Monthly Archives: June 2006

Corporate WordPress support is evil?

Toni announced yesterday the launch of the Automattic Support Network. This has of course attracted the attention of many blogs who have discussed the business implications but Peter Chris wonders if WordPress.org support will suffer. Here’s another post on the same issue but Matt replies with an excellent rebuttal.

I very much doubt the support network will have any immediate effect on the level of support offered to non-paying users. The number of non-paying users will always vastly outnumber those who pay for support. What happens if commercial support adversely affects the time spent on non-paying users? Guess what? There’ll be money in the bank to hire somebody else from the community to help out!

This can only be a win-win situation for all involved.

If you want to see what all the fuss is about, then give WordPress MU a spin. It’s come a long way recently, and if you’re looking for more, then visit wpmudev for older releases, some plugins, a theme pack and other stuff.

The Akismet Worst Offenders

Rich Boakes has written an extension to Akismet that makes deleting all the spam comments much easier. His extension adds a “Worst Offenders” list at the top of the Akismet page. The list is ordered by hits from IP address and helped me delete 2,407 comments with 3 or 4 clicks and saved me scrolling through an endless list of spams.

To make things load faster, look for “LIMIT 150” in akismet.php and change 150 to 10. Your Akismet review page will only display 10 spam comments now, which is more convenient.

Using another mod he wrote he has also hooked Akismet up to Apache’s deny/allow capilibities. It updates his .htaccess to deny requests from the worst offenders on his Akismet page. If your server isn’t particularly powerful this would be a great way of stopping those spammers eating all your precious server resources.

The best anti-comment-spam engine just got a great UI overhaul!

No more dumping in Blarney

I'm just back from the recycling area in Blarney and I'm perplexed. There's a huge sign there saying that effective from the start of this month, papers and plastics won't be collected. The large container for these products is conspicuous by it's absence.
The sign also has "No Dumping!" written on it in pen, and some of the remaining glass containers have the warning, "No plastic bottles if you don't want these to be removed as well!"

On the ground in front of the sign lay five or six white plastic bags full of rubbish. It's more than likely wet waste as well as recyclables and as I left a young man in a hoody approached carrying another white bag. A young woman trailed behind him by a dozen feet with another white bag.

How long more will Cork County Council collect the rubbish that's dumped there before they remove the facility altogether?

Update 24 hours later: The rubbish was cleared up this morning.

UCC students blogging

Damien Mulley has the scoop about the latest development at University College Cork. All students will be given blogs!

While that’s great news for blogging in Ireland, I’m disappointed that they didn’t choose WordPress Mu. I had a quick look around a few blogs and noticed a few things:

  • They do have permanent links, but links to articles are only in the sidebar “Recent Posts” block. The title of each post is not linked, and neither is the timestamp.
  • Permanent links aren’t very descriptive being of the form “/blogs/Username/item_x.htm” where x is a number.
  • It looks like trackbacks and pings aren’t supported so it will be just a little harder for blog owners to participate in blog conversations with others.
  • What will happen when a student finishes college? Will they be able to export their work? On another level, who owns the work? Student or College?

I have to disagree with Bernie’s comment about what value for money colleges get from hosting blogs. Bebo and MySpace are only two of the many companies offering their own proprietary website platforms. A college weblog has an unbreakable link to that institution. Colleges are places for learning which is quite different from the profit motive of any and every commercial company out there. The more exposure students get to blogging the better they will be at dealing with this phenomenon in the future. Not to mention the older students who are not in the demographic targeted by commercial interests.

Flocking Fast!

Wow, Flock is fast! I wonder if it chews memory like FF 1.5 too?
It’s also a lot more polished than when I tried it a few months back while debugging their sign up page on WordPress.com: preferences, cookies and form data were all imported from Firefox. The little Greasemonkey face isn’t showing in the status bar so I’ll have to install that again.

Oh, and it doesn’t spew out a ton of debug messages to the console any more! 🙂