Nurses Meeting Lounge

michel v — intraordinaire.com posted a photo:

One of ten thousands buddhas in the monastery of Fo Guang Shan in Dashu, south of Taiwan. August 2008.

It looks like there’s going to be another point-release of WordPress coming soon. WordPress version 2.6.2-beta1 was just branded in svn a short while ago. Looking over the logs, I don’t see anything major — a fix for the Textpattern importer, a bug fix that prevents an attempt to make a revision of a revision, a new ‘login_redirect’ filter, a new ‘wp_rand()’ function, and a handful of other minor bugfixes.

I’m kind of wondering if there’s something bigger that’s going to be added before release…

Anton Mannering organised TechLudd Cork last night at the Cork International Airport Hotel. I demoed Tweet Tweet and answered questions about WordPress and some of the plugins I had running on my blog.

Apart from showing off Tweet Tweet I took a few photos too. Pictured below are only some of the people there including (in no particular order): Walter, Bernard Goldbach, Anton, Aileen, Gavin Harkness, James Galvin (who should tweet more about Tweetrush!), Walter Wynne, John Peavoy, Pat Phelan, Ashley Halsall, Robin Blandford and some crazy guy who calls himself Damien.

If you see yourself in one of the photos please leave a comment, and apologies for not getting your name on the night.

Yes, the lighting in the toilets in the Cork International Airport Hotel really do change colour.

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Captcha is broken - now what? The Guardian. I was quoted in today’s Guardian, which consistently has some of the best tech coverage around.

It’s been seven weeks since my knee surgery. I can now officially put my full weight on my right leg. Unofficially, I’ve already been walking around without crutches for most of the past week. When I had my six-week checkup with the surgeon, I asked when I could drive a car on my own instead of having to get my family members to drive me to appointments. He said “whenever you feel like you can,” so I did.

The important thing about the six-week checkup last week was that it marked the point that my meniscus repairs are healed enough for me to start bending my knee past 90 degrees. At my physical therapy appointment a few days later, we measured my angle at 118 degrees, and I was able to pedal an exercise bike. Between the bike, the squats and the leg-lift exercises (4 different exercises with 4 pound ankle weights x 100 reps each = 1600 pounds!)

We’re also getting back to a proper eating plan at home, so between that and the exercise I get from therapy, I’m hoping to shed some pounds now. I’ve got to say, though, I don’t recommend the knee surgery weight loss plan. It’s a pretty darned expensive gym membership.

WordPress.org user, “definitelynot” discovered a bug in the WordPress plugin, WP Super Cache that could expose blogs to duplicate content penalties. Unfortunately this affects every blog that uses the plugin in “ON” or full “Super Cache” mode, and has URLs that end with the “/” (forward slash) character. If the plugin is on “half on” mode, you’ll be fine.

The problem is that an anonymous user might visit a legitimate URL, ending with a slash, the plugin then creates a static file out of that page, which is then used when people visit the same URL. Unfortunately if someone links to that URL without the ending slash, a visiting browser or search engine bot won’t be redirected to the proper URL, they’ll be served the static html file.

For example:

1. John visits the URL /2007/05/23/why-the-nurses-cant-go-on-strike/ on my site. WP Super Cache creates a html file of that page.
2. In his enthusiasm for that post, John publishes a post about those zany doctors, but he forgets the ending “/”.
3. Googlebot, seeing fresh content on John’s site, crawls it and sees the link, visits my site eventually and wonders why it’s seeing the exact same page at two different URLs.

To be fair, Google is pretty good at figuring out where duplicate content is supposed to go but it’s better to avoid the issue completely. It also only matters if there are links to your site without the ending slash. The most common will probably be to your homepage as it’s likely internal URLs will be copy/pasted.

How to Fix
You should update to version 0.7 of the plugin which checks if your blog is affected by this problem. It also has instructions for updating the mod_rewrite rules in your .htaccess. It’s fairly easy to fix. Thank you “andylav” for the mod rewrite magic!

1. Edit the .htaccess in the root of your WordPress install.
2. You’ll see two groups of rules that look like this:
   

   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !=POST
   RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*s=.*
   RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*wp-subscription-manager=.*
   RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*attachment_id=.*
   RewriteCond %{HTTP:Cookie} !^.*(comment_author_|wordpress|wp-postpass_).*$
   RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Encoding} .*gzip.*
   RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/index.html.gz -f
   RewriteRule ^(.*) /wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/index.html.gz [L]
   
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !=POST
   RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*s=.*
   RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*wp-subscription-manager=.*
   RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*attachment_id=.*
   RewriteCond %{HTTP:Cookie} !^.*(comment_author_|wordpress|wp-postpass_).*$
   RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/index.html -f
   RewriteRule ^(.*) /wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/index.html [L]
   

3. You need to add the following 2 rules above each block of “RewriteCond” lines:
   

   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^.*[^/]$
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^.*//.*$
   

4. The rules should eventually look like this:
   

   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^.*[^/]$
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^.*//.*$
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !=POST
   RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*s=.*
   RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*wp-subscription-manager=.*
   RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*attachment_id=.*
   RewriteCond %{HTTP:Cookie} !^.*(comment_author_|wordpress|wp-postpass_).*$
   RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Encoding} .*gzip.*
   RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/index.html.gz -f
   RewriteRule ^(.*) /wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/index.html.gz [L]
   
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^.*[^/]$
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^.*//.*$
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !=POST
   RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*s=.*
   RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*wp-subscription-manager=.*
   RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*attachment_id=.*
   RewriteCond %{HTTP:Cookie} !^.*(comment_author_|wordpress|wp-postpass_).*$
   RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/index.html -f
   RewriteRule ^(.*) /wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/index.html [L]
   

5. Or you could just delete those rules and let the plugin regenerate them for you again.

PS. Thanks also to Lloyd for noticing the “enable the plugin” link was pointing at the wrong URL, and to Ryan who spotted a minor problem with the admin page and was kind enough to send me a Tweet about it.

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Riding the Crazyhorse: Iterative Testing and Design of WordPress. If that sounds like something you’d want to see at SxSW 2009 presented by Liz Danzico, Jane Wells, and yours truly then vote early and often. Polls close soon.

A few weeks ago Twitter annoyed a lot of European users when they stopped sending sms notifications to their users. I never really used that facility so I didn’t miss it but many Tweeters did. Outrage and blue murder were spoken of in the same sentence. People marched in the streets, there were riots.

OK, maybe not, but it annoyed a few prolific Tweeters and I wondered aloud if I could make Tweet Tweet send me sms notifications when I got replies or direct messages. After quite a bit of testing and playing around with Meteor’s website I’m glad to say I cracked it. I added hooks to my plugin for other plugins to latch on to, and wrote a small bit of code that logs in to Meteor.ie and uses their free web text to notify me of replies or direct messages.

Following on from that success, Jason Roe added code so Irish Vodafone customers could get sms notifications too!

So, if you really miss the sms notifications from Twitter, and you’re an Irish Meteor or Vodafone customer, download Tweet Tweet, install it in your WordPress blog and enjoy getting those sms notifications from Twitter again!

Developers - if your phone company isn’t covered just yet, please take a look at the existing Meteor and Vodafone plugins. The framework is there. Using curl to login and send texts can be a little daunting but it’s not impossible. Get in touch by leaving a comment here, or using the contact form on the about page.

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