Year: 2005

Fighting spam in comments

I’ve been getting some spam in the comments recently. I must say that since the upgrade to WordPress the amount of spam I am getting has drastically decreased, but it hasn’t disappeared. Fighting spam in comments and trackbacks, it turns out, is yet another area where WordPress rules.

WordPress has some built-in mechanisms for combatting spam, as well as a number of external tools, hacks, and plugins.

For the time being, I have enabled premoderation for comments matching certain words. I have also checked all options except for ‘An administrator must approve the comment (regardless of any matches below)’, which I don’t want to do at the moment.

Let me know if new settings cause any problems.

Update: This is a quick update to let everyone know that changes helped a lot. I am getting all those comments which used to show up in my “Waiting for approval” queue. I mark them as spam and off they go. WooHoo! :)

Nick of Time

Nick of Time (1995)I’m lately very interested in the acting of Johny Depp. He’s young, but he has a whole bunch of excellent movies. I am trying to find more, so I’m renting everything I can find. “Nick of Time” was long on my list and finally I managed to see it.

Directed by: John Badham
Genres: Thriller, Drama, Crime
Cast: Johnny Depp, Courtney Chase, Charles S. Dutton, Christopher Walken, Roma Maffia, Marsha Mason, Peter Strauss, Gloria Reuben, Bill Smitrovich, G.D. Spradlin, Yul Vazquez, Edith Diaz, Armando Ortega, C.J. Bau, Cynthena Sanders
IMDB raintg: 6.2
My rating: 5.5 [rate 5.5]

Continue reading Nick of Time

Xhtml Friends Network

Xhtml Friends Network (XFN) is yet another area of the blogging world. XFN is a technology that can be used to build human relationships networks. Basically, it is an addition to XHTML standard, which allows to mark URLs with a number of relationships, such as acquaintance level, wheather you’ve met a person or not, if he is a part of your family and wheather you are working with him or not.

The URL marking is really easy, but I wouldn’t have bothered with it, unless WordPress supported it. In fact, I’ve learned about this technology from the WordPress. It supports the XFN by default and provides an excellent management interface in the links administration section.

I have therefor marked all my links in the sidebar with appropriate XFN tags and I have also submitted my site for spidering.

Happy birthday, grandpa!

Today is the 76th birthday of my grandfather (my father’s father). It’s been a while since I last saw him in 1997, but from what I hear he’s still kicking and rocking. I have only one old and lousy picture of him with my cousine. But that should change soon, because:

  1. I asked my father to find a digital camera and make a few pictures at grandpa’s birthday party. With some luck he’ll do so and send me the pictures.
  2. I promised both my grandpa and my grandma that I’ll bring Maxim one day to show him to them. Of course, that’ll require a long trip from Cyprus to Russia, so we’ll have to wait a bit until Maxim grows up and becomes strong enough. That will take about a year, but that will happen.

Anyway, happy birthday grandpa and all the best wishes from all of us. You know.

Update: I called my grandpa today and he said that my father did show up with the digital camera and he did make a few pictures. Hooray! Half of the job is done. Now all he needs to do is actually send these images to me.

Blogroll separated

My blogroll grew a bit lately and started to slow things down. I’ve decided to move it to a separate page – Blogroll. I’ll keep only a handful of links on the right tab. In case you want to see more, there is always a link to it on the sidebar, as well as in the navigation bar.

If you are wondering how I integrated the blogroll like this into WordPress, here’s how I did it:

  1. Create a separate page in WordPress admin.
  2. Update .htaccess file to properly handle permalinks for the new page.
  3. Install and activate WordPress PHP Exec plugin
  4. Export BlogLines profile via PHP Exec plugin, like so: 
    <phpcode>
<?php
   include ('http://rpc.bloglines.com/blogroll?html=1&id=leonid');
?>
</phpcode>

Note: change ‘leonid’ in the above URL to your BlogLines username.