Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

WordPress, web development, and world domination.

WordPress: Kills Spammers Dead

Aug232004

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 spams from my moderation queue with just a few mouse clicks.

Tips for Travelling in the South

Aug192004

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.

If you are not a native Southerner, and plan to visit our lovely lands, you might want to read all 15 tips in order to avoid any potential ass-kickings.

XFN 1.1

Aug172004

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 the next Nightly Build, and eventually in WP 1.3.

GoMeme 4.0

Aug142004

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 is GoMeme 4.0. It is part of an experiment to see if we can create a blog posting that helps 1000’s of blogs get higher rankings in Google. So far we have tried 3 earlier variations. Our first test, GoMeme 1.0, spread to nearly 740 blogs in 2.5 days. This new version 4.0 is shorter, simpler, and fits more easily into your blog.

Why are we doing this? We want to help thousands of blogs get more visibility in Google and other search engines. How does it work? Just follow the instructions below to re-post this meme in your blog and add your URL to the end of the Path List below. As the meme spreads onwards from your blog, so will your URL. Later, when your blog is indexed by search engines, they will see the links pointing to your blog from all the downstream blogs that got this via you, which will cause them to rank your blog higher in search results. Everyone in the Path List below benefits in a similar way as this meme spreads. Try it!

Instructions: Just copy this entire post and paste it into your blog. Then add your URL to the end of the path list below, and pass it on! (Make sure you add your URLs as live links or HTML code to the Path List below.)

Path List
1. Minding the Planet
2. Luke Hutteman’s public virtual MemoryStream
3. geek ramblings
4. (your URL goes here! But first, please copy this line and move it down to the next line for the next person).

(NOTE: Be sure you paste live links for the Path List or use HTML code.)

The DMV Secret Society

Aug142004

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.

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Play Ball!

Aug092004

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 many entertaining distractions. Hot dogs, corn dogs, peanuts, ice cream, music, dancers, silly games between innings, etc. And between all of that, they managed to watch a little bit of the game itself (the Braves beat the Kannapolis Intimidators 7-0, BTW). We watched the occassional foul ball sail by, none near enough for us to catch. But a couple of times, balls sailed over the corner of our section, into an area near where we had parked our van. We joked around about whether it’s considered an “act of God” if a baseball hits your car. Perhaps we shouldn’t have tempted fate…

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Technorati redesign

Jul262004

Thanks to the efforts of Tantek: a new Technorati design. In the words of Scotty, “It’s…it’s… It’s green!”

By rewriting the vast majority of the markup (both from the old Technorati site, and the mockups from AP), I was able to simultaneously reduce the size of the HTML, while significantly increasing its semantic fidelity.

The result: I cut the size of Technorati’s home page in half, made it Valid XHTML, with a style sheet that is Valid CSS. (Nevermind that the W3C CSS Validator is buggy in that it incorrectly labels the page as invalid due to the validator’s failure to parse the perfectly valid media attribute value screen,projection).

However, they seem to be having some backend problems at the moment. I can’t get it to show me my link cosmos unless I manually remove the “rank” parameter from the querystring.

(via photomatt)

Second-hand ego surfing

Jul252004

So, after we took the kids to the mall yesterday, we went to the Borders bookstore across the street. Of course, I headed straight for the computer books section. I saw several titles that I’d like to have, but nothing that I just had to have right then.

But I did indulge in a little second-hand ego surfing. As I perused the authors of various books, I thought to myself, “He runs WordPress. And so does she. And so does she.” And even though those folks don’t know me from Adam, it’s pretty cool to know that I helped them in some small way 🙂