Update for Servage Referral Widget etc

Last night after over an hour of coding I was able to finish version 1.2, the new version is able to count how many times a user clicks the link, then report it in the Widget control panel. I might make an option later to report it under the widget, or in the Dashboard.

Google Analytics is quite a handy tool to see who reads my site and for what purpose, the Webmaster Tools is also great, however I am noticing the search ranking isn’t very accurate for some reason.

In other news I went out half way through writing this entry, the slimline sets of Mythbusters seasons appear to be slowly coming out, I got my copy of Season 1 today.

I also just bought the spamannoys.me domain, mainly for e-mail of course.

WordPress/Servage spam IP filtering

I have Akismet set up to keep spam out as well as keeping all comments for moderation, I initially decided to do some IP blocks seeming as there would be a few that would constantly send spam.

The only problem was that as WordPress only use

$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']

to determine a user’s IP address which as most people who know PHP know it is a bad idea because it doesn’t take into account proxies etc. In my case it was actually giving Servage’s own IP for every result which wasn’t of much use unless I wanted to block comments/trackbacks altogether.

As there’s no documentation that I could find about where WordPress actually contains the code to find the IP and Google wasn’t much help I had to look manually.

I eventually found it in comments.php in the wp-includes directory.

$commentdata['comment_author_IP'] = preg_replace( '/[^0-9a-fA-F:., ]/', '', $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] );

First to add in the neccessary code a variable must be created, change the above code to this:

$commentdata['comment_author_IP'] = preg_replace( '/[^0-9a-fA-F:., ]/', '',$bp_IP );

Then add the required code above that stating:

$bp_IP = isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']) ? $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'] : $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];

This allows the correct IP to be shown in most cases, most of the thanks must go to Jason for this.

Update: This piece of code also works in WordPress 2.6x.

Google Suggest/Trends, theme editing, FileZilla issue

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
This is now my homepage, it is extremely handy, plus it’s slightly less bloated than the default Firefox search page, trends http://www.google.com/trends is quite interesting to have a look at as well.

Thanks to http://www.blogohblog.com/, http://www.dyers.org/blog/archives/2008/05/21/how-to-add-avatars-to-your-wordpress-25-theme/ and Jason I was able to fix some issues I was having with the Gravatar section of the theme which is by default not supported, the code at first didn’t work I figure because it was incorrectly detecting the WordPress version as something less than 2.5 however there was a </div> that had no starting tag which caused the theme style to get messed up also, after fixing those the Gravatars work fine now.

I have been experiencing a ‘DDE execute request failed’ error in FileZilla 3 when choosing to view/edit files regardless of the fact that it does appear to view/edit the file perfectly fine, there doesn’t appear to be any information that I can find about it when searching around.
I managed to stop it appearing by setting a default text editor, choosing ‘Always use default editor’ and unchecking ‘Inherit system’s file-type associations’, must be a Vista/FileZilla/TextPad/UAC thing.

I received my Windows Vista upgrade advisor shirt not long ago, it’s very well made but I don’t think I’ll be wearing it anywhere anytime soon.

I just found out what a post slug is…