Something I'm going to share with you today is how to delete a batch of files in Linux (a CentOS distribution in this instance) using the built-in find utility and some regular expressions.

Use case: It turns out that the backup utility for WordPress doesn't delete old backups that it stores on your server. As these files build up, they typically consume a lot of space, and eventually fill up your hard disk.

As a blogger, the URL field in the WordPress comments form is a constant pain - either spammers are using it to drop shady links, or readers feel compelled to fill it with garbage just to fill in the field. Either way, it's a nuisance. But how do you get rid of it?

We recently decided to clear out old comments on blog entries on one of our WordPress sites. We have almost six years worth of comments and data on this particular blog, most of it pertaining to old news items. While the discussions were interesting and engaging in their day, they now represent tens - maybe hundreds - of thousands of lines of database entries.

This is a quick tip post to show you how to redirect the www version of a domain to it's non-www equivalent using Niginx.

The reasons for doing this are quite technically dense, so a knowledge of web hosting and SEO might be useful. Basically, having the same site available at both www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com means that there are two identical copies of your site on the web.

If you've ever moved your WordPress site to another location, you'll find that all your images end up broken because they all point to the old domain.

The problem is, all the image paths stored in the database are static, so you've got to update them to the new location.

I test out a lot of content management/publishing systems. A lot.

As someone who runs a couple of websites, I make it my business to check out different publishing systems and see how they're cobbled together. Some systems are pretty straightforward to set up and conducive to publishing straight out of the box.

One of my biggest problems with Drupal is that it doesn’t have common solutions for standard problems: Image handling and WYSIWYG editing are just two areas where Drupal fails users.

Newcomers to Drupal will be aware of the hours of research needed to choose an Image management strategy. And for WYSIWYG editors, you have a fairly broad choice: TinyMCE, FCKEditor and many more.

I installed a dual-boot configuration during a system rebuild recently and stuck the latest and greatest version of Ubuntu 8.10 on a sizeable partition. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll know that I'm constantly questioning whether Ubuntu Linux is a viable Windows replacement.

One of the key things for me in making a transition of this magnitude is finding a desktop blogging client compatible with Linux and it also being as fully featured as Windows Live Writer - my blogging client of choice and perhaps the leading blog client software. The thing is, the latest version of Live Writer Beta has some pretty hot features, including a link gloassary which allows you to autolink to a page previously linked to: you enter the last anchor text as previously and it automatically creates the link for you.

There isn't a single other blog editor that I know of that can replicate that functionality.

I've been weighing up two blogging/CMS platforms recently with a view to launching a new community site. Those platforms are Drupal and WordPress MU.

Drupal is a leading open source content management system. With the aid of some nifty add-on modules, Drupal is capable of becoming just about anything your imagination wants. Blogs, wikis, forums, event calendars and much more.