It's a Blog ! Not a Log !

Now I don’t how many of the people who read this have a blog themselves or are considering getting one, but if you do . .  whatever you do don’t get one hosted at the above companies, because if you do, you will never ever be able to use the xmlrpc function that is embedded in WordPress, this function allows you to post images/text etc from other websites/apps into your WordPress blog.

When I first started blogging I did’nt know about xmlrpc, but as I began to have other sites where I posted things to do with my life, i.e. YouTube, Flickr and discovered that I could post from mobile apps on my iPhone and iPad, I began to realise what a fantastic function it was.

However when I attempted to start using this function on my WordPress Blog I discovered that it would’nt work, no matter what I did or how I did it, I just could’nt get anything to remotely post to my blog.

After much digging around on the net I discovered that possibly my hosting company was blocking this function within WordPress, so I decided to contact them, at first they informed me that this was not the case and that it must be something else.

So I went away and did some more digging on the internet and someone’s post on some long forgotted forum suggested that i make a copy of the xmlrpc.php file in wordpress and rename it to something else, which I duly did and then pointed my apps and websites to this newly created new named xmlrpc.php file and low and behold it worked, however some of the apps and websites I used were hardcoded to only use the xlmrpc.php file, so again I approached my hosting companys Tech Support explaining what I’d done and how I’d done it, and why of why was the original xmlrpc.php file not working, well they passed me about for a while and eventually I was told by someone that due to an expoilt in early WordPress installs they had decided to lockdown this file to stop their hosting servers being compromised.

So I went away and researched this exploit and found that it had been fixed and that the particular version of WordPress I was using was one of the ones where the exploit no longer existed.

With this news I went back to the Tech Support company and explained that my WordPress did’nt have this exploit and could they enable the function again . . .

Ohhh noooo we can’t do that sir, we’ve disabled it across all our hosting platforms/servers

Oh and why’s that I said

Well sir it seems not everyone’s as diligant as you are and some people are still running older versions of WordPress and because of that we can’t unlock the file to enable you to use it, so I’m afraid sir that theres nothing we can do to help you . . .

Anyway I’ve been having this arguement with them for the past few years now and I’m getting sick of it, in the 3 years I’ve argued with them, they could have got up off their arses and contacted all the people with outdated versions of WordPress and told them to update them, but guessing that would take brains, something which they don’t appear to have.

So today after recieving an email from them informing me that I had to change my email passwords for security reasons and that if I did’nt, they would change them automatically for me, I sent the following to their Technical Support Dept

Dear Technical Support,

I notice that you’ve recently sent me an email telling me to change the passwords on my email accounts, otherwise you will change them automatically.
Well how about you send a similar email to all your customers running outdated versions of WordPress, telling them that if they don’t update them you will disable their accounts, this way customers like myself will be able to use the XMLRPC function of wordpress, instead of continually having to listen to Support Technicians telling us that its been disabled locked down due to inconsiderate users not updating their versions of WordPress to a version that prevents the XMLRPC.php file from being exploited.
Come on Tech Support, pull your finger out and get with the programme, I’ve heard this same excuse from you for at least 3 years, so instead of blaming the customers because they have’nt updated, how about being security conscious like you are with email passwords and either notify those with older versions of WordPress that you’ll disable them unless they change or just migrate all those users with updated installs all onto one hosting server and then allow those customers to use the XLMRPC.php file.
I look forward to a response and the name and number of a Director of the company that I can complain to directly and perhaps reach some sort of solution.
regards
Vince a pissed off, sick to death of hearing excuses, probably soon to be an ex-customer of Namesco . . .

Now its just a case of waiting and seeing what they reply with. . . .

I’ll keep you posted

Just testing out a new WordPress to Twitter Plugin for WordPress, so if you can see this via a link my New Blog post on Twitter it works

Discovered a nifty little plugin for WordPress today called Twitter2Press it allows you to turn part of your WordPress blog into an image hosting service for all those pictures you tweet, you know the ones that normally got to twitpic or one of the other Twitter picture hosting services.

Its fairly easy to set up and you can be up and running with it on your blog in about 5 minutes flat, I’m using Tweetie 2 to post the tweets at the moment as this seems to be the only iphone twitter client that allows you to choose a custom image hosting service, though i could be wrong (feel free to correct me).

So what are the benefits of hosting your Twitter generated pictures on your WordPress blog, well for a start you don’t have to point links to them if you what to post them on your blog, there already here, not much of a benefit I suppose, it also in a sense allows you to mobile post to your blog using the medium of pictures, but the best benefit of hosting them is now people on Twitter are now being directed to your blog rather than some image hosting company, so your getting all that extra traffic, and all that extra traffic might just decide to read your blog and maybe even follow it, so it’s hopefully bringing new followers to your own little space on the interweb

Anyway time to eat the Tuna and Lemon grass stirfry I just tweeted about mmmmm yummy

Tweetie 2

The Birdfeeder Plug-in I added to my WordPress installation does indeed work, the last post appeared almost immediately in my Twitter account, so it looks like my fellow twitters out there are now going to be deluged with random blog posts from here, I’ve also managed to get YouTube to recognise my blog now, so it’ll be easier to post my videos on here as I load them onto You Tube, which means it’ll be fairly instantaneous, rather then taking me about a week to actually get my finger out and do it, just in the process of testing that now as well to see how it works, so keep an eye out for a couple of video posts from my You Tube account

Mmm just added the Birdfeeder Plug-in to my WordPress installation, thought I’d best do this so that my also new Twitter Account actually gets some posts made to it, cause at the moment it’s looking very very bare, bit like that old mother Hubbard’s cupboard.

The idea behind the plug-in is that any time you update your blog with a new post it updates your twitter status with your blog post, well that’s the idea anyway, so I’ve added this post to my blog to see if it actually works . .

Took me about 5 attempts to get the upgrade installed properly, kept on having problems with the Visual Editor and the tags function after the installs, couldn’t figure it out at first and googling the problem didn’t seem to help much either, as it seemed no one knew the answer to the question or the answer they had didn’t work for my particular situation.

Anyway after sitting down and thinking about it for a couple of hours, I started from the base upwards and went through every single folder on my website and compared each file to the upgrade files, anyway after about an hour I found to my dismay that a number of files hadn’t copied across properly during the upgrade, so after another 30 min’s of noting down which files where missing and uploading them one at a time I finally got the upgrade to take and now as you can see from I’m back on-line with my visual editor and tags back happy days.

Now I’ve just got to wait around for the next upgrade which should be hopefully 2.7 with all its fancy bells and whistles, lets hope that ones a little simpler to install/upgrade.

Well been a while since I changed the blogs theme and after looking through WordPress’s theme directory I’ve come across a few that I quite like so over the next week or so I’m going to be giving a different theme a go and see which one I like, so if you come back and the Blog looks different don’t worry you have’nt taken a wrong turn on the net and ended up at someone else’s blog, it’ll just be me changing the theme.

If you do happen to see a theme you like feel free to comment and let me know, as at the end of the day its you who has to look at it everytime you read it.

Anyway the theme for today is

3COL-RDMBAN RR 1.4 by TAKTEEK

Seems like only yesterday, how time flies

I never thought I’d enjoy blogging or that I’d actually type so many entries about  my time in Manchester, theres alot of things I’ve told people on here and theres alot things I have’nt sometimes I wish my Blog was more anonymous to my friends and family so that I could share more about my little piece of the world, but some things are best kept unsaid.

Well heres to another 2 years of blogging and possibly even more

Well after much searching of the internet for solutions to why Flickr wouldn’t integrate with my WordPress blog and trying just about every solution in the book :

Tried moving my blog into the root of my website = Didn’t Work

Tried adding some extra scripting to the xmlrpc.php file = Didnt Work

Tried creating a .htaccess file that would allow the xmlrpc.php file to be seen by Flickr = Didnt work

Contacted my Hosting company asking why the xmlrpc.php file was access denied = Didnt know

Contacted my hosting company again asked same question – Still didn’t know why

Contacted my hosting company yet again and finally got them to admit they didn’t allow the script to be run as earlier versions could be exploited = So still no joy

Finally decided to rename the xlmrpc.php file to another name and point flickr at this file and guess what = It worked

3 days of searching and ringing my Hosting company and I can now finally post from Flickr to WordPress hurrahhhhh

Just thought I’d share with you some photo’s of the lovely me and my bad mad friend’s, in order to do this I previously used Coppermine Gallery, but I could never get the wordpress plugin for Coppermine to work properly, so lucky for me I found WordPress Photo Album by R.J. Kaplan of me.mywebsight.ws , which seems fairly easy, well actually its damn easy to use and it integrates very smoothly into the WordPress structure perfectly.

Anyway will be spending the next few days uploading the images from my Coppermine Gallery into WP Photo Album, so keep checking back to see what’s new