And then she noticed that the random Interesting picture from Flickr wasn’t working anymore, and I missed it too… (it’s sudden absence is why I ditched the Vigilance theme in the first place… and I later found out it wasn’t even related to Vigilance. Oops).

So now I’ve updated the Flickr Interesting photo code appearing at the top of my posts/pages. It’s now WP-Super Cache friendly, doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes via a JS call. Note to self: disable hotlinking on that file.

Now the site’s faster (Super Cache is enabled), and prettier (Flickr Interesting is back), and rounder (I added rounded corners to the image area… unless you’re in IE. Sorry.).

That’ll do for now.

Oh, and the reason the Flickr Interesting photos went away in the first place: my host updated the PEAR php library in use, and that broke phpFlickr, until I forced phpFlickr into using it’s own built-in edition of the PEAR files. Now wasn’t that just a bit more than you wanted to know?

I’ve pretty well ended support of this. I’m not intentionally avoiding emails or comments, I’m just out of time and need to make you aware there’s a better way.

I’d like to encourage you *not* to use the WP-Password Plugin. Here’s why: It doesn’t protect items in feeds, it can be broken by future wordpress versions, it doesn’t protect media/videos/images in your feeds (only pages powered by WP), and at last check, changing WP to do what I want the plugin to do really jeopardizes it’s security of all other things WP. I just don’t want to do that to you.

Instead, I recommend using .htaccess to protect the directories you want people to see. Here’s a good tutorial on it: http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess3.shtml

If I am going to do anything else with the plugin, it will be a re-write to help people create their own .htaccess rules.

Minor update to the WP-Password plugin I’ve let languish. I think I’ve fixed the redirect bug.

http://www.broome.us/wp-password/wp-password_0_6_1.zip

You’re welcome to try it out. Update the comments with any bug reports, ideas, complaints, etc.

Future plans might involve integrating WP 2.7 (and later) internal password protection to provide a better UI, handling it’s inherent per-page/post nature better (Default value, etc). Preliminary checking looks like it’ll take some changes to the WP Core to really work well, but I’ve been known to think on problems like that slowly for a while and suddenly come up with a solution… we’ll see.

I didn’t want to specify a single image for its optional banner, and don’t actually use Flickr myself, but I spent a little time tweaking phpFlickr and some CSS until I got this spiffy new header. Since Vigilance is pretty much just black and white, every spash of color Flickr gives me matches just fine.

Every page load pulls a random-ish “Interesting” photo off flickr, and I get a surprise every time I visit my own site. And so do you. Plus, mouse-over the image and you get links to the Flickr Interesting page, OR can go see the whole photo you’re only seeing part of now.

I rock.

If anyone’s interested in the code, say so… I may turn this into a plugin.

WP-Password 0.6:  http://broome.us/wp-password/wp-password_0_6.zip

For those new to the latest work, it’s a complete rewrite of the plugin.  It now uses a set of numbered rules that are much more precise and lack the ambiguity (read: ability to circumvent) of the old system’s Regular Expression conversion & comparion.

Another new feature: Where the old (before 0.5) plugin could only protect specific urls (and even than had some problems…) the new one protects the content of protected urls wherever it appears — homepage, archive pages, rss feeds… Should be everywhere.

Here’s a preview of the admin:

WP-Password Admin 0.6 Screenshot - click to zoom

This isn’t quite ready for release on the WordPress Plugins site yet.  I have a few things I want to add before that… Feel ree to add your own requests via comment.

1. Let users choose their own “This content is password protected, please Log In to view it” text.
2. Add a decent un-install.  Or just ANY uninstall, since it doesn’t try at all.
3. Find a better way to make visitors log in than hacking a copy of wp-login.php
4. Add password-protection by Category and/or Tag, not just words in permalink urls.

As you see, I don’t think this is done.  But it bears some testing.  Please let me know if you find any problems or have any suggestions or questions.

Here would be a useful thing: A distributed co-op system of server uptime checks.  A cron job on your web server kicks off a local web page that performs 3 jobs:  1.  Asks some central server (or two, or three, or a distributed network of them) for 5 urls to check for uptime.  2.  Pings and tries to http-access these 5 urls.  3.  Sends the results of the checks back to the server it just talked to.  The 5 urls it checks are themselves other servers just like yours who’ve recently contributed uptime checks against yet other sites (maybe even yours).  Everybody scratches everybody else’s back.

The tricky part is managing the DOS attack this starts.  The central server would have to mete out the list of urls to check cautiously, globally distribute them, and preferably time them in accordance with the desired check frequency each site wants… and then would have to aggregate and notify each site owner of up/down events noticed by “the collective”.  Difficulty: you wouldn’t want the central server giving 1000 different web sites the same url to check at the same time — or the “service” of an uptime check could be come an attack in itself, threatening the very uptime it’s supposed to harmlessly monitor.

The idea of a co-op of free service & benefits seems to have merit to me, just needs some more development.  You get globally-distributed checks against your site, free, and provide a very small service yourself.  Like a single antbenefiting the colony in its individual capacity, and benefiting from the colony in its massive capacity.  Gotta work on that.

And here’s a completely useless thing.  Paypal lets websites collect funds from visitors.  But some visitors would rather call you and give their credit card number over the phone that type it on a computer.  So what does the site owner do?  Goes to paypal himself, places an order from his own website using the customer’s info.  Works fine.  Once.  Try and repeat an order and paypal requires you to establish a Paypal account.  Except you can’t do that, because you won’t get the email that will go to your customer.  Stupid stupid stupid.  Paypal is literally locking themselves out of my small, but growing business.

That’s why I’m looking into a more “mature” system for business transactions: PaySimple pre-sales support has been pretty good so far… Just still collecting facts & opinions on them.