Herself’s Webtools

TimesToCome was once a bleeding edge website. The splash page had a black starry background with a javascript ufo flying around as any self respecting cool website did in the 1990s. Times changed, and animations fell from favor so it went static. Over time the designs changed but the splash page remained just a link list to various sections of the website. TimesToCome was late moving to a blog setup. It is even later in becoming a portal, but better late than never.

RSS feeds can be used to create portals or to being live, current information to your blogs. Magpierss is built into WordPress. So you can easily use it to bring your other blogs rss feeds into your main blog, or to bring breaking news in your subject area to your blog with a custom rss.

TimesToCome was broken up and spread across eight blogs when I modernized it. The portal grabs the rss feeds from all eight blogs using magpierss.

If you need to install magpierss download it and follow the directions in the “INSTALL” file. It was the simplest install of any web software I’ve look at yet.

Be very sure to follow the directions to set up the cache. If you do not then every time the page loads it will grab fresh copies of the feeds slowing it down as well as any sites it is pulling rss feeds from.

Included in magpie are a README file and a cookbook file. Both contain examples of how to use magpierss. You can just cut and paste the examples and change the names to protect the innocent.

If you are pulling a bunch of feeds and using more than the links, be sure to leave lots of white space in your layout. I’m not a design person. The design took me about four times as long to put together as did the code. But it is simple to remember to use large margins and lots and lots of white space to make things legible. I also used the Coppermine script I wrote as a WordPress plugin to bring in three feeds of latest photos to the portal. It breaks up all the text.

So in summery, if you want to build a portal or incorporate live rss into your site use magpierss. If you are using WordPress it is already installed you just need to read the directions.

TimesToCome portal splash page. I refer to it as ‘The Wonder of me page’. ;D

Herself’s Green Things carries just the garden and houseplant blog rss feeds and photos.

Many web hosts charge extra for log file access or don’t offer log file access at all. If this is true for you check out Woopra.

Woopra provides live information, not daily like Google analytics. It has a wonderful interface and is painless to install. You just add the appropriate plugin or javascript code to your site.

I have not tried it, but several commenters on this blog have highly recommended it.

So if you need or want real time analytics give it a look.

While doing research for the WordPress Security Suite ( Prevent Bot Registrations, Prevent bots, scrapers and other badness on your WordPress blog ) I needed some tools to pull agents, user requests and ip numbers from my log files and just give me a list of the unique ones of each.

So I wrote 3 PHP scripts to do just that.

Download the scripts, put your access-log in the same directory and run them from a command line or just load those pages in a directory on your webserver and view them. ( Be sure to block them in robots.txt if you have them on a public webserver. )

Download log parsers

The final plugin of the three part TTC ( TimesToCome ) WordPress security set is ready. This one acts as a tripwire. If a file is changed by you or more importantly someone other than you you’ll know.

Simply install and activate the plugin. Once activated go to the plugin management page and tell it you want a list of all files changed in the last 0-99 days ( pick your day ) and it will bring up a list of altered files for you.

If your WordPress install is in the top directory of your website this will check all the directories on your website. If you are down one level ( http://yoursite.com/wordpress/ ) then you can change this line:

$directories_to_read[$dir_count] = “../”; // plugins run from wp-admin so bounce up a directory

to this:

$directories_to_read[$dir_count] = “../../”; // plugins run from wp-admin so bounce up a directory

And it will check all the directories not just your WordPress directories.

Download

Part 1: WP plugin to prevent bot registrations

Part 2: WP Security Plugin: block bots, scrapers, cross-script attacks and more

Part 3: Tripwire

Install them all for best results!