Don’t leave for the weekend before upgrading your WordPress blogs to version 2.5.1. The security update has just come out.

Many affiliates run multiple WordPress blogs on the same server. It’s necessary to update your installations regularly as WordPress is an extremely vulnerable piece of software. Manual updating costs too much time, so here’s some Linux shell code for you. My script assumes that the document root of all WordPress installations on that server is at /srv/www/htdocs/DOMAINNAME/wordpress.

1. We download the WordPress source code:
unlink source_en.zip
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip
mv latest.zip source_en.zip

2. We run backups of the old system, extract the new version and restore the old sitemap.
for domain in example.com anotherexample.com lastexample.com
do
rm -r /srv/www/htdocs/$domain/wordpress_old
cp -r /srv/www/htdocs/$domain/wordpress /srv/www/htdocs/$domain/wordpress_old
unzip source_en.zip -d /srv/www/htdocs/$domain
cp /srv/www/htdocs/$domain/wordpress_old/sitemap.xml /srv/www/htdocs/$domain/wordpress
done

You also want to keep your plugins updated. You will need to collect the sources from various sites on the internet and put the extracted versions in a “plugins” folder on your sever. With the following script you can deploy the contents of your plugins folder (which you keep up to date manually) to all of your WordPress installations:
for domain in example.com anotherexample.com lastexample.com
do
rm -r /srv/www/htdocs/$domain/wordpress/wp-content/plugins
cp -r plugins /srv/www/htdocs/$domain/wordpress/wp-content
done

Good luck and happy blogging.

Today I received a couple of my emails telling me that all posts of this blog were deleted. At first I thought people were kidding but then I got really scared. At first I thought somebody had hacked into my WordPress. But I always update all my blogs on the same day a new WordPress version comes out.

It turned out that the MySQL table containing the posts crashed. The MySQL log told me that by post table “is marked as crashed and should be repaired”. Great! But a little bit of research solved the problem. You need to go to the corresponding MySQL database directory, for example /var/lib/mysql/wordpress, and execute the following commands as root:

/etc/init.d/mysql stop
myisamchk -r wp_posts.MYI
/etc/init.d/mysql start

Problem solved within a few seconds. If that hadn’t worked I would have used my backups that are created hourly. Let me know if I should write something about backup strategies for standard root servers too.

Wie von Henning und Max berichtet werden Tracking-Links von Zanox in Blogs auf wordpress.com blockiert.

Warum bei Wordpress so absolut gegen Affiliate-Links vorgegangen wird ist für mich nicht verständlich. Erstens sollen Leute, die guten Content schreiben, auch dafür belohnt werden können. Und zweitens ist es auch möglich dass z.B. ein gemeinnütziger Verein sein eigenes Merchandising über Partnerprogramme von Online-Shops abwickelt und die Provisionszahlung durch Zanox erhält. Außerdem bietet Zanox ja auch noch sein sogenanntes “Fundraising@” an, womit wohltätige Organisationen über Zanox-Spenden-Shops Geld sammeln können.

Zur Lösung dieses Problems gibt es viele Möglichkeiten. Hier sind drei einfache:

1. Ihr nutzt nicht wordpress.com sondern installiert die Applikation auf Eurem Server.
2. Ihr benutzt für die Links eine andere Domain (nicht die von Zanox) und nutzt Weiterleitungen.
3. Ihr nutzt kein Zanox sondern weniger bekannte Affiliate-Netzwerke.