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WP Plugin: Import your Flickr comments

I have had a plugin running on my photoblog In Photos for quite a while now that imports comments on my Flickr stream into my blog posts. It prefixed “Flickr:” to the username and linked back to the Flickr comment.

Due to overwhelming demand (two people asked!), I cleaned up the plugin a bit and put a configuration page on it and called it the Flickr Comment Importer. There are a few things to consider if you want to use this plugin but it’s straight forward to install and configure and it’s all documented on the plugin page.

Download it now!

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Brians Latest Comments Cached

After the success I had with Ultimate Tag Warrior I turned my eye to another popular WordPress plugin that I use: Brian’s Latest Comments.

This plugin lists the latest comments on your blog and I wanted to squeeze every bit of performance out of my server so I guessed that caching the output of the plugin would save several queries for every page generation. Comments are cached for an hour. The cache isn’t invalidated by a new comment so don’t worry if the comments list doesn’t update immediately after a comment is made.

Install

I used the same cache directory that WP Cache 2.0 uses, wp-content/cache/. You’ll have to create that directory and make sure the webserver can write to it. The simplest way of doing that is by running the command chmod 777 cache. Download the file below and copy it into your plugins directory. If you’ve never installed the original plugin you’ll need to download it and read the install.txt to find out how to use the plugin.

Download

brianslatestcomments.txt – rename to .php and copy into your plugins directory.

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Drowning in the flood

I have noticed a strange thing in the past week or so. Google has referred legitimate looking browser user agents to this blog and In Photos.org and within seconds that browser tries to download all my feed links, and several months of my archives. I have a little flood protection built in and it stops them with a 403 after several of these requests but it’s annoying. It’s some sort of pre-fetching plugin to “speed up” browsing isn’t it? Firefox has a similar thing in the form of the “Fasterfox” extension if memory serves. Ben Metcalfe has a good write up on the evils of pre-fetching. It could kill your database or use all your credits in online stores!

Whatever you’re using, welcome to my kill file.

64.136.27.227 … “GET /index.php?tag=suicide-girls HTTP/1.1” 200 36422 “http://www.google.com/search?q=suicide+girls&hl=en&lr=&start=20&sa=N” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)”
64.136.27.227 … “GET /wp-content/plugins/widgets/rss.png HTTP/1.1” 200 3341 “https://inphotos.org/index.php?tag=suicide-girls” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)”
64.136.27.227 … “GET /feed/atom/ HTTP/1.1” 200 35775 “https://inphotos.org/index.php?tag=suicide-girls” …
64.136.27.227 … “GET /feed/ HTTP/1.1” 200 35449 …
64.136.27.227 … “GET /feed/rss/ HTTP/1.1” 200 4636 …
64.136.27.227 … “GET /wp-content/themes/whiteasmilk/style.css HTTP/1.1” 200 9639 “-” …
64.136.27.227 … “GET /xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.1” 200 42 …
64.136.27.227 … “GET /2006/07/ HTTP/1.1” 200 68150 …
64.136.27.227 … “GET /2006/09/ HTTP/1.1” 200 68150 …
64.136.27.227 … “GET /2006/08/ HTTP/1.1” 200 68150 …
64.136.27.227 … “GET /2006/06/ HTTP/1.1” 200 68150 …
…

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GIMP Lomo Plugin

mF posted a Lomo plugin for the GIMP. His example images on flickr look good but I haven’t been able to get the script to run in GIMP 2.0, will try in GIMP 2.2 tonight.

script-fu: Error while executing
(load “/home/donncha/.gimp-2.0/scripts/lomo2.scm”)
ERROR: unbound variable (errobj script-fu-menu-register)

GIMP: Plug-In “script-fu”
(/usr/lib/gimp/2.0/plug-ins/script-fu)

attempted to install procedure “script_fu_lomo” in an invalid menu location.
Use either “<Toolbox>”, “<Image>”, “<Load>”, or “<Save>”

Update! Here is a GIMP Lomo plugin that works in GIMP 2.4!