Baltimoremick.com

Last night, I spent some time taking care of some housecleaning on my blog. Here's a brief summary of what I did last night.

• Installed Bad Behavior Plugin
  I was getting annoyed at the occasional trackback spammer linking to a post--either merely trackbacking to certain posts or completely taking my content to use as a post on an obvious ad-site.  I now have what I consider a pretty good perimeter to protect against comment and tracback spam: Akismet, Spam Karma 2, and Bad Behavior.
• Corrected a Strange Wordpress Error
  I discovered this problem when I was transitioning from Categories to Tags after settling in with WordPress 2.3.1.  WP 2.3.1 transitions from categories to tags, and the database tables that held categories were removed.  When I was removing categories after I had moved to tags, I kept getting a strange error.  The same error would appear when I was updating links in my blogroll and their categories.  The error below (or some variation) was what I would see:
  PLAIN TEXT
  WordPress database error: [Table 'foo_db1.wp_post2cat' doesn't exist]

  I knew that I did not have any plugins referencing categories, and most of my plugins and themes were up-to-date.  I stripped everything down on my blog, but the problem still existed.  Based on a thread here, I decided to upload the WP 2.3.1 base files.  Once I re-uploaded the wp-includes directory, the problem stopped.  It was then that I was reminded of a problem I experienced with FileZilla at the time I updated my blog.  I had thought I had corrected it by performing the upload via scp, but apparently I did not completely upload everything.  I should have been tipped off by another problem I fixed.

• Corrected a Problem with Windows Live Writer
  When I was using Windows Live Writer, I was getting an error when I would try to have it update the list of categories to select when editing or creating a post.  The error pointed to an error coming from what Windows Live Writer uses to communicate to WordPress blogs, XML-RPC. On a hunch, I looked at the xmlrpc.php file in the root of my blog installation.  I compared it to the standard WP 2.3.1 installation, and I noticed the one on my blog install was older.  I updated that file, and my error in getting categories in Windows Live Writer went away.
• Cleaned the Blogroll
  I started cleaning up my blogroll.  If you don't see your blog there, do not get offended.  I decided to pare it down to those blogs I read that are updated with some degree of frequency.  I am pondering moving the blogroll to another page just to reduce the clutter on the left margin of my blog, but that is a project for another day.
• Updated Other Plugins
  I updated a couple of plugins to their latest version.  I have re-added Twitter Tools, and I updated the Subscribe Me plugin as well.  I also added Simple Tags as an easier way to manage tags in WP 2.3.1, as the native tools suck badly.