Since Talk Like a Pirate Day is only three weeks away, I spent some time this weekend revamping my old Fun Filters hack. The result is a new plugin for WordPress 1.2 or higher, which I call the Text Filter Suite. This version basically provides a post and comment filtering framework, which can be controlled on a per-post basis.
Grandaddy Yesterday was good. We all stayed in bed later than usual, though not as late as we would have liked. Susan cooked buttermilk pancakes. We took the kids out to a Chinese restaurant for supper, then when we came home, we bathed them and put them to bed, ready for school the next day. Then, around 11:30pm, my mom called to tell me that my grandfather had just passed away. He had been in … Continue reading
One of my other web sites is called The War on Spam. Over the past few months, I just hadn’t had time to update it. I’d run across links that I wanted to post, but I just couldn’t take time out to write up editorial commentary to go along with them. So I’m giving up. Sort of. So, I’ve automated things a bit. You might notice that there are a ton of new postings. These … Continue reading
My spammer came back for another visit, so I decided to have a bit of fun. Here is my second WordPress plugin: TarPit (txt, phps). What it does If you have any IP numbers listed in your moderation_keys setting (that’s where you put the spam words in the Comment Moderation setting under Discussion Options), this plugin will check them against the current visitor’s IP number. If it matches, the visitor will get a delay (that’s … Continue reading
Last night, a spammer tried to post comments to a variety of posts, from a variety of IP numbers. The spammer also tried to obfuscate his text by using HTML encoded entities for some of the text in the links (which were to a variety of sites for online gambling or pharmecuticals). None of them ever showed up here. They were all auto-moderated by WordPress. I was able to delete all 64 of the attempted … Continue reading
This is one of the funniest (and truest) things I’ve seen in a while: Tips for Travelling in the South (via monokinetic). 13) Don’t ridicule our Southern manners. We say sir and ma’am. We hold doors open for others. We offer our seats to old folks because such things are expected of civilized people. Behave yourselves around our sweet little gray-haired grandmothers or they’ll kick some manners into your ass just like they did ours. … Continue reading
I read yesterday from Tantek and Eric that XFN has been upgraded to version 1.1. They’ve added three new values: contact, kin, and me. The me value is under an entirely new “identity” category, and is exclusive of all other values. Eric has some additional notes on the usefulness of me. Since Matt didn’t do it already, I added support for XFN 1.1 to WordPress. The changes are in CVS, so they’ll show up in … Continue reading
There are by some estimates more than a million weblogs. But most of them get no visibility in search engines. Only a few “A-List” blogs get into the top search engine results for a given topic, while the majority of blogs just don’t get noticed. The reason is that the smaller blogs don’t have enough links pointing to them. But this posting could solve that. Let’s help the smaller blogs get more visibility! This posting … Continue reading
Those of you who have read my past writings know that we recently moved our family from Alabama to Georgia. Of course, this necessitates a lot of bureaucratic tasks such as change of address forms, setting up utilities, changing our drivers licenses, car registration, etc. This week we finally got around to the drivers license bits, and it’s a little different here than it was in our old hometown.
This past Tuesday, we went with some friends of ours to see a Rome Braves (class “A” affiliate of the Atlanta Braves) . baseball game. We introduced our kids to important concepts such as trash-talking (“batterbatterbatterbatterSWING!”), the Tomahawk Chop, and yelling “Charge!” after the trumpet call. Surprisingly, the kids didn’t get bored and ask when we were going home a million times — we actually stayed through the entire nine innings. Of course, there were … Continue reading