WordPress, in recent versions, have forces the display of WordPress as the generator in meta tags along with the version information in the header of your WordPress blogs - <meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.5.1" />. Unlike previous versions there is not easy way to remove it. Unless WordPress is using that to provide support (which it doesn’t), I don’t see any good reason for providing that extra bit of help to hackers, do you? Here is a simple plugin which will remove the WordPress generator meta tag along with its version information.

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Newer versions of WordPress (2.3.1 and above) adds two extra lines to your blog header. They are:
<link rel="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml" title="RSD" href="http://blog.taragana.com/xmlrpc.php?rsd" /><link rel="wlwmanifest" type="application/wlwmanifest+xml" href="http://blog.taragana.com/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml" />
You need them to use Windows Live Writer to write to your WordPress blog. However many, like me, do not use Windows Live Writer. For them such headers are simply junk and add to the size of their pages (and download time) without adding any value to them or to their users. For such bloggers (majority I presume) here is a simple WordPress plugin (Angsuman's Windows Live Manifest Remover WordPress plugin) which removes these two header links from your WordPress blog.

Download Angsuman's Windows Live Header Remover Plugin, rename the file to angsumans-windows-live-header-remover.php, upload it to wp-content/plugins folder of your blog and activate it from Plugin Management screen. It requires zero configuration. It does one thing and does it well - remove these two useless headers from your WordPress blog.

Technical Note: There is a similar WordPress plugin which does the same thing. This plugin works differently in that it doesn't add the code directly to the plugin body but to the 'init' hook. This ensures that this plugin will remain compatible with future versions of WordPress as it doesn't depend on the relative order of execution of the plugins versus the default WordPress filters. Sounds complicated? To put it simply - Install the plugin and then forget about it forever. It will continue to serve you (your blog) in the background for a very long time.

You can get more free WordPress plugins here.

Semaphore is used to restrict access to shared resources, such as shared memory or to limit the number of processes that may simultaneously use a resource, in a multi-process or multi-threaded environment.

In php using semaphore a process must wait while accessing a shared resource currently used by another process. But this may not be required for all cases. Sometimes we need to just verify whether a resource has been locked and move on. Unfortunately we have no way to check the status of a semaphore lock in php. Let’s see how we can implement non-blocking semaphore access in PHP.
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A short survey on your programming language preferences, shouldn’t take more than 1 minute of your time. Please participate and let others know too.
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PHP is not only a very competent web development language (and part of LAMP stack). It is also a very capable language for writing (command line) scripts. You can write simpler and cleaner scripts with php than perl. Here is a php code which takes a file name as input, trims whitespace from each line of the file and finally saves the result back in the same file.

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Translator Plugin Gold provides automatic machine translation of your WordPress blog in 32 languages - German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Arabic, Dutch, Greek, Russian, Norwegian, Brazilian Portugue, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Latin American Spanish, Filipino, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Slovenian, Swedish, Welsh, Turkish and Latin.

The new features in version 1.1 are:

1. In the option page (under Advanced -> Miscellaneous section) it now provides SQL queries which you can execute in your database to significantly speed-up Translator Pro on heavily trafficked sites. It adds indexes to the tables for faster querying.

2. Improved user interface

3. Translator Plugin Pro adds a new feature to verify completeness of translated pages by checking for keywords or tags in your page. This elegantly handles the failures in third party translation engine. This adds to the extensive checks we perform to ensure quality and completeness of translated pages.

4. New translation engine errors have been added for automatic fail-over support and load-balancing.

5. Overall performance improvement and optimizations have been added to this release.

6. New extensive documentation have been added in this release, old documentation revised and updated. You can read the full documentation here. Don’t forget to check our developer API for writing your custom look and extensions.

You can read about all the features here.

We now provide online help desk on our new support site. Please register there for customer support.

Please post your feedback in Translator Plugin Gold forum.

Translator Plugin Gold 1.1 is fully compatible with WordPress 2.5 as well as earlier version of WordPress.

PHP files are scripts which are interpreted by php interpreter (php.exe in windows). Converting them to exe files makes it easy to distribute PHP applications to Windows users. Unfortunately Zend, the PHP company, doesn’t provide a way to convert PHP scripts to Windows executables. Today I am going to show you a simple way to convert your PHP scripts to regular Windows executable files (.exe). Not only that you can also convert an entire directory of PHP scripts and assign one of the files as the main file to execute first. Additionally the source files are encoded which not only improves the performance but also protects your source code. You can also set the icon for the file which is useful when you are distributing your PHP application as a stand-alone executable.

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Suhosin is an advanced protection system for PHP installations. It was designed to protect servers and users from known and unknown flaws in PHP applications and the PHP core. Suhosin comes in two independent parts, that can be used separately or in combination. The first part is a small patch against the PHP core, that implements a few low-level protections against bufferoverflows or format string vulnerabilities and the second part is a powerful PHP extension that implements all the other protections.

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I am very happy to announce the much-awaited release of Comment Guard Pro for WordPress blogs. Comment Guard Pro is designed to unobtrusively protect your blog against all types of comment spams - trackback spam, pingback spam, robotic spam using comment form, human submitted spam (where the spammers actually goes to your site to spam you; they are the hardest to detect), referrer spam etc. We provide multiple layers of protection against all kind of comment spams.

Comment Guard Pro is a zero configuration plugin, even your grandma can use it. However if you want, you can configure every aspect of the system. You can make it your own, implement your own vision, replace, enhance and extend its functionality.

Comment Guard Pro is state-of-the-art comment spam detection software based on expert system to classify comments. Comment Guard Pro leverages several tried and tested comment spam fighting techniques & knowledge which is the result of several man-years of research into comment spam detection, both in-house and by the anti-spam community. We extensively tested and re-tested and fine-tuned the system with the key criteria - elimination of false positives and false negatives in comment spam detection.

Most spams are outright rejected without filling up your database and consuming your resource. Comment Guard Pro doesn’t normally ask your viewers to do anything extra like solving a problem etc.
Note: We reject a comment only when we are sure about its spamminess.

Comment Guard Pro was born after years of frustration with the state of comment spam prevention software available today. They fall in two major categories. Either they are ineffective in stopping spam (too many false negatives) or too strict and even deny legitimate comments (false positives). They are a pain in the neck for genuine commenters, resulting in bloggers losing their audience, and generate lots of false positives (marks a genuine comment as spam) which consume bloggers time to moderate. They also consume bandwidth and CPU by saving the junk comments in your database.

There is another issue. To eliminate false positives from existing plugins, you have to check their spam queue manually. It might be ok for 5-10 comments in queue, but not for say 2000-10000 comments in spam queue as is commonly the case with a widely used Comment spam protection plugin today. Most of such plugins protect against some type of comment spam or other but not the whole range. Frequency based spam detection techniques, for example, let in deluge of spams from new spammers. None of these are acceptable. Ultimately you get frustrated and tired of bloggng and suffer burn-out.

A big issue with today’s comment spam protection software is that you get a blackbox with no direct control over its actions. A widely used anti-spam plugin today is renowned for marking even the blog author’s comment as spam and another for even locking out the blogger from his own blog! The software today doesn’t respect your preferences. In short you lose control over your comments and have to blindly trust a third party for making the right decision about your comments; and often it fails.

Not any more. Comment Guard Pro puts you back in control over your comments. You control how it makes its decision. If you don’t like the logic employed by a pluglet (a rule) then you can decrease its score, change its decision on success or failure and you can even disable it. You can even add your own pluglets to implement your grand vision. You are the boss.

Comment Guard Pro gives you back the control and time to do what you do best, blog.

Comment Guard Pro is pluggable. You can individually control each pluglets, configure and fine-tune their functionality and weightage. You can also write your own pluglets to add more spam prevention techniques, gather more statistics or anything else you may desire like sending a cute / angry note to spammers and more. It comes with fully documented open pluglet API and examples to enable you to write your own pluglets.

It comes with lots of valuable features and functionalities. It was extensively tested for about a year with over 5 million comments. It came out with flying colors. Read more here (press).

The most common use of this is to display the current year in the copyright message dynamically. Anyone who really knows PHP should be able to do it easily. However not everyone who has to use PHP knows PHP, like, for example, people using snippets in ModX or modifying templates in WordPress. Here is the code snippet for them:
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