Sunday Chatter – 4/13

Image Upload Problem in WordPress 2.5

Many bloggers have been experiencing troubles when trying to upload photos within WordPress 2.5. I first noticed this myself as soon as I upgraded my blogs. I quickly went to the WordPress.org support forums, but I guess I was too early in looking for a solution, as the problem hadn’t been officially reported yet. Well now, two weeks after 2.5 has come out, other users have found a fix for this little annoyance. Read more about how to fix image uploading problems in the WordPress support forums.

Prevent Comment Spam by Closing Old Posts

Akismet comes standard with WordPress to stop spam. While it’s a great plugin, there are still quite a few spam comments that get through in which you need to manually moderate. Most spam occurs on posts older than two weeks old. For this blog personally, most of the spam is on posts older than 6 months. The reason for this is because these older posts are well indexed within Google and get targeted easily by spammers due to their exposure. You can solve this problem by automatically having posts older than 14 days closed to new comments. ShoeMoney.com wrote about a great plugin to do this written by Matt Mullenweg. By default the plugin closes posts after 14 days. You can change this by editing a single line in the plugin file. I’ve changed mine to close after 30 days.

Yahoo! Not Opposed to Microsoft Buyout

It turns out Yahoo! isn’t opposed to Microsoft’s $41 billion takeover offer after all. The statement comes after Microsoft warned last Saturday that if a deal isn’t reached by April 26th the software maker will launch a hostile takeover at a less attractive price. Jerry Yang, chief executive of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo Inc., and Chairman Roy Bostock sent a letter Monday to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

“We are open to all alternatives that maximize stockholder value,” Yang and Bostock said in the letter. “To be clear, this includes a transaction with Microsoft if it represents a price that fully recognizes the value of Yahoo on a standalone basis and to Microsoft, is superior to our other alternatives, and provides certainty of value and certainty of closing.”

Yang and Bostock also say in the letter the company’s threat to begin a hostile takeover is “counterproductive.’

Tweet This Post!