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I consider myself an apprentice when it comes to WordPress. I enjoy how easy it is to get running, while at the same time appreciating the ability to tweak things to get it running how I want. I want to say that I have used WP for years, but the truth is that I have tinkered with it, even made some photo-blogs for friends, but personally I haven’t had a blog for about two years. I trod the path of blogger, movable type and settled with WP, and here I am!

The tweaking I mentioned before is just to get things operational after installing the current version of WP, 2.51.

1. I use hosting, this gives me greater control over my blogs, however some of the general settings are not suitable for my taste. First off, I need to add hot-linking to the new site. This stops people stealing your bandwidth by linking directly to pictures, media on your site. This I have to do in cPanel, otherwise none of my graphics appear.

2. My hosting partner is based in USA, whereas I am located in Central Europe. I often use characters from different alphabets, so the ISO-8859-1 character set is not good for me. Before posting anything, install the UTF-8 Database converter plugin. It will whine about not being the correct version of WP, but I have not had any problems yet with version 2.51. Caveat emptor!

3. I like the new media upload facility introduced in 2.51, but… I couldn’t get it to upload anything. I hunted around for ages, and eventually the problem turned out to be an apache security setting which needs to be over-ridden in your .htaccess file. What I needed was to add this to the file:

SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off

I noticed that this had been a common problem, and thus had become a plugin, covering various Apache versions.

So to conclude, I am quite happy with the ease in which a blog can be ready, using a few mouse clicks, and a few plugins. I can still manually install WordPress if I need to, and I can tweak the database to use a different character encoding, but I feel it’s easier to “sell” to others the idea of a relatively trouble-free setup.

Tags: mod_security, movable type, plugin, Preview, utf-8