Upgrade Blues

November 6, 2007

Just a few things related to the upgrade to 2.3.1.

  • I’ve been getting hammered by comment spam for the past couple of months, and MadMan advised me to install Akismet and Bad Behavior. Akismet was already installed, so I installed Bad Behavior.
    Bad Behavior is a WordPress plugin which detects all incoming comments and tracbacks, and checks them against a blacklist of spammers. If there’s a blacklist match, it just serves up a 403 page to the spambot. Enthused, I set it to strict mode.
    Unfortunately, all IP addresses assigned by Reliance Infocom (including mine) are on a spam blacklist. As a result, I couldn’t write comments. Or create new posts. What makes it really fun is that Bad Behavior doesn’t allow blacklisted IPs to do anything that requires submitting a form – including turning strict mode off. So I was locked out of my own blog until Madhu kindly logged in for me and turned strict mode off.
  • The blogroll in the left sidebar has the white background only in the lower half. I will have to fix this by editing the .gif background file. This will require much careful fiddling about in Paint.
  • The blogroll also no longer contains the link category headings (though links are still sorted by category). I’ll probably be able to restore the headings by mucking about a little with the PHP. This needs to be done at leisure, with enough time to debug, so it may not happen for a while. Bear with me until then.
  • The ‘Email Aadisht’ page had stopped working because I accidentally deleted my contact form plugin. It’s working again now.
  • The del.icio.us links widget will be back again soon. Soon = tonight if I get home early enough and fresh enough. Otherwise, by Thursday.
  • Tags!
  • The new theme lets you hide the widgets by clicking on the green circle. This is stupendous.