Weblog Tools Collection is organizing a WordPress Plugin and Mod Competition. The competion will start on April 15 and run for two months. If the participation is anything like the recent WordPress Themes Competition, we can be sure to see some excellent plugins coming our way.
I moved the blog from the “/blog” context to the webroot (http://www.digitalhobbit.com). Old links should still work. Please leave me a comment in case you run into any issues.
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....