English – Kristian Risager Larsen

Must-have WordPress plugins

29. august 2015 Kristian Risager Larsen

For all the WordPress sites I maintain, I always install the following plugins:

BackWPup: To make full backups of my WordPress sites, and upload them to my Dropbox account. It supports a lot of other backup destinations as well. The free version is excellent, but if you like it, buy the pro version.
My typical settings are:
General: Archive Format: zip
Schedule: Start job with: WordPress Cron
Schedule: Scheduler: Type: Weekly (at eg. 02:35 in the morning – never set it to the top of the hour, because other people probably backup at that time)
To Dropbox: File deletion: 1 (because Dropbox then keeps the past month’s backups anyways)
Avoid Google’s Cache: Because I don’t like that Google and Internet Archive make copies of my content.
I wrote it because a politician regretted something he wrote on his WordPress site.
WP Updates Notifier: Sends you an email every time WordPress, a plugin or a theme has an update.
Open external links in a new window: Once a user clicks on an external link, a new tab is opened, instead of opening the link in the current tab. This is to keep visitors on the current website. It is pure JavaScript, and doesn’t affect SEO.

Let me know if you have plugins that I should add to this list.

TV series with focus on politics

23. december 201327. februar 2014 Kristian Risager Larsen

I have compiled a list of television series that evolve around politics, or have a strong political theme.
It started as a procrastination while writing my thesis, and currently counts 92 shows. I have written a few notes for every show.

Feel free to suggest additions.

Merging directories in OS X

9. juni 201114. juni 2011 Kristian Risager Larsen

For a long time, I’ve been wanting to merge two directories in OS X. I have an internal harddrive and an external harddrive, and I wanted to merge a folder on each drive – but only visually: I did not want to move the files between the drives.

I wanted to merge the contents of the folders ‘a’ and ‘b’ into the folder ‘c’:

Personal watchlist through RSS from Wikipedia

24. september 200919. oktober 2010 Kristian Risager Larsen

MediaWiki, which runs the famous Wikipedia-sites, has an API available, which makes it possible to get RSS-feeds. Through these RSS-feeds, you can even get your personal watchlist.

The API is documented, but I found it more useful to visit the actual API.php script (this is for the English Wikipedia, you can just change the en at the beginning of the URL).

To get your personal watchlist as an RSS-feed, you have to set up a personal token on your Preferences->Watchlist page, and input a token. The nice coders at MediaWiki thought you wanted some privacy, so you can use the given 25-character tokens.

Then go to the feed URL, which could be something like http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=feedwatchlist&wlowner=kezze&wltoken=e5d7a983d213352dc135691217cb21629c71ccfc , i.e. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=feedwatchlist&wlowner=USERNAME&wltoken=TOKEN . Substitute USERNAME and TOKEN with your own data.

My personal preference is to get 72 hours (which is the maximum) of updates and all the revisions (not only the most recent one). This way, the URL is something like
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=feedwatchlist&allrev&hours=72&wlowner=USERNAME&wltoken=TOKEN – and for the Danish Wikipedia, which I’m mostly using, the URL is http://da.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=feedwatchlist&allrev&hours=72&wlowner=USERNAME&wltoken=TOKEN.

Apache2 + Internationalized Domain Names (IDN)

15. august 200827. februar 2014 Kristian Risager Larsen

Since I couldn’t find any documentation regarding Apache2-support for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), I realized that it’s not at all hard to configure.

You can just set the ServerName or ServerAlias-property to the punycode-value of the domain name, i.e. æøå.tld would become xn--5cab8c.tld. A converter is available at VeriSign.
After converting, save the apache2 virtualhost configuration file, (eventually run a2ensite config_file.tld , if you have chosen to config your web sites that way) and run:
apache2ctl graceful

The web server should start serving the web site immediately.