Improper 404 Error Handling Fix For WordPress 2.5

I’ve upgraded several of my blogs to WordPress 2.5. However, I noticed that two of them didn’t handle 404 (Page Not Found) errors properly after the upgrade. Every invalid URL gets redirected to the index page; worse still, they returned a 200 server response code which tells the browser that the URL is valid!

Another bad outcome of this bug is that your sites won’t get verified in Google Webmaster Tools.

This problem only occurs on WordPress blogs that uses a page (instead of the more common latest posts listing) as the front page. So how can we fix this?

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Tapeless Backups Using rsnapshot

I’ve been using rsnapshot to backup the /home partition on our Samba server since God knows how long. rsnapshot takes the pain out of backup maintenance on Linux systems and is very easy to set up.

rsnapshot is one of those tools that you just need to configure once and once working as expected, there will be no more tinkering with it ever.

To help you get started with minimal problems, go through the documentation. It’s written systematically and should give you more than sufficient information.

Better Permalink URLs For Your WordPress Blog

If you’re hosting your WordPress blog on a mod_rewrite-enabled Apache web server, you can use this feature to make your post URLs prettier.

By default, WordPress uses an ugly format like http://yoursite/?p=795 (this URL is for post #795, just in case you’re wondering). If your server has mod_rewrite enabled, you can also use more descriptive URLs as suggested by WordPress:

WordPress permalink options

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Yahoo! Pipes Now Supports Serialized PHP Output

Yahoo! Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulation tool. It can combine, filter and sort multiple feed data and spit out a single customized feed that you can use for yourself or share with others.

Before today, JSON has been the only way for you to obtain the output data of a Pipe. Now, Yahoo! has provided a second way to do this: serialized PHP.

I’m sure those who are more proficient with PHP will find this feature very useful. Thanks Yahoo!

How To Sell Products Directly From Your WordPress Blog

Recently, a friend asked me, “Could I run a shop within WordPress?”

I’m sure that she’s not the only person who wondered about this. After looking around, I found one of the best tools to integrate an online shop with your WordPress blog: WP e-Commerce.

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