Just a quick note on how to achieve the following purpose. Say you have a 3 months old baby and your mother sends you a 3 month old birthday ecard. Say you wish to download the animation of that ecard and share it on the blog you keep for your family and close friends. I suppose this is “everyday computing” for the rest of them.

Anyway, here is how it is done :

1. In firefox, you can find the swf animation easily. simply type about:cache in the address bar and locate the swf. Copy it on your desktop or somewhere accessible.
   Warning: if you have NO CACHE at all showing when you type about:cache, you might be a web developer using web developer tools with cache disabled. Re-enabled it, re-watch your animation, now it will be in the cache.
2. In WordPress, upload the swf by using the add media button. Obtain the attachement location by clicking the “Link to Media” button and, in “HTML” view, paste the following code (replace http://url/to/my.swf with the link to your media – twice) :

In order to accomplish this, I studied WordPress hooks. WordPress hooks are small functions customizable in one’s WordPress theme which will be called by WordPress core code. The reason behind hooks is to enable some custom code to be called in a given theme, plugin or widget, without modifying the WordPress core code which will be erased every time we upgrade our blog to the newest version of WordPress.

Hiding a category from the post metadata:

The post category at the end of a post are displayed using the following method : the_category(). This method is defined in wp-includes/category-template.php. This method calls get_the_category_list(), itself defined in the same file. This function gets the category list by calling get_the_category() also defined in this category-template.php file. Now, the important part is that this method get_the_category calls a custom filter named get_the_categories.

Let’s enable the filter get_the_categories and use it to skip the “Editorial” category. We will do that by editing (or creating) the functions.php file of the blog’s theme file.

Notice that we will not skip the category if we are logged in as super admin (that is to let the category appear in the administration panel)

Hiding a category from the category widget :

The same solution applies to the category widget. After identifying the method used by the category widget which is Walker_CategoryDropdown in the same wp-includes/category-templates.php file, it is clear it calls the list_cats filter somehwere down the road (in start_el). The only problem was, if the category was filtered out in the apply_filter method, it would display an empty line. Therefore, I submitted the following patch to the wordpress team.

In functions.php (in our blog’s theme folder)

If you wish to use this code, download and apply the patch (tested on WordPress 3.1) I hope the patch will make into the later versions by the WordPress dev team.

I hope this example of use of hooks and filters will enable you to create your own custom code for WordPress. Happy coding

References:

Below are great articles about WordPress development in general and WordPress hooks in particular

• Best practices for WordPress coding
• Hooks, Actions and Filters (WordPress codex)
• How to Use Hooks on your WordPress Blog (Smashing Magazine)

Recently, I’ve been working on a Microsoft addin allowing users to post to bluekiwi from Microsoft Office. I liked the feature myself and discovered Microsoft Office also enabled publishing to WordPress and set out looking for such a solution for OpenOffice.org. Sun Weblog Publisher seems to be the extension to do just that and here is how it works.

• Download and install the extension (if you have any problem, running Mac OS X (I had an error saying “Failed to load the Java implementation) simply reinstall OO.org entirely. The bug comes from a change of location of the Java JRE in Mac OS best I could figure out)
• Once the extension is installed, open OOo and go to Tools > Extension Manager ad edit the settings for the Sun Weblog publisher one and enter the type and URL of your blog.

To publish your document, simply go to File > Send and select “to weblog”. You’ll have the choice to pubish your post as a draft or directly to your blog.

Finally, click on  ”OK”. Strangely enough, you will get an error message but your post was more than likely published anyway ( I suspect WordPress changed something in its API and the extension doesn’t get the response it expects).

Of coure, this entry was posted from Open Office 3.3.0 on Mac OS X (images included).

On Monday morning, I received an email from Google Webmaster Tools letting me know that my WordPress blog had been hacked and was temporarily blacklisted. Users accessing my blog using Google Chrome or Firefox were advised to stay away for safety. I appreciate Google’s notification of this problem as well as their concern (and Mozilla’s) to protect my visitors.

Why was my WordPress blog hacked ? I don’t believe it was individually targeted, I believe it was hacked because it was vulnerable. Two reasons :

1.  I hadn’t updated my blog to the latest version of WordPress. As a matter of fact, I was not even running WordPress 3.0 yet.
2. Also, I believe the file permissions I was required to use on the server by my host provider were not safe enough thought I could not change them without breaking the whole blog (Access Denied error). I largely blame my hosting provider architecture for that.
So, what did the malware look like ? It was a php code which was added to every .php file in my main wordpress folder and read something like eval(base64_decode(XXXXXXXXXXX)). Once this was decoded and evaluated, it would check whether the referrer was Bing, Yahoo or Google and if so, redirect my visitor to a malware sharing site of some kind (I didn’t go to it…). This hack has been used recently on several GoDaddy hosted wordpress blogs and other CMS. With some help from @fdevillamil and Google, I found information about the problem and started working on it.

Finally, I finally got the problem sorted thanks to several blogs posts I’d like to point to here.

1. Here is a detailed explanation of the attack
2. I downloaded and modified Peter’s fixfiles.php script in order to clean my PHP code of the malicious PHP script.
3. Sucuri Research offers a console command (requires SSH access to your server) to clean your WordPress, too. They also detailed how to fix a hacked blog intended for GoDaddy users.
4. Before resubmitting my blog for validation by Google, I made sure everything was okay using Sucuri’s malware scanner service (free for limited use) . A very useful tool.
5. I quickly searched for similar tools I could use in the future and found the following articles though I didn’t test these services yet.
6. I moved my blog to another host where I was able to set the permission more restrictively
7. I disabled several of my plugins and updated my WordPress hoping to secure my blog from too many security flaws that could lay in third party code
8. Next, I read up about a few ways to fix security holes in WordPress in these posts :

• Monitor Malicious File Changes in WordPress Blog
• Secure a WordPress Blog
• The best way to handle file permissions for Apache www-data (ServerFault discussion)
• Avoid users uploading malware

9. Finally, I updated my blog which was no luxury. It can quickly be done in a few steps which are detailed right here

Hope this helps out someone else in a similar situation and that Google reconsiders my website soon.

First, I must confess that I like trying software out. That’s probably how I ended up having some many accounts with so many services and having a Tumblelog AND a WordPress blog. Since this blog is not running on wordpress.com, it is for me to remember and backup my database and files from time to time in case of a problem with my server. For my Tumblr, it is different. The data is on Tumblr server(s) and there are no features I know of in the admin to download them and store them locally. After a year of publishing a daily list of the movies I watch and books I read, this tumblelog became a Journal of my cultural activities and I grew attached to it. Recently I decided it had to be backedup in case something happened to my tumblr account or whatever. As usual, someone had the idea before me and a tool is available. It is called – appropriately enough – Tumblrbackup. It couldn’t be easier to use, enter your credentials, select the tumblelog to backup and the destination on your computer. A folder is created which contains your posts, images, avatar and even your custom style. A index.html file is generated allowing you to browse your own content on your local hard drive. The index.html doesnt include your custom style so it looks pretty plain but everything you wrote and uploaded is there… Now I just need to remember and rerun the backup from time to time. Cool!

A very quick post to list the languages supported by Code Colorer which I use on this blog. Everytime I write I find myself wondering which language is supported and how I should write it out for the plugin to work so here it is, for the record:

• ABAP
• ActionScript
• ActionScript 3.0
• Ada
• Apache
• AppleScript
• Apt sources.list
• asm
• asp
• autoit
• avisynth
• bash
• basic4gl
• bf
• bibtex
• blitzbasic
• bnf
• boo
• c
• c_mac
• caddcl
• cadlisp
• cfdg
• cfm
• cil
• cmake
• cobol
• cpp-qt
• cpp
• csharp
• css
• d
• dcs
• delphi
• diff
• div
• dos
• dot
• eiffel
• email
• erlang
• fo
• fortran
• freebasic
• genero
• gettext
• glsl
• gml
• gnuplot
• groovy
• haskell
• hq9plus
• html4strict
• idl
• ini
• inno
• intercal
• io
• java
• java5
• javascript
• kixtart
• klonec
• klonecpp
• latex
• lisp
• locobasic
• lolcode
• lotusformulas
• lotusscript
• lscript
• lsl2
• lua
• m68k
• make
• matlab
• mirc
• modula3
• mpasm
• mxml
• mysql
• nsis
• oberon2
• objc
• ocaml-brief
• ocaml
• oobas
• oracle11
• oracle8
• pascal
• per
• perl
• php-brief
• php
• pic16
• pixelbender
• plsql
• povray
• powershell
• progress
• prolog
• properties
• providex
• python
• qbasic
• rails
• rebol
• reg
• robot
• ruby
• sas
• scala
• scheme
• scilab
• sdlbasic,
• smalltalk
• smarty
• sql
• tcl
• teraterm
• text
• thinbasic
• tsql
• typoscript
• vb
• vbnet
• verilog
• vhdl
• vim
• visualfoxpro
• visualprolog
• whitespace
• whois
• winbatch
• xml
• xorg_conf, xpp
• yaml
• z80

An impressive list which should be handy next time I post anything.