Blake Helms | Birmingham, Alabama

All of the images, javascript, css and theme files are now being served up via Amazon’s Cloud­front CDN ser­vice. You may notice some miss­ing images or styles as the CNAME prop­a­gates. You should notice a fairly sub­stan­tial dif­fer­ence in per­for­mance. I will be writ­ing a fol­low up arti­cle on what all was involved.

First let me start by say­ing I do not feel there is any inherit flaw in WP-SuperCache but merely a flaw in my con­fig­u­ra­tion which I hope the Word­Press com­mu­nity at large can help me fig­ure out. When I decided to switch my blog over to Word­Press I was con­is­tently advised to install WP-SuperCache, which I did. Unfourtantly […]

A few weeks ago I wrote an arti­cle on “How to Con­nect Your Blog to Face­book.” Face­book is designed around con­ver­sa­tion so pub­lish­ing your post there is an easy way to cre­ate  inter­ac­tion with your friends and bring­ing the com­ments back makes it very easy to share your friends insights with the world. In that article […]

If you visit my site you will notice a new tab on the left side titled “Sug­ges­tions.” Click­ing it will open a win­dow where you can sug­gest new top­ics for me to post on. This fea­ture is part of a really cool ser­vice called Skribit. Any­one who has ever had a blog knows that from […]

The great­est blog related week­end of the year is upon us! Word­Camp Birm­ing­ham is this week­end! Last year was a great time with lots of great infor­ma­tion, a ton of inter­est­ing new peo­ple to meet and some of the best BBQ. This year’s lineup will surely not dis­ap­point with a keynote by Aut­tomatic founder Matt […]

This week­end I did some work adding Face­book inte­gra­tion to my blog. Part of the prob­lem with the recent social media rev­o­lu­tion is hav­ing a con­sis­tent mes­sage across all plat­forms. I post to my blog, I then have to post a link to in my Face­book and Twit­ter. Recently I setup my per­sonal URL short­en­ing ser­vice at bhnet.me this has […]

First off, I think the Word­Press plu­gin instal­la­tion sys­tem is sec­ond to none in the indus­try, but I do think that there is room for improve­ments. I will out­line them below. Con­sis­tent doc­u­men­ta­tion - Every plu­gin SHOULD have a changelog! Not sure why so many don’t. I think this should be required when post­ing a plu­gin. Some […]

On Fri­day reports began sur­fac­ing around the Inter­net that a new worm was attack­ing a large num­ber of Word­Press instal­la­tions. It was soon dis­cov­ered that the prob­lem is a cross-script attack­ing vul­ner­a­bil­ity that was patched in ver­sion 2.8.3. Any site run­ning an ear­lier ver­sion can be attacked. Sev­eral high pro­files sites have been affected including […]

Now that I have moved my site to Word­Press I’m curi­ous what plu­g­ins you the read­ers are using. Please leave a com­ment with a list of some of your favorite.

For many years I’ve looked at the Wor­press plat­form. I’ve played with it some and even went to a Word­camp! For many years my site has been run­ning on the Dot­Net­Nuke plat­form. I first started using it with ver­sion 2 and main­tained my site up through ver­sion 5. It’s main appeal was it was writ­ten in .NET, It […]