This is a nice feature in my opinion, as not only does it hide possibly sensitive information about your database it also allows you to create a friendly error message for the less computer savvy among us. A possible example would be a simple message telling the user that something has gone wrong and they should check back later. It’s as easy as creating your custom error page and uploading it to /wp-content/db-error.php

Then I got thinking. What about our old friend Mr Search Engine?

What would happen if he decided to pay a visit while the database was having a seizure? Well for starters the page would be returning the HTTP 200 status code, which would cause the search engine spider to assume everything is fine and dandy. Not only that, just about every page would be serving the custom database error which would be seen as duplicate content. Uh oh.

Luckily the WordPress developers allow us to use PHP in the custom error page, so it becomes trivial to rectify this.

The HTTP 503 status code does the trick here, coupled with the Retry-After header. Retry-After is measured in seconds so in my example I’m telling the spider to come back after one hour (3600 seconds), like so:

<?php

header('HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable');
header('Status: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable');
header('Retry-After: 3600');

?>
... your error page html content here ...

The search engine spider now knows that all is not as it should be and that it should check back in an hour.

The possibilities here are endless if you know your way around PHP. The error page could send an email or SMS to the site administrator and much more, however this is outside of the scope of this article.

The installation of said honeypot was a breeze and if you host your own site I recommend installing your own honeypot. More details are available at Project Honey Pot.

The most important (and visible) one is the banishing of WWW. As always a change like this this may break things and / or bring about the end of humanity as we know it. If you spot anything amiss feel free to let me know.

This widget will display your blog’s incoming links from Technorati in your sidebar in a similar way to what you see on the Wordpress dashboard. You can see it in action on my sidebar.

To use it you will need the Wordpress widgets plugin with a widgets compatible theme and a Technorati API key.

Technorati has a limit on the amount of queries you can submit per day (currently 500). As you can imagine a site with heavy traffic load can easily consume that amount very quickly, so this widget will cache the data and refresh it at a user configurable interval.

This is a beta version of the widget so please don’t get angry at me if it deletes your blog / makes your computer explode / causes your cat to be ill etc. There are bound to be wrinkles that need ironing out, if you find any please let me know.

Suggestions and feature requests are also welcome, feel free to leave them in the comments below.

So far this widget has only been tested and confirmed working on Wordpress version 2.0.4 – 2.0.7 and 2.1.2 (Thanks Free Thinker)

Installation

1. Download the widget below (zip file).
2. Extract djn_incoming_links.php and upload to your widgets directory (usually /wp-content/plugins/widgets/).
3. Login to your Wordpress admin.
4. Go to the “Plugins” section where you should see “Technorati Incoming Links Widget”, click activate.
5. Go to “Presentation” and then “Sidebar Widgets” and drag the widget into place.
6. You’re done, time to configure it!

Options

The widget has the following options:

• Title – The title that will be displayed in your sidebar (this will also link to the relevent page on Technorati).
• API Key – You should enter your Technorati API key here (see above).
• Number of items – The number of links to display.
• Caching Interval – How often the list should be updated from Technorati in hours.
• Clear Cache – Clears the links cache, this will pull the data from Technorati again.

Note: If you have no incoming links or have not set your API key the widget will display nothing. I didn’t think people would want a nice advertisement for the fact they have no incoming links.

If you want to check that the widget is working correctly you can view the source of the page and look for “DJN Incoming Links ### debug data” to check the status.

Download Version 0.62

Changelog

24 May 2007 – 0.62 – Bugfix for incorrect number of items displayed. Thanks Rico.

24 Aug 2006 – 0.61 – Initial beta.