Blog Archives

Scrivs considers new CMS for Whitespace

Apr082005

Scrivs is pondering a change for his design blog, Whitespace. The three main choices are Textpattern or WordPress or DIY. I’ve already weighed in with my (admittedly biased) opinion of WordPress. It seems to me that it would be a great fit for his stated requirements. Here is a list of features that I am looking for: Easily import entries from MT Multiple authors with different permissions Multiple blogs. For example, I may setup a … Continue reading →

A modern day fairy tale, part 2

Apr082005

For some reason, our daughter doesn’t like it when I make up new versions of her favorite stories. … Around that time, the three bears returned from their walk to eat their breakfast. When they went inside their house, Papa Bear immediately noticed something wrong. “Somebody’s been DDoSing my server,” he said. Mama Bear checked her server. “Somebody’s been defacing my corporate website!” Baby Bear checked his server, too. “Somebody’s been spamming my blog!” The … Continue reading →

Tartan Day 2005

Apr062005

Today is Tartan Day, which originated in Canada, was later adopted by the United States, and is now beginning to spread to other corners of the world, just as the “Scottish diaspora” has. The celebrations in New York this year were especially auspicious, as they featured the sword of William “Braveheart” Wallace, which has never before left its native Scotland. There was also some controversy this year with the conspicuous absence of Sean Connery, who … Continue reading →

WordPress Scandal: Photomatt Responds

Apr012005

Matt finally had a chance to make a response to the recent WordPress SEO scandal. Here’s a small snippet: The articles hosted content thing was just a short-term experiment, an interesting idea (original and relevant Wikipedia-type content on the site) that was badly implemented. As an experiment it could have been conducted much better than it was. The content should have been more topical to WP issue, I should have kept up with the content … Continue reading →

WordPress Scandal Update

Apr012005

Matt “scum of the earth” Mullenweg, vacationing in a not-very-wired portion of Italy, finally got wind of all the villagers with torches and pitchforks who have been searching for him. I have close to a thousand emails and countless blog posts and comments to go through, but Iâ€™ll try to synthesize everything and respond ASAP, I think itâ€™s important because some people seem to be spinning things quite maliciously. If you have a specific question … Continue reading →

The WordPress/HotNacho SEO Debacle

Mar312005

Debate is raging over the “WordPress SEO Spam” issue. Please pay special attention to the disclaimer at the beginning of Andrew‘s post (emphasis mine): Disclaimer. I’m hesitant to even write about this, knowing the web’s fondness for angry mob justice, but I feel like it’s an important issue that needs to be addressed. My one request: please be calm and rational. WordPress is a great project, and Matt is a good guy. Think before piling … Continue reading →

Plugin: SpamForceField

Mar292005

SpamForceField is my newest anti-spam plugin for WordPress. This one does a couple of interesting things: All connections via pinappleproxy are denied. Every connection’s Referer is checked against your blacklist keys. If a match is found, the connection is denied. If a comment is flagged as ‘spam’ due to the normal spam checks, the client receives a 403 Forbidden HTTP status. This also occurs for connections denied in the other two checks above. When connections … Continue reading →

Old wine in a new bottle

Mar242005

The topic of Ajax is pretty hot right now. And some people are getting a little hot over the naming. As I pointed out yesterday, and as Ian Hickson and Dare Obasanjo have also said, Ajax is not a new technology. Web developers have been doing this stuff for years under various names. JavaScript Remote Scripting, Remote Scripting with IFRAME, JPSPAN. But for whatever reason, the name “Ajax” has stuck. So, what is Ajax? It’s … Continue reading →

Ajaxing the Rails

Mar232005

If you’re a web developer, then hopefully you’ve already heard of Ruby on Rails and Ajax. If not, you’re behind the times, and you have some reading to do. New in Rails is built-in Ajax support. I haven’t had time yet to play with Rails yet, but I’m itching to do so. Rails is a web application framework written in Ruby, an odd, interesting programming language (probably only ‘odd’ to me because I haven’t used … Continue reading →

IE7 to support standards?

Mar212005

According to Eric Meyer, it seems that there is hope that Internet Explorer 7 may have improved standards support. He’s got a list of “Top 10 CSS Fixes” that should be made. I would definitely like to add “proper support for PNG transparency” to the list. It’s not CSS-specific, but it is a browser bug that requires many site designs to implement IE-specific work-arounds. And of course, there are many other bugs listed at the … Continue reading →