This morning I set to the task of de-spamming Author Buzz. There is always a trickle of deeply suspect junk accounts being registered. However, of late, there have been enough spam accounts that the real users have started to notice. It was time to take action. I’m not going to …

This morning I finally got through reviewing a series of Masonry based themes. Masonry is a JavaScript grid layout library. Masonry works by arranging elements in optimal position based on available vertical space, much like a mason fitting stones in a wall. In other words, it makes grid layouts look …

WordPress 5.5 has arrived on Author Buzz. This update comes with a host of new features and many enhancements to the post composer. Updates include new SEO features such as automatic XML sitemaps. There are new features in the post editor. Many of these are to make composing posts easier. …

If anything good came out of Tumblr getting new owners it is that the broken RSS feeds for EU countries are now functional again. As a developer with not enough time to do everything, this is excellent news. For our users this means that your headlines from Tumblr can be …

No, that’s not some weird geek code AB-in.UK is the new Author Buzz short URL service. But it is so much more than a URL shortener. At present, we are closed beta testing URL shortening. That’s because there are a fair few jagged edges that we need to work through. …

API – that thing that geeks use to make magic happen is coming to Author Buzz. We will be rolling out two sets of API specs. The first is a collection of theme hooks and filters. Once all themes available to our bloggers support these API, we will release a …

I don’t know if anyone has noticed but Tumblr’s RSS feeds rarely work anywhere else. It turns out that all EU based requests to RSS feeds redirect to a EU policy acceptance page. This includes machine consumed data like RSS feed. I have recently made a pull request to the …

This is less a big deal update and more me having some fun but Author Buzz now has secret dad jokes. I was playing with the hooks in WordPress and realised I could use send_headers. That’s a hook for sending headers – who would have guessed. As a result, if …

There are no development updates to share at the moment. However, I thought I would remind you of a feature that we recently rolled out. The post planning calendar. The WordPress Editorial Calendar is one such way to manage this task. The editorial calendar is something we added right after …

If there is one thing that this outage has shown me, it is that there can always be a more comprehensive backup system in place. This post should publish just after the most comprehensive, site-wide, backup of all the things has completed. That ends step one. Some backup stats Files …