blogging

I just upgraded my blog from WordPress 1.2 to 1.5. As expected, the actual upgrade was very smooth, and it really didn’t take longer than a few minutes. In the next few days, I’ll need to play with WordPress’s new theme mechanism to customize the design of my blog. I tried a bunch of themes (there are a lot of 1.5-compatible themes already, many of them very nice), but none of them were usable without at least a little bit of tweaking (for example to insert my logo at the right place, customize colors to match, etc....

While I’ve been pretty successful in suppressing comment spam, I still seem to have some trouble with trackback spam. I believe there are some decent WordPress solutions out there now, but I haven’t really had a chance to play with them. In the mean time, I decided to start filtering out all comments that contain the word Texas, as I’ve been getting a lot of spam for Texas Poker and Texas Hold’em, and for some reason Wordpress (at least my version) seems to be unable to recognize the word hold’em as a spam word… If you’re from Texas or need to comment on Texas for one reason or another, I apologize in advance....

Lately I’ve been bombarded with comment spam (free online poker anyone?). I have expanded the list of keywords that flag a comment as potential spam, thus requiring manual admin approval before it is posted. This is still annoying, though, as I have to disapprove the spam every time it is posted. Therefore, I have implemented a simple but hopefully effective automatic anti-comment-spam solution based on Elliott Back’s Spam Stopgap Extreme. The only downside is that it requires Javascript to be enabled in order to post comments....

JustBlogIt is a nice little Firefox extension (also works with Mozilla) that adds a right-click menu entry to easily add a blog entry for the current page. The unique thing about it is that it also supports many web based news aggregators, such as Bloglines. You simply have to right-click on the entry you wish to blog about, and JustBlogIt will automatically insert the correct title and link in the blog form....

Here is a very nice collection of weblog and RSS submission sites.