Cross Site Scripting Vulnerability in Subscribe2 Plugin

News of the XSS bug in Subscribe2 didn’t show up in any of my RSS feeds or mailing lists, even though it’s a fairly popular plugin,  so I wanted to make a note of it in case anyone else missed it. Version 8.2 has a fix for it .

Creating Admin Notices From a WordPress Plugin

I just threw a couple small PHP classes up on GitHub that I use in almost every WordPress plugin I write. The first is  IDAdminNotices , which is a clean and easy way for plugins and themes to send messages/errors to the user within the Administration Panels. The second is IDDescribeVar , which will outputs the type, length and contents… [more]

Virtual Workspaces for Windows

I’ve been using Linux since high school — which is longer ago than I care to admit ;) — and one of my favorite features of *nix window managers has always been the concept of workspaces , but for some reason it never occurred to me until today to search for a Windows tool that would create them…. [more]

Why Short URLs are Evil and You Should Never Use Them

Ok, so maybe that title was a bit of a hyperbole, but this is one of my biggest pet peeves on the Web right now. Joshua Schachter has a comprehensive analysis of the concept of Short URLs and the myriad problems associated with it, but the biggest one for me is the fact that the true URL is… [more]

Preventing Callback Functions From Executing Multiple Times

Many actions in WordPress will fire multiple times, which can lead to performance drags and undesired/intuitiveness results. Pippin Williamson points out that you can check how many times an action has already run , and modify your code to respond accordingly.

Connecting to a PPTP VPN from an OpenVZ CentOS VPS

When setting up the PPTP and PPP packages on an OpenVZ VPS in order to connect to a VPN, there are a few extra steps you need to take that you don’t have to do with a non-virtualized box. First, you have to load the following kernel modules on the hardware node and/or set them to automatically start during the boot up process : After doing that you should… [more]

Discouraging Trolls

Jeff Atwood wrote a fascinating article on different methods to use to discourage trolling on social websites , including some discussion of their ethical merits. I wasn’t aware of slowbanning and hellbanning before, but I think they’re very clever ideas.  

 
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