out to be one Samir Farajallah from Dubai.

So what we’ve got so far is some dude in Dubai who owns the domain where the malicious code resides, and some hacker in Napperville, IL, trying to exploit my blog using that malicious code.

Wait, it gets better… On Saturday evening, I have another look at my blog’s 404 log, and I find that some other hacker from Vietnam (IP address: 203.171.31.19) is trying to hack into my blog using that exact same code, but this time the text file’s located on some domain in Argentina. That last link leads directly to the text file with the malicious code, but it’s harmless if you browse it. It only works if you run it as PHP code, like these hackers are trying to do.

So far, it looks like I’ve got two hackers, who may or may not be working together, using the same malicious code, located on two different, possibly compromised domains, and trying to modify my header files, possibly to insert code in there that will display splog content or some other stuff.

Update: It looks like three more hackers are trying their luck today, on Sunday morning, 9/30/07. Their IP addresses are 65.98.14.194, 66.79.165.19 and 66.11.231.48.

What I can tell you is that they haven’t been successful. I checked all of my files, and none of them have been touched. Everything’s fine. At this point, I’m not going to waste any more of my time trying to hunt them down. If I see that the attacks continue, I’ll notify my web hosting provider, along with the hosting providers of the other domains, and I’ll also notify the ISPs who own the IP addresses used in the attacks.

My thanks go out to John Godley for the wonderful Redirection plugin. I wouldn’t have been able to catch these hackers without it. I don’t often check my 404 log files, although I should.

I’ve been working in IT for 13 years or so. Maybe I’m naive, maybe I’m too honest for my own good, but I’ve stayed away from this hacking business, and I’ll continue to do so. It’s just not a sustainable lifestyle. I believe that the bad stuff you do in life will catch up with you sooner or later. It’s inevitable. These hackers will get what’s coming to them, and I won’t even have to lift a finger beyond what I’ve done so far.

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