I read with interest Mark Pilgrim’s highly pessimistic, but well thought out, article on comment spam yesterday. Whilst I find that I cannot disagree in principal with most things Mark says, I somehow feel that things aren’t quite at the throwing in the towel stage. On the WordPress developer list we have been discussing tactics which Mark hasn’t touched upon but which could be employed to negate the value (increased page rank) of comment spamming. Dougal sums things up nicely in the article he wrote over at the WordPress Development Blog
Category Archives: Blog
Old Halloween Theme
I’m being totally lazy in not creating a new theme for this year. I’ve just dragged last years theme out of the folder. In fact it was a one word change in one file! Happy Halloween.
Long Time No Blog
It’s been a while, but I am still here! I’ve been pretty busy at work and I’ve been spending less time on the PC at home. Plus I’ve just not been in the mood 😉
In brief, I’ve still got a long list of books I want to mention. I’m still tweaking my WordPress installation here. Work has been busy but not too stressful. I’m still cycling 50 miles a week, but the old waistline is not reducing 🙁
Things are moving again on the WordPress development front, we have a new member on board (that makes three Mikes and a Michel), and the buzz at the moment is comment spamming and it’s prevention.
I’m sure there are a million other things I could write about but it’s late now, so I’m off to bed.
Later days…
WordPress 0.72 Is Out
Hurray, WordPress 0.72 is now out! As Dougal notes there are lots of new things:
* All most all of the configuration options are managed through your browser. Edit your config file once and never touch it again!
* A new default style
* Improved Post/Edit interface makes it easy to edit/delete recent comments
* Improved HTML auto-formatting
* Password protected posts
* New get_links_list() function builds your entire blogroll for you
* Improved Links Manager
* Support for blogging clients that use the metaWeblog and MovableType APIs
* ‘Quicktags’ gives more intuitive HTML formatting option when editing posts
* Image upload feature compatible with more PHP server setups
* RSS feeds for comments
* RSS feeds now support “Conditional GET” to help conserve bandwidth
* Geoposition support
* Security fixes
* …and tons of minor little bug fixes…
You can get it from SourceForge
WordPress Release Candidate
Cool! The next version of WordPress is almost here! 0.72 Release Candidate 1 is now available from the usual place.
Speed Up
With any luck, I have just managed to speed up the time it takes to generate my blog page. It should now be almost three times faster than before. I managed to narrow it down to the ‘posts_nav_link()’ function which gave the ‘older posts’/’newer posts’ links at the top and bottom of the page. These were taking as long to execute as the main blog loop (in fact they run almost the same database query). So for now they have been removed, which means you must use the archives, calendar, or categories links to navigate to the older posts.
Upgraded At Last
Well, I finally did it. Journalized is now running on WordPress! I took a long time about it. Mainly because of my b2 specific hacks I didn’t wish to lose. I have them all in WordPress now. Yes, all of them. And no, they are not all in the official code yet.
I feel like perhaps I can move on now. Start catching up with things which have lagged behind (like about 10 book reviews!).
Nearly There
I’ve been working on converting Journalized to WordPress. I’m nearly there, but I keep getting distracted by fixing bugs and answering questions on the support forum. 🙁
