ijames

Interesting idea, but I’m concerned about the mandate to rewrite any message flagged as spam. If someone has a legitimate comment with a few words that score high (it’s been known to happen), will they need to consult a thesaurus before their comment can be posted? That can be very frustrating. I’d suggest an alternate path to acceptance as well, like a Captcha check (a la Spam Karma) or even a “Check this box to submit your message for moderation instead.”

I also wonder whether comment spam and e-mail spam are similar enough in content that SpamAssassin’s regexes (which are tuned for e-mail spam) are highly effective for comment spam. That’s not a protest; I honestly don’t know, and it seems like it’d be interesting to find out. The two certainly have different purposes. Has anyone ever tried gathering a corpus of comment spam that could be used for testing tools like this?

– iJames
https://www.invisiblejames.com

Oh, another minor point: the Technotags plugin is only useful if you want to link back to Technorati’s tag pages, and do it frequently. If all you want to do is have your site show up in a Technorati tag listing, that’s automatic: just use good category names, and Technorati will file your post under that tag every time you ping it. You can force a tag, too, by including a specially notated hyperlink:
https://www.technorati.com/help/tags.html

If you’re only ever going to do it once or twice, that may be more efficient than installing a plugin.

(You probably already knew this, but it took me a second to figure out what Technotags was for myself, so I thought I’d share.)

– iJames
https://www.invisiblejames.com

Looks to me like you’d just use it when writing your posts. I’m not using it, but as best I can tell, you’d just drop the file in your wp-content/plugins directory and activate it in the Options screen. Then, anything you put inside a <tag> block will automagically be converted into a Technorati link, and you can add tags to the bottom of your post as well by adding a “ttag” custom field when you write the message.

Anyway, that’s the sense I get from reading Gudlyf’s blog post about it. If it doesn’t work that way, you may want to head over to that post and ask the author.

– iJames
https://www.invisiblejames.com

Try adding this one to what you’ve already got:
RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})/?([0-9]{1,2})?/?([0-9]{1,2})?/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?([0-9]+)?/?$ /index.php?year=$1&monthnum=$2&name=$4&page=$5 [QSA]

(All you’re doing here is including a regex for the day field, but then ignoring it and going straight to $4 for the name. Functionally equivalent to *not* having it and using $3 for the name.)

– iJames
https://www.invisiblejames.com

Yeah, I didn’t think your name was Polo, that was a joke.

The .htaccess file sits in your blog directory and tells the Web server how to handle requests. You can Google to find out more about it. If you’ve set up permalinks on your blog (under “Options”) it’ll tell you what to put in that file. What I’m saying is, paste in exactly what the permalinks screen tells you to paste in, but also add <b>&order=ASC</b> to the end of each line that references <b>index.php</b>.

Does that make sense? If you aren’t familiar with PHP, then fixing the dates in the sidebar listing may be a bit advanced. I’d advise it’s probably not something to worry about until and unless WordPress supports an order parameter on that function.

Good luck!

– iJames
https://www.invisiblejames.com

Looks like it works, too. Isn’t it nice when stuff is easy?

There’s still a lot you can do — you could include an archives listing or a search box in the sidebar, for instance — just paste the appropriate sections from the rest of the index.php file. I’m sure if you still want to pay someone for advanced work, you can find some very qualified people (not me!) but it looks like you might have what you were looking for.

– iJames
https://www.invisiblejames.com

Hey, what do you know, that worked. (I strongly advise documenting that in the ‘create account’ special page, BTW. No telling how many other people may have been turned away by this.) Anyway, as promised, I’ll drop some stuff in there tonight.

Back to the original subject: Podz or Macmanx, has that list been put in the old WordPress wiki? If not, it could be a good idea, since the Codex still isn’t linked from the main WordPress pages but the Wiki is. I could add it too, but it makes sense that you should get the credit.

I do contribute to Wikipedia. (Albeit not under this pseudonym.)

As for the Codex, I’d like to contribute, but when I tried to create an account last week I got “You have not specified a valid username.” I just tried it again now and it still doesn’t work.

The username I’m trying to create is “iJames”. I’ve tried others and get the same error. Fix this bug or give me a workaround, and I promise you I’ll add at least three tips to the Codex within 24 hours, including my ascending archives list and some useful stuff about Stattraq.

–

Podz:
<I>There are a few Codex editors who have, for want of a better term, a solid view of the ‘big picture’ and pages are being moved and consolidated in order that this goal be achieved.</I>

At the risk of sounding like a troublemaker, and the certainty of a topic shift: if your “vision” of the Codex isn’t in keeping with the philosophy of a wiki, in which structure emerges from open expression, why are you using wiki software for it? And why are you granting mere mortals access to tamper with it at all?

Content: Okay, cool, it’s a personal blog. You write in complete sentences and you haven’t posted any awful poetry yet, so it’s probably a better personal blog than average. >8-> I’d consider a more distinctive name, though. “World Wide Web blog” is kind of like having a license plate that says “CAR”.

Design: Needs flavor. You don’t need to go overboard, but add some background or some color or something. Kubrick may be wonderfully elegant on the inside, but the untouched Kubrick is the most boring look out there. (Even worse than the awful WordPress default.)

Good luck with it!

– iJames
https://www.invisiblejames.com

Why should this be an official feature? I thought the philosophy of WordPress was to keep things lean and offer a rich set of plugins.

I’m astounded that no one yet has mentioned the WP-Stattraq plugin. It does everything people are talking about here and more.

– iJames
https://www.invisiblejames.com

Glad the problem was fixed, but in case anyone else encounters this, I’d like to offer a tip to check the timestamps on any other comments posted by that IP address. I inserted a bunch of comments manually after moving my site from Blogspot (importing turned out to be too much of a pain), and I altered the timestamps on all of them. I messed one up and set the date to December 2005 instead of 2004, and then I got that “Slow down, cowboy” error. Took me twenty minutes to figure out what was up.

– iJames
https://www.invisiblejames.com

Marko: (Polo?)
I’d really like to know how you got the archives to run in ascending order.

That was actually two separate problems. Making the archives themselves run in order was pretty easy — I set up my permalinks in the options, added the proper rules to .htaccess, then edited .htaccess again and added “&order=ASC” to the calls on index.php.

Making the months listing in the sidebar run forward was actually harder. There’s no order parameter to the get_archives function, so I had to find the function code in wp-include and alter the ORDER BY clause in the SQL statement itself. That was annoying. Perhaps I’ll add the parameter myself and submit it to WP as a patch. I haven’t contributed to a lot of open source software before, so we’ll see how hard that process is.

Actually, what I’d really like to know is if it is possible to have just one category running in ascending order, with others descending.

I’m sure you can. The easiest way I can think of is to add a RewriteRule to .htaccess that includes the category name in its pattern, and add the &order=ASC only to that rule. It’s kind of a kludge, but you wouldn’t have to mess around in any WordPress code.

“BTW, narchives is not a plugin. :)”

Yeah, okay, it’s a file. But is there a reason it couldn’t be a plugin? Seems like a good idea to me. >8->

I’m with Dreamhost as well. They have some quirky approaches to things, they’re not quite state-of-the-art, and I’d personally call their service “adequate” instead of stellar, but they are very well-established and you get a lot for your money. They’ve also got a one-click WordPress installation that’s quite handy for getting started.

If you sign up with them, try putting in 777 as a promotion code and see if their “year for $0.77/month” promotion is still valid. I used it and I’m getting 120GB bandwidth and 2.4GB disk space (they tripled it on all their current customers too) for roughly $4.35 a month for two years. If this was a brand-new hosting service I wouldn’t even trust an offer like that, but these guys have been around since 1997 so I don’t expect then to go away any time soon. For that price I can put up with having to wait a few days to get GD Freetype libraries fixed in their PHP binary.