Based on prompting from a point made in this great article, I extended the System logging Known plugin that I wrote previously, to include a visual security log.

This log shows a user by user security log, showing login/logout and login failure attempts for each user’s account, plus a global log visible to the administrator. This provides a visual way for you to keep track of when, and from where, your account has been accessed, and hopefully give you tools to spot erroneous access attempts (for additional security you should totally check out my two factor authentication plugin as well).

» Visit the project on Github...

Just a quick note to say that the my Known Chrome plugin will now return an installable .crx file.

You’ll need the OpenSSL PHP extension installed, but if you do an installable .CRX file will be returned instead of a .zip. If you don’t have OpenSSL installed, the oldstyle .zip will be installed, however some people had problems with this.

» Visit the project on Github...

I have a number of WordPress sites which use Dan Coulter’s Flickr API powered gallery plugin to render images from an attached Flickr account.

This plugin appears to no longer be maintained by the author, and I have previously written about having to make a couple of code changes in order to get it to work again.

Anyway, a little while ago, I noticed that my Flickr galleries had stopped working again, so here’s a fix.

SSL Redux

Firstly, the Flickr API now REQUIRES that you connect to it via SSL. However, the Flickr gallery code uses the non-ssl endpoints.

So, in phpFlickr.php we need to update the endpoint URLs

var $rest_endpoint = 'https://api.flickr.com/services/rest/';
var $upload_endpoint = 'https://api.flickr.com/services/upload/';
var $replace_endpoint = 'https://api.flickr.com/services/replace/'; 

If you use the database cache, at this point you’ll need to reset it, since you need to rebuild the cache using the correct URLS.

To do this, open up mysql (or mysqlmyadmin) and open your wordpress database. Next, delete all the rows from the cache, e.g.

mysql> use wordpress;
Database changed
mysql> delete from wp_phpflickr_cache;
Query OK, 904 rows affected (0.04 sec)

Broken Flickr shortcode

Next, it seems that there was a collision with the Flickr shortcode, seems something was already defining the code but was expecting different parameters (likely Jetpack, but I’ve not really investigated).

So, I modified flickr-gallery.php to define the shortcodes in the plugin’s init function, after un-registering the existing definitions, and altered the priority so that it was defined last.

Get the updated plugin on Github…

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