I decided to take my recent comment / trackback spam issues as an opportunity to upgrade Wordpress from 1.5 to the latest version (2.02) and try the new Akismet anti-comment-spam plugin that is included in the release. Comments are re-enabled for now. Let’s see how this goes… Either way, the upgrade was worth it. The WordPress 2.02 admin interface looks a lot more modern and polished, and I look forward to exploring some of the new themes and plugins....
The Typo Theme Contest ended on 11/28, and the final results were posted two days ago. I didn’t win anything, but my humble contribution “opyT” admittedly pales in light of the many awesome themes that were submitted by others. Most importantly, over 120 Typo themes resulted from this competition! The themes are very diverse, and everybody who is interested in hosting a Typo blog should be able to find at least a couple themes to their liking....
The Rails based Typo blog engine has been gaining a lot of traction lately, and I’m seriously considering switching from WordPress. Don’t get me wrong - I love WordPress. It is a very solid and full featured blog engine that has never let me down. But I can’t deny that there’s a certain attraction to running a Rails based blog. I might even want to fiddle with the blog engine itself as an opportunity to get more up to speed on Rails....
Google has just launched another beta service: Google Blog Search. It looks pretty good already, and for example searching for relevant phrases brought up the expected postings from my blog. There is no way to explicitly submit a blog to Google, and the key to getting your blog listed is to submit it to relevant blog lists, which is most easily done by pinging a service such as Ping-o-Matic. If you’re using a nice blogging tool like WordPress, it should automatically take care of this for you....
Google Adsense seems to be very sensitive to certain content. I have only posted two entries about Flying Spaghetti Monsterism (this one and this one), and currently the main page displays these two posts among various others about topics such as iPod, podcasting, Ruby, Java, Cafepress, Spreadshirt, Xbox, etc. Still, as of the time of this writing the Google banner exclusively contains ads for websites on religion or spaghetti recipes....