Wordpress 2.8.5 is a security hardening release. Some of the notable changes are:

• A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
• Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
• Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
• Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

If you aren’t seeing an upgrade banner message at the top of your Wordpress Admin dashboard, go to Tools -> Upgrade to trigger the cron job upgrade manually.

To upgrade Wordpress in two steps without having to disable plugins, or if automatic upgrade fails, click here. If you’ve never been able to use automatic upgrade due to errors you could never explain click here.

YOURLS is a URL shortening service you can run on your own server, and it comes with a Wordpress plugin called YOURLS Wordpress to Twitter. In the past I’ve used WP to Twitter, but since it doesn’t support YOURLS I’ve had to switch.

I’ve asked the author of YOURLS Wordpress to Twitter to add Google Analytics Campaign Tracking Code with a custom field for authors to add their own identifier, but he has been too busy updating the YOURLS scripts, so I’ve hacked the plugin code to allow us to use Campaign Tracking now.

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Today YOURLS 1.4 was released, but the database upgrade script created some errors for some people, dead links, and the stats are not working. We can fix all that. Be sure to logout of the old version you will be upgrading from before starting the upgrade, or you might see the Install YOURLS page and link, rather than the Upgrade YOURLS page and link. First lets go over the changes in the config.php file.

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Most people use URL shortening services like Bit.ly, TinyURL, Awe.sm, Su.pr, and the list goes on. There has been a lot of concern over the long term stability of these services, since they aren’t profitable business models, so they can’t be relied on over the long haul. One popular service, Cli.gs announced it will shutdown on October 25. Tr.im sudently shutdown, and then reopened just as suddenly, so it’s hard to trust short URL services. One effort will be to provide an independent directory service for URL mappings through 301works.org, but that isn’t going to solve the problem of reliability.

Sometimes the only way to solve a problem is to do it yourself. I’m talking about setting up your own URL shortening service using YOURLS: Your Own URL Shortener, which is a set of PHP scripts written by Lester Chan and Ozh Richard. Let’s go through what YOURLS offers and how to set it up.

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Wordpress now has the ability to redirect old article links and titles to the new correct page, provided you’re using the latest version of Wordpress, but what about 404 pages?

When a link is truly broken, and Wordpress can’t already fix it automatically, you might as well just deal with the visit to your site as a 404 error page. There are plu gins out there that require manual input to redirect traffic, but is the broken link getting so much traffic that you need to go to all that trouble rather than adding content to your site. The article location will be re index in the search engines anyway, and you shouldn’t spend all your time being a perfectionist when it isn’t going to get you much of a ROI.

Since the visitor will land on a 404 error page that doesn’t monetize, or provide anything of interest for the visitor, it seems like a good idea to redirect, or forward, the visitor to the site’s homepage where they might find something of interest.

Wordpress uses a standard 404.php landing page for every theme. The code usually looks something like this:

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