Keepin’ static like wool fabric since 2006
I’ve always wished I could link to Wikipedia on this blog by typing “[[Tiger Woods]]”, just like I would in a Wikipedia article. I even considered writing a WordPress plugin to do just that. Thanks to the WikipediaLink plugin by pixelbath, I don’t have to. It already works great. Mad props!
Turns out my Comment CAPTCHA wasn’t so smart after all. It stopped comment spam by stopping all comments. I’ve switched over to Akismet, so hopefully the comments should be working again.
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If anyone’s running their blog on WordPress and hasn’t upgraded to 2.1 yet, I’d strongly recommend it. It was easy as pie, and it fixed my two biggest annoyances with wp: the “Save and Continue Editing” button now works and the bizarre image insertion interface from the old WordPress is much improved.
I’ve also got to give them snaps for their most popular ideas page. Users rate ideas, and the most popular ones get implemented in the next release. At least that’s how the theory goes.
I was amazed how quickly the webspammers found the comments form on this site and started dumping cialis links on it. I’ve cleaned up the ones that made it through (there were 48 more listed as “pending” by WordPress) and installed a CAPTCHA plugin to prevent this in the future. For those of you who don’t know, when a web site asks you to enter some random characters in a hard-to-read image, that’s a CAPTCHA.
Hopefully you won’t notice, though. This is a “smart CAPTCHA” that uses JavaScript to automatically fill out the form when a real browser is visiting. I’ll see how well this works. Here’s hoping!
Update: This plugin did a great job of stopping comment spam by effectively turning off comments from unregistered users. I’ve turned it off and I’m switching to Akismet. (2/11/2007)
After months of wavering on the idea, Fratrik finally shamed me into creating a blog of my own. I expect the content to personal stuff, thoughts on programming, science, sports, and any of my random interests. Stay tuned for a post on my drive out west at the end of the summer.
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