AWSOM.org = Artist Website Setup Options Markup

AWSOM Pixgallery 4.5.4 released

harknell — Thu, 15 May 2008 15:45:59 +0000

AWSOM Pixgallery 4.5.4 has been released and is available from the AWSOM.org website. This new version adds in an image view tracking system, 3rd party Image processing support (for Lightbox 2 and other image popup/effect plugins), better thumbnail gallery pagination support and options, new CSS entries to make sub gallery folders in a gallery more distinct, and a few other minor changes and fixes.

Also, if you haven’t noticed yet, there are some new video tutorials up detailing usage of Pixgallery with more to come soon. You can comment here, at Harknell.com, or by email if you have any specific tutorials you’d like to see.

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AWSOM Pixgallery 4.5.4 To Be Released Soon

harknell — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:11:16 +0000

I wanted to let everyone know that the newest point release for AWSOM Pixgallery should be available this week. I’m doing some testing and hoping to squeeze in one or 2 more things before I release it. Right now it has a “fix” for the thumbnail pagination system to allow admins to limit the number of pages that are displayed (for those of you with huge multi-page galleries), support for 3rd party image plugins (like Lightbox, etc) that disables the built in system and easily adopts the new one (also good for those times that other plugins conflict with Pixgallery’s javascript), plus a new Image view tracking system that can display the number of times each image has been viewed (or not, but the admin can still see this info), and some more fixes and add ons.

So look for the release soon.

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How To Write Better Post Tiles

harknell — Fri, 09 May 2008 13:23:18 +0000

Lorelle always offers a ton of good blogging advice over at her blog at lorelle.wordpress.com, but she’s particularly spot on with her advice on Post Titles. One of the best ways to really get people interested in your posts is if they have a really good reason to read the post in the first place, and a good title is that first selling point. In addition, search engines also tend to use the title a bit more in determining what content to deliver in a search, so a really great article with a terrible title will probably be lower in a Google search than a crappier but better titled article. Go check out her full article to get more advice on this.

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New Video Tutorial Available: Adding Image/Gallery Captions to AWSOM Pixgallery

harknell — Wed, 07 May 2008 14:04:41 +0000

A new Video Tutorial for AWSOM Pixgallery has been posted in the AWSOM.org Tutorial section. This new video tutorial covers the FastFlow method of quickly adding Image and Gallery Captions to your Pixgallery galleries.

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Self Hosted Blog Options Write Up

harknell — Tue, 06 May 2008 14:59:02 +0000

While I’m obviously a big booster of the WordPress system as a means of setting up a blog, art, or comic website, I am not blind to the fact that there are other options out there, and in many cases these other options may be better for some people. The website BloggingPro.com has an excellent write up of the present good options available for people that want to self host a new website using a CMS type system. Their article (available here) details the current pros and cons for WordPress, MovableType, Chyrp, Habari, and ExpressionEngine. So if you want to get an idea of the current state of things in the blogging software world ( to help make and finalize your decision that Wordpress is the best :) ) go check them out.

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First AWSOM Pixgallery Video Tutorial Now Available

harknell — Sat, 03 May 2008 17:58:01 +0000

The first AWSOM plugin video tutorial, titled ‘Create Your First AWSOM Pixgallery Image Gallery Page‘, is now available at the AWSOM.org website. This first tutorial is for the AWSOM Pixgallery plugin for Wordpress and is designed to show you how to set up your first image gallery in just a few minutes.

I plan on adding new tutorials over time to detail out all of the different capabilities of this plugin as well as others in the AWSOM series. Upcoming tutorials will feature how to use the FastFlow method of setting up your AWSOM Pixgallery image/gallery captions as well as details on how the different settings in Pixgallery affect your gallery look and feel.

Please feel free to contact me or leave comments if you have specific ideas for tutorials you’d like to see. I’m also considering creating regular Wordpress video tutorials which would go through the core areas of Wordpress set up and usage.

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Quick Fix for Image Uploader issue in Wordpress 2.5.x

harknell — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:59:02 +0000

Hi everyone, some people seem to be having major issues using the new Flash based image uploader function for pages/posts in Wordpress 2.5.x. There is a “fix” available that might help–a no-flash plugin that returns the regular image upload function from previous versions of Wordpress. The plugin is available from the Wordpress.org website here.

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Wordpress 2.5.1 released, major security fix required

harknell — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 12:44:34 +0000

WordPress 2.5.1 has been released, and all 2.5 users should immediately upgrade to the new version. There is apparently some kind of security vulnerability fix in the new version, so this is a critical upgrade for all users. I suspect it’s probably related to the ongoing series of issues that are causing spam attacks on older versions of WordPress, so this is a pretty big reason to be constantly on the lookout for irregular things occurring on your sites and make sure you always have the most updated versions of plugins and such installed.

So far it looks like all of the AWSOM plugins are unaffected by the upgrade and still work properly. If you encounter any issues though please let me know.

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Language Display issues in Wordpress

harknell — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 21:32:55 +0000

I’ve had a few reports come in that people using the AWSOM News Announcement plugin or Pixgallery have been having some issues displaying different language types, most notably Asian or other non-English based character sets. The fix for these issues with AWSOM plugins, or any other plugins displaying this phenomenon, is within the Wordpress database. When a database is set up in MySQL one of the things you can assign to it is the language encoding type. In addition, all of it’s fields and tables can also be assigned a language encoding type. By default MySQL utilizes Swedish as it’s encoding type (MySQL was developed in Sweden). Wordpress typically tries to set up it’s database as UTF-8. In some cases this doesn’t work right, especially if the admin has updated their version of Wordpress continually from a version previous to Wordpress 2.1.x where this wasn’t defined.

So, the fix is to go to the database directly though phpmyadmin or another database editor and change the language type for the affected Tables and fields to the language type that you need to display. For AWSOM plugins it’s pretty obvious which tables are for what plugin by their name (I make great pains to place the plugin name as the table name)

In extreme cases you can contact me to help you out, but the best bet is to do a google search for how to use phpmyadmin.

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Spam Hack in Progress across Wordpress sites

harknell — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 15:54:23 +0000

There is currently a large scale spam attack on Wordpress sites that is ongoing and affects primarily Wordpress versions 2.1.x and 2.2.x (it’s not clear if 2.3.x or 2.0.x are affected, but it seems likely they aren’t). The attack results in a large number of spam listings injected into either posts or theme files which are then set to be hidden through css. Your will typically find that you’ve been affected when Google contacts you to say you are being de-listed due to a high number of spam links on your site. It is also typical for the attackers to delete all of your pages from your site for some reason, so if you load your site and all of your pages are gone you may have been hacked.

It’s not entirely clear what method the hackers are using to get admin access to the affected sites, but from my observation it may be a privilege escalation attack using the comment system. In some cases a random user account was created right before the attack. It was also noted that the comments.php theme file was altered to add in a console access applet which allowed for low level server access. If you get hacked make sure you check every theme file to make sure no malicious code was added–or better yet, reload your theme files from a backed up or fresh copy, and delete out any suspect user registrations.

Wordpress 2.5 is apparently not affected by this problem, so an upgrade should help. I have upgraded my sites to 2.5 and have managed to mostly get things working (though my archive page on this site is currently non-functional). It looks like this is the unfortunate little push that will force most people to upgrade, though I strongly suggest making sure first that there are updated plugins that work with 2.5.

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