Scott has written WordPress plugins to make it easier to write about code, generate monster avatars and generate unique geometric shapes for each commentor.

I would want a ping to appear on each of those linked posts, both to thank the linking blog for writing about me and to provide useful information to the reader (and to increase my comment counts). Yet WordPress only puts a ping on the first linked page.

It took me a little while to figure out why WordPress kept losing my pings since I wasn’t even sure if it was a problem on the sending or receiving end but it turns out WordPress is filtering pings because it thinks the comments are coming too fast. I’ll put the details below but if you just want to make sure all the pings intended for your blog actually reach it then here is the plugin for you.

Current Version:

WP_PingPreserver v0.4

Installation instructions:

Unzip wp_pingpreserver.zip. Upload wp_pingpreserver.php to wp-content/plugins/ and active in the Plugin Control Panel. Your blog will now allow up to 5 pings within 75 seconds.

Technical Details

The average user won’t need to read this but I thought I would post the details of the problem in case anyone wanted to fix it in the core WordPress files. It turns out that the function wp_throttle_comment_flood from wp-include/comment.php is automatically added as a default filter (in /wp-includes/default-filters.php). This function checks if the last comment from the commentor’s IP address was within 15 seconds and if so rejects the comment. This is obviously a problem with pings when 2 or 3 comments will be coming from the same IP within seconds.

Unfortunately, the comment_flood_filter passes in very little information (only the time of the current and previous comment) and the function wp_throttle_comment_flood does not allow plugins to signal that a comment should be accepted. So for this plugin to work it has to remove_action wp_throttle_comment_flood and replace it with it’s own function. Also since no information about the comment is available in the scope of the function (that I could find), I had to resort to checking to see if the $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] variable contained the string “xmlrpc.php”.

Anyway it’s a bit of a hack but it seems to be working. Please let me know if you have any problems or suggestions.

Change Log:

• v0.4 1-21-2008:
  • Checked if this is still a problem in Wordpress (it is)
  • Updated time limit to 75 seconds to be in line with Wordpress’s 1 comment/15 seconds
• v0.3 8-8-2007:
  • Switched from checking $POST to $_SERVER
• v0.2 8-8-2007:
  • Allows ping if <5 pings within 15 seconds
• v0.1 8-2-2007:
  • First attempt

After I put up a post about repairing my laptop power connector, Laptop Freak left a informative comment:

As you see on the photo above, the positive connector oxidized and almost black. If you put a fresh solder on the connector like this, the power jack problem will reappear very soon. I usually remove the power jack from the system board (with iron gun and solder sucker), clean oxidized pins on the power jack and pads on the motherboard and only after that resolder the power jack.

It turns out, unsurprisingly, that he was right. The power jack started coming loose again after about a month and a half. I was in the middle of a bunch of things so I didn’t really feel like messing with it so I just opened up the computer and threw some more solder on it. When the power jack started jiggling again a few weeks later, I knew I had to do something better to fix it. So I picked up a desoldering sucker and some desoldering wick.

It was kind of fun to melt the solder and suck it up until I started thinking about how much money I was messing with. Anyway I had pretty good luck heating up the solder with the soldering iron, sucking with the sucker (it appears the technical term is desoldering pump), and then getting the remainder with the copper desoldering braid. This left only tiny bit of solder so I pulled on each joint separately while heating them with the soldering iron. MAKE just put up a nice soldering and desoldering video tutorial. Would have been handy to have watched that before doing all this.

After all that, I was left with the separated power jack. Laptop Freak wasn’t kidding about oxidation. It looks like someone left the connectors in the Dead Sea. I’m no electrician but I’m guessing black crud covering electrical contacts can not be a good thing. So I scraped off all the gunk with a screwdriver and polished them until they were nice and shiny.

Then I tried to clean the contacts on the board with an eraser to remove any oxidation on the copper, stuck the jack back in its holes and soldered it back on. So far I haven’t had any problems, we’ll see if it last this time. If it breaks again (knock on wood), I’m definitely trying the external power jack workaround.

In case you didn’t read my old post about fixing this, here’s links for how to dismantle a Toshiba Satellite A70 (and tons of other laptops) and the common Toshiba power jack problems.

Update:Laptop Repair Guy now has a great step by step guide (complete with many pictures) to repairing the power jack.

My Toshiba Satellite A70 started having power problems several weeks ago. Although the power cord was plugged in, the computer was not charging and was draining the battery. The little ‘plugged-in’ LED would come up but the battery status LED would still show power coming from the battery. I could jiggle the power cord and it would come back up so I ignored it and got used to jiggling. Unfortunately, the power got more and more touchy and I spent more and more time jiggling the stupid power cord. I first guessed it must be something with my power adaptor but (after cutting open the outer wrap of the cord), I finally put it together that the ‘plugged-in’ LED was coming on but not the battery charging light. This seemed pretty odd. So I finally went out and bought a multimeter. For $20 it was a really good investment and I wish I would have bought one several hours of jiggling frustration earlier. Anyway after the multimeter showed the cord was giving the appropriate 19V without any interruptions, I finally got the bright idea to google the problem and found out that this is a common problem for the A70. Although I have soldered maybe once in my life, the repair didn’t look all that difficult so I thought I’d give it a shot. I ran out and grabbed a crappy Radio Shack iron for $15 and a pack of resistors and circuit board to practice on for $10. You could skip the practice if you were already confident in soldering.

The website How to dismantle a Toshiba A70 is invaluable for this task. I just thought I’d add a few notes to their steps:

• Step 2 includes “Remove the metal brace and the wireless card.” I think this could have been a bit more descriptive. There are two wires running fromt the card up through a hole in the motherboard. I’m pretty paranoid and I couldn’t quite work up the guts to disconnect these until I already had the screen off. But you really don’t have to worry. The wires end in little connectors that pop on and off easily enough. Also when you disconnect the wires, make sure to note which one goes where. I forgot to and took a guess. Since my internet, isn’t reversed I’m assuming I was correct.
• Steps 6 and 7, “Remove the securing strip,” are a real pain. I took the little strip above the keyboard off three or four times and every time it gave me a hassle. It seems to help if you get the bottom keyboard side off first and then work on the top. It’s amazing how well it holds on for just being little plastic tabs.
• When following step 10, “Disconnect the keyboard cable from the system board,” there are little lock things on each side of the keyboard ribbon. Don’t forget to unlock these when taking it out and relock them when putting it back. I forgot to relock them and spent a few anxious moments trying to figure out why only half my keyboard was working.
• Step 20, “Carefully remove the system board from the base,” is even more of a pain than removing the securing strip. It’s sort of the same idea only with a $1000 dollar motherboard instead of a $5 piece of plastic. The motherboard is really wedged in there. I found it easiest to start by getting the PC slot side out first. If you push in the little PC ejector button and sort of lever it and the i.LINK port with a screwdriver, you should be able to get it above the plastic. After that, a little lever action on the volume and headphone jacks on the other side and it should come out fairly easily. This took me about half an hour to figure out. An important note is that if you are certain the DC input jack is the problem you don’t even need to take out the motherboard. You could just solder the end of it with it in place. A good way to check this would be to wiggle the power connector from the outside and watch the pins of jack on the inside.
• One general point is that there are more than two types of screws. I saw long ones and short ones and assumed that there were only two types. But somewhere in there there is also a medium length screw. You would probably want to pay better attention to this than I did. My last hole didn’t fit my last screw. Luckily, it was only the hard drive cover and it already had one screw holding it in so I guess it will hold until something else breaks…

So once I finally got into the motherboard, I could see the rear pin of the power input jack moving freely in and out it’s hole on the motherboard. I’m not electrician but I assumed this was a bad thing.

So I fired up my fresh new soldering iron and after practicing with a few resistors, I finally worked up the guts to solder the loose jack. I ended up with a decent sized blob so I cut off some of the extra with some wire clippers. It’s worked for a week now so I guess it turned out ok. So in summary it took me, a complete novice at electronics, several hours to fix and cost $45 but I can use the tools again and I learned a lot about the inner working of my computer so I guess the only real cost was a bit of solder. If it breaks again (knock on wood), I might have to try this workaround.

Edit: Laptop Freak left a informative comment:

As you see on the photo above, the positive connector oxidized and almost black. If you put a fresh solder on the connector like this, the power jack problem will reappear very soon. I usually remove the power jack from the system board (with iron gun and solder sucker), clean oxidized pins on the power jack and pads on the motherboard and only after that resolder the power jack.

So I may be getting the chance to replace my missing screw sooner than I had hoped.

Update:Laptop Repair Guy now has a great step by step guide (complete with many pictures) to repairing the power jack.