WordPress – Page 28 – Something Odd!

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!

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! 🙂

WordPress Love on the beach

OK, so maybe I had something to do with this picture, but I had to counter the bebo message with one of my own!

More WordPress Feeds

I mentioned elsewhere that Matt announced tags feeds this morning but I thought this should get more of a plug because it’s such a great feature!
When you write a post on WordPress.com it’s categorised in the usual way but it’s also added to a site-wide pool of posts and identified by a global category. Matt’s announcement this morning means that I can track what people are talking about photography, photos, gimp and even wordpress all from the comfort of my aggregator!
Now, how best to encourage people to rename that “Uncategorized” category so their posts are picked up?

WordPress 2.0 Theme Competition

Terry Ng wrote to me plugging the WordPress 2.0 Theme Competition! There are a few participants already but there’s plenty of time to compete!

Rate My Post!

From a few brief searches on Google in the past I found that nobody had done a decent “Rate This Post” plugin for WordPress. This evening I went searching again, and came across the Post Star Rating plugin by O Doutor! It’s in Spanish which may cause some problems for English speakers but I figured it out so it can’t be *that* hard. 😉
After a bit of tweaking, I have it running on In Photos and it appears to work ok! That is, when I clicked the stars it worked, I haven’t stress tested it yet!

Irish Blog Awards – Who's your favourite?

Ryan alerted me to the fact that Damien Mulley has opened the flood gates for nominations for the Irish Blog Awards!

This blog hasn’t been updated as much as it used to since wordpress.com took off, but take a look at the categories and email Damien if you think I should be nominated!

Guess I have my hands stuck in several of the categories with this blog and my photoblog, In Photos, so please don’t let me stop you nominating me in whatever category you like! 🙂

painful self-promotion ends!

WordPress.com Goodies

Yesterday it was announced that Yahoo will bundle WordPress right alongside Movable Type on their website! Matt and the rest of us were keeping mum on everything until yesterday, but now it’s out I can blog this. Matt has links to online coverage of the event.

Me? I think it’s great, the best blogging platform just got a huge boost from a very major player on the Internet! Maybe when I talk to people about blogs in the future they’ll know what I’m talking about!

The new Automattic website launched yesterday too. There’s a little blurb about me on the About page, although I do not drink Murphys except for that time years ago when I drank a pint with a shot of Baileys to help it go down.. that was interesting.

In other news, Performancing for Firefox came out. It’s a blog editor extension for Firefox that looks pretty cool. Unfortunately I’m not using Firefox 1.5 yet so I can’t try it out.

Interview with me and Matt: Blogging, WordPress, Business.

Tom Raftery has published his interview with me and Matt Mullenweg. He talked to us last Monday on various subjects related to WordPress, commercialisation, plus blogging in Ireland, business blogging and others. You can download and listen to the interview on the above site.