Programming Coffee

I’ve been pretty lucky so far. Up until recently, I’ve averaged a couple spam comments per week on my blog. For some reason or another, things have changed and now I receive several per day. What happened? I’m not too sure. It happened roughly the same time I started blogging more frequently. Along with the traffic increase, the comment spam also increased. So how do I stop comment spam? Easy, right? Just install a wordpress plugin that handles comment spam protection. But wait, that’s a long frikkin list! Which one is the best? What do other bloggers recommend?

I have yet to figure out what the real value is in comment spam. Most Wordpress blogs use the rel=nofollow tag, which will prevent any search engine from following links in the comments, and any pagerank from being distributed. Are comment spambots created for the sole purpose of frustration? Or is it really a secret plot of the pharmaceutical companies to increase brand awareness by any means necessary?

I decided to ignore my awstats for a while, and try out ShortStat by Shaun Inman. And then use the ShortStat Widget to moniter my stats from my dashboard. I’ve heard that its a good simple stats program… Only time will tell.

WordPress, in conjunction with a couple Ecto testers have worked together to create a patch to the WordPress 1.5.1.3 release that allows WordPress to play nicely with its XML-RPC counterparts. Now WordPressDash, and other XML-RPC clients of WordPress can resume daily activities. Thanks to WordPress and the Ecto testers for addressing this quicly. The patch can be downloaded on the Ecto site.

Thanks to Cory Cooper (if you want me to link, let me know), I have been alerted to the fact that WordPress version 1.5.1.3 breaks WordPressDash. Ok, so it really doesn’t break it, it just injured it a little. Something changed in the way posts are handled (i’m not sure if it’s an xml-rpc thing or not), but when you post to a blog the xmlhttprequest receives a 404 “Page not found”. Its the weirdest thing too, because the post actually goes through, but the categories won’t set. To make things more confusing, the 404 is generated on the xmlhttprequest to actually make the post, not to set the categories…
I’ve got a support thread started to try and get to the bottom of this. And I’m crossing my fingers that the solution will be backwards compatible.

I have had a lot of good feedback for WordPressDash. The community wanted to post to multiple categories, so I gave them that support. The community had trouble configuring their widget, so I enhanced error reporting. Now the community wants UTF-8 support and QuickTags. Well, I will do my best to make WordPressDash UTF-8 compliant. QuickTags? Maybe not. Due to Safari’s inferior cursor position handling in textarea’s, Quicktags were actually turned off for Safari users in Wordpress 1.5. And According to another post about quicktags in safari.

..until they allow you to get and set cursor position and selection in a TEXTAREA, the Quicktags will suck on Safari.
Alex King

And for those wondering what quicktags in safari has to do with quicktags in my WordPressDash widget, dashboard widgets use the same engine as safari

I found out today that chattablogs does allow posting via xml-rpc (which is great!), but unfortunately WordPressDash cannot post to it, despite MoveableType and WordPress using the same API. 

In other development news, I’ve been working on providing support for posting to multiple categories(because that seems to be a pretty important feature request), but my code is bombing out after the first category is set.  There are only 2 reasons this would happen:

1. My code is off.  Perhaps I’m clearing some variables or not successfully iterating through the full category array.
2. Their code is off. Maybe the API will only allow 1 category to be set per post.  That would really suck…  If that is the case, I might have to get in touch with WordPress to fix this, or offer an altered xmlrpc.php file to complement the widget.

Lately I’ve been looking for a good solution for my Paniris Web Development website.  Historically I’ve been a huge advocate of home-grown solutions, and because of my programming background I always enjoyed creating the site from the ground up.  Lately though I have had the opportunity to play around with some nice open source software (WordPress, Mambo) and have realized that there is a plethora of good software packages out there.  But do they fit my needs?

I want something that’s easy to customize, scalable, and business oriented.  I’ve found WordPress to be very customizable and flexible, but lets face it… its blogging software.  And then there’s Mambo.  I’ve spent countless hours trying to navigate my way through the configuration admin and have been thouroughly disgusted with the lack of user-friendlyness.

I *wish* I could do a home-grown solution for Paniris, but I’m tired of my personal websites going stale while I work on other peoples sites. I will probably resort to using WordPress in the end (which is good news, since I just spent the last 4 hours working on a new theme).

If anyone knows of a good hyrbid solution, drop me a line! 

For all 3 of you out there who are now wondering "What happened to Kyle’s old website?", here is my official explanation. My old site was stale, and I wanted a way to keep my site current with all of my latest thoughts and activities. A blog seemed like the most obvious solution, and I decided WordPress would best suit my needs.  Besides, one of my latest programming projects has been WordPressDash, which is a blogging widget for Apple’s Tiger operating system (OS X 10.4). 

I was tired of the old site anyways.