I recently had an odd situation come up, though it’s not incredibly hard to imagine. I needed to create a staging web server, identical to production, but it should live on a different hostname (eg, staging.holyarmy.org, instead of www.holyarmy.org). The content should not accessible to the public, nor to search engines. This isn’t really so much a privacy or security issue as it is a convenience and customer service issue. If search engines somehow picked up on our staging site (and they would, given it’s full of SEO triggering info, google analytics scripts and the like) then our search information could become poisoned with the staging URL. Also bad would be if a customer found the staging site and posted information to the wrong place. I’ve actually seen both of these happen in the past when measures were not in place to prevent it.

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I keep the Wordpress code on this site up to date with security and bugfix updates as they come out. Same for Gallery and the plugins. But today I saw that the WPG2 plugin had been updated from version 2.x to 3.0. This plugin integrates my gallery with my wordpress blog. In the old version, I had to hack up my theme and add custom widgets in order to display random image widgets and get a “Photo Gallery” tab to show up in my page list by the header of the page. Now the plugin does all of that automatically and more! It’s cool, because I can switch themes much more easily now, without all the custom stuff. Hurray for improvement!