Now why would I do that, especially when my blog is syndicated through it?

Simple. I’m always trying to cut back on RSS and other “stuff.” Less is more. But don’t worry — I subscribed again. Only this time, I subscribed to my own filtered version of it! I built it [...]

This is part knowledge share, part appeal: fellow bloggers, I’d comment a lot more on your blogs (and I want to!) if I could. Please, make it easy for me to comment — don’t make me log in (I won’t do it) or moderate me. I’ve found a solution that works really well [...]

My wife has a site that needs two WordPress blog installations. The URLs differ by a subdirectory name. Both blogs need to be (URL-wise) subdirectories of /blog/. They need to be completely independent of each other, yet use the same custom theme. And there used to be just a single blog, which was not in a subdirectory; its permalinks must not break. (It has nice URLs with the date and title in them, not post ID-style URLs). And because I’m the husband, I get to maintain it, so tack “easy to maintain” onto the requirements (it must be easy to upgrade WP in both blogs, for example). In this article I’ll show you how I did it with a single .htaccess file, a single copy of WordPress, two MySQL databases, and a single configuration file.

Fixing URLs

As I mentioned, there used to be a blog at /blog/ which must not break. Suppose this blog was about dogs and my wife has recently started blogging about cats. She wants two …

I wrote a custom imageless CAPTCHA for my blog a while ago. I didn't write it as a plugin, so I lost it when I upgraded Wordpress a couple weeks ago. Not having this in place to help eliminate comment spam was an eye-opening experience, and vindicated much of what I asserted in my original posts: a naive question-and-answer system is highly effective at stopping spammers, probably as effective as scrambled images. Read on for the details.