Short post today, but I’m a bit behind on work, and I’m trying to catch up.

Yoast.com just relased a new Wordpress SEO plugin, but its only available to his e-mail newsletter subscribers. If you want to learn more about this plugin and how it can affect your Search Rankings, sign up to the newsletter…

a

New Wordpress SEO plugin from Yoast

Fervens design screenshot

The theme is by a loyal Smashing Magazine reader, Elena Gafita, and the design is by far one of the most beautiful I have yet seen.

Grab your own copy here: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/08/05/fervens-a-free-wordpress-theme/

a

New design, once again

After clicking the upgrade button 6-7 times, and it still refused me to continue on, I decided to go digging on the Wordpress support forum, where several other people had the same problem.

None of the fixes worked though, so I decided to do a bit of digging myself.

Dissecting the upgrade.php file, I noticed a particular part:

<?php if ( get_option(’db_version’) == $wp_db_version ) : ?>

So, the upgrade.php file checks the data in the database to see if the version of the database is correct… Hmm, okay, let me dig up what it says in the database.

A quick visit via phpmyadmin discovered that the value “db_version” in the “wp_options” table was blank. That cant be right? So heading over to another blog which had successfully upgraded to Wordpress 2.6 without any problems, I saw that the value there was set to “8201″ …

I changed the value manually in the database, and now the blog works perfectly.

Please note, that I manually told Wordpress that I had updated the database correctly, so if that is not the case and the upgrade script did not finish running due to some sort of error, I could have broken the blog even more, please try this at your own risk!

a

Having trouble upgrading to Wordpress 2.6?

After a bit of searching I found the problem, but getting into the database to clean up was a bit of a problem, since the script was still running. I had to remove the script totally from my install in order to stop it!

I was now left with 96.000 something posts, of which I knew 93.000 or so were duplicates! How to clean those up? I could use the manual approach, which I started on, but I soon realised I would be old and grey before that fixed the problem.

A bit of Google searching (where else to start your research?) I found a nifty script to help with exactly this problem:

DELETE bad_rows.*
from wp_posts as bad_rows
inner join (
select post_title, MIN(id) as min_id
from wp_posts
group by post_title
having count(*) > 1
) as good_rows on good_rows.post_title = bad_rows.post_title
and good_rows.min_id <> bad_rows.id

This solution was found on the Wordpress.org support forum

This solved the problem, and my blog is now acting normally again.

P.s. remember to back up your database before doing this!

a

Mysql trick to delete duplicate Wordpress posts

On the 1st of January I installed Angsuman’s Translator Plugin and look at the results so far:

November 2007: 6,275 visits
December 2007: 4,645 visits
January 2008: 14,530 visits
February 2008: 27,338 visits
March 2008 (so far): 26,797 visits.

It is obvious that March will surpass the previous two months, and yes, I am VERY happy with the results so far.

I should note that I of course also maintain the site itself by adding new fresh content, so it is not ONLY due to the plugin, but I cannot ignore the huge increase the plugin as given me.

Help me sponsor the server costs!

You can have your banner shown for as little as $20 per month! February gave 27,338 unique visitors with 75,277 pageviews. Click here to get more information.

a

Wordpress translation plugin gives fantastic results

Alright, not really what I wanted to happen on a Monday evening.

I came home, and just before I started to make dinner, I went to check my mail, in there was a mail from an advertiser that an ad was not showing, and naturally I went to the site to check.

Lo and behold, my site was hacked, and the hacker installed the c99madshell v. 2.0 on my domain.

Searching for information I found only vague information, and never really found out how the ‚Ǩ#”%”‚Ǩ# hacker came in.

I started by updating my Wordpress installation to the latest version, and then went hunting. I found the script in my themes folder, where it replaced one the .php files.

The only information I found that gave any clue to where to look was here: http://www.devside.net/blog/smf-exploit-like-phpbb-hack

I included below screenshot, which is from the same blog-entry (credit where credit is due) since I focused on removing the hack instead of documenting it. I hope the owner does not take offence.

Removing it was fairly easy once I knew where to look, but I had to have a serious look around to see where it was hidden.

So, what did I learn from this? To backup, backup often, and to always update my Wordpress installations.

Have you had a visit?

a

A hacker came by with c99madshell v. 2.0 madnet edition

The idea behind the plugin is to automatically provide a multi language version of each of your pages for your users, as well as for the search engines.

The amount of new pages available for the search engines to spider on your site, and one things the search engines love, is big sites.

The site I chose for this test, is one of my fairly well indexed and visited sites, www.photoshoptutorials.dk This is a site which has have been working for itself, and just gradually adding content, and gradully receiving more and more visitors. It currently has about 10.000 pages on it, but with the addition of this plugin, it theoretically has 10.000 x 14 = 140.000 pages.

Other pages have reported a solid increase in visitors and indexed pages, so I am very curious to see what this will bring to me.

I have now generated enough data over the last half year or so with the page as it is now, and I should be able to see if and when this plugin kicks in.

I will write a status back in a few months, to report what kind of progress there has been.

a

Wordpress Plugin Test - Angsuman’s Translator Plugin