WordPress 2.0 has been launched, along with a complete redesign of the wordpress.org site. But the support forums are not functioning correctly, so I suggest that you hold off upgrading until things settle down a bit.
Category: grayblog.co.uk
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Christmas
Last year, my Israeli clients all seemed to make a point of sending me emails on Christmas day, as if to say "Ha! Makes no difference to us!". It’s not a tradition that I wish to see encouraged.
So, having put together our quiz for the family for tomorrow (goodness knows why we have to do this sort of thing – I’d rather eat loads of food and then sit around being bloated than have to entertain people), wrapped all the presents (there were lots – and I only had to do the ones that I’m giving to H, as she has taken care of gifts for everyone else – delegation is the name of the game), stocked up the food and fuel stockpiles in case of unexpected snowdrifts (60% chance of snow on Monday and Tuesday could render Ruralville isolated if the gritters don’t make it out to us on Bank Holidays), we’re now fully prepared for whatever the next few days throws at us.
Expect quiet here for the next few days (though you probably won’t notice much difference from normal) except for automated posting of the quiz here tomorrow (can’t do it today in case the in-laws read it). Whatever you’re celebrating, I hope you have a good time. -
Eee, cards
Notice that everyone is on their last day at work today? You can tell by the way that they are doing nothing other than sending ecards to everyone in their address book to give them something to do until the Christmas sherry is opened at lunch time (bought from the discount bin at the Co-op, no doubt). So far I’ve had five and, thankfully, only one of them was musical. Mind you, that’s two more than the number of actual cards that I’ve received and one of them wasn’t even made of card!
In other news, go over to Scaryduck and give him a well-deserved HONK. I think I might have to make some sort of New Year’s Resolution about finally getting around to doing something about upgrading my existing crop of post-name letters (from ACIM to MCIM) and adding to them (with the words "Chartered Marketer"). This will mean study and evenings in seminars, but it will be worth it – one of my competitors has the upgraded version of my letterage and I want to be seen to out-do him.
And in yet other news, I see that the WordPress 2.0 will be released on Boxing Day. I feel a festive upgrade coming on, which might resolve the issues with the non-functioning archives and the malfunctioning comments. On the other hand, it might make no difference at all. -
Akismet problems
Hmm. I’m having problems with the Akismet anti-spam plugin for WordPress. It won’t let me review comments and I know from just before it went belly-up that it was screening out Brian’s comments as spam (clearly not the case). I’ve emailed the plugin author to alert him, but no news yet.
Anyone else had the problem of not being able to review messages? I’m using Akismet 1.12 on WP1.5. When I go to the review/moderate page, I get this error message where the list of messages should be displayed:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: get_post() in /var/www/vhosts/grayblog.co.uk/httpdocs/wp-content/plugins/akismet.php on line 253
Ideas? -
About
I’ve updated the graybiography. I need to fix that CSS problem though.
That’s about as close as you’re going to get to content for the timebeing. -
Akismet update
I’m pleased with the Akismet anti-spam plugin for WordPress. So far:
- 1512 spam comments blocked
- 1 false negative
- 0 false positives
Recommended.
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Holy poop
I’ve just installed the new Akismet anti-spam plug-in for WordPress. I’m not sure that I like the way that usage is conditional upon signing up for wordpress.com and downloading and using Flock – but it looks like it works. It’s cleared out nearly 4000 spam messages from the grayblog archives at the time of installation. Since then, I’ve been upstairs and taken a bath. In that time, it has detected and quarantined more than 150 new spam messages. Yikes.
Admittedly, most of these messages would not have come to my attention previously because my use of the WordPress blacklist feature actually picked out the vast majority of spam that I was receiving, but occasionaly something was getting through, and usually in large quantities at one time. This seems promising and I’ll report if there are any major new developments as I use it.
(Another thirteen in the time it took to type this – thank goodness for the auto-delete feature, which clears out any comment in the moderation queue that is more than a fortnight old). -
New variant spam
A new and worrying variant of comment spam has hit my site this morning – just a single spam comment so far, but it was sufficiently unusual for me to look at it closely before hitting the "delete" button.
The spam itself contains the usual "I think your site is great" crap and a link, telling me to scroll half-way down for a recipe. Now, this is the sort of thing that I might do, but I usually check that the link is not to some pr0n or cas1n0 site before clicking, particularly as the link has come from a stranger (and consequently went straight to moderation for me to review).
In fact, the link is to a legitimate weblog, specifically to this post. As you can see, I’m not the only one to have experienced this.
It seems that the comment spammer is trying to pollute comment spam blacklists by getting valid websites blacklisted. This would have the obvious consequence of rendering blacklists useless and reducing the value of anti-comment spam tools and plugins. This is a worrying development.
You can read more about it at The Net Is Dead. The advice is to carefully check comments left at your site and do not blacklist legitimate sites and URIs.
Personally, I find this all immensely tiresome. I had reduced the problem of comment spam to a minor nuisance, but now I’m back to getting 50 to 100 comment spams per day. This is not why I have a website – to wage a constant war on idiots is not why grayblog is here. A more timid soul might throw in the towel in the face of all this crap. It seems that waging this war is the price I must pay for subjecting you all to my words and pictures.
Some might argue that it’s a fair deal! -
Long break
I’ve been away on holiday, hence the long pause in postings. There will be photos and details in due course.
In the meantime, this site celebrated its fifth birthday last Thursday. I know I said that I was going to organise something special, but it didn’t come to pass. So have some cake instead.
Please note: I did not say that I would provide the cake. Come on, do you expect me to do everything?! -
September 16th
September 16th will be this site’s fifth birthday, making it one of the longest-running British blogs.
Unfortunately, I shall be away from the laptop that day, so will not be able to post amazing, witty and entertaining blog-birthday anecdotes. So I’m going to open the floor to regular readers to write something on that day. I’m also hoping that, in addition to writing amazingly amusing stuff for this site on that day, they might also look under the bonnet and figure out why the archives *still* don’t work.
If you want to be in on the act, let me know by the usual means.