Month: January 2008

WordPress comment-related plugins

I went through a few comment-related plugins in the WordPress plugin directory.  It’s amazing how much cool stuff is written and uploaded over there.  Here are just a few to give you an idea of what you can find and install on your blog:

  • WP AJAX Edit Comments – this plugin can be used to allow people, who comment on your blog to edit their comments.  They don’t even have to be logged in, and they will still be able to edit their own comments for a period of time.  Also, this plugin provides some nice functionality for blog administrators and moderators, who can approve, delete, or mark comments as SPAM from the post at the blog, rather than from the email message or blog administration interface.  I have installed this plugin, and you, my dear visitors, should be able to fix your own typos now.  Let me know if it doesn’t work for you.
  •  CommentLuv – this plugins helps blog owners to give back some love to those who comment on their blogs. When a person leaves a comment on your blog, CommentLuv plugin navigates to this person’s web site (the one that was mentioned in the comment form), looks for an RSS feed of that site, and, if it finds the feed, gets the latest post from it.  It then appends a link to that latest post to the person’s comment. I tried this plugin and it works very well.  However, I decided to not use it here just yet – not because of the plugin quality, but because of the general way I see discussions here.  I’ll probably use this plugin on one of my other blogs.
  • Ajax Comment Posting – this plugin makes comment posting a little bit faster.  It avoids the page reload for when the comment is posted.  I’ve installed this plugin on this blog, but somehow I still don’t see it working.  If you notice that it works or, on the contrary, it breaks something for me, please let me know.
  • Delink Comment Author – this plugin helps in those cases, when someone posts a nice comment to your blog, that you want to approve, but don’t for the link that author of the comment used as their web site. With this plugin, you can remove the link to the comment author’s web site via comment administration of your blog.  I have installed this plugin too, and it seems to work exactly as advertised.

And now is a really good time to see if the comments on this blog still work for you.  I’ve tried to test things out and make sure that everything is OK, but to be on the safe side – you should too.  Please, leave a comment to this post and let me know if it works or if something is broken.  If comments don’t work at all for some reason, please drop me a line using any other way.

Google AdSense blocks are back

It was almost half a year ago that I wrote these words:

Google AdSense is gone.  I’ve been planning to do this for a long time but never got down to it.  I don’t want to have any ads on my personal blog anymore.  And, it wasn’t making me that much anyway.

As a tribute to my inconsistency and greed, I wanted to let you know that Google AdSense blocks are back.  Currently you can see one in full post view, between the post content and the comments.  Another two are in the sidebar.  I’m still playing around with the ad types, sizes, colors, and locations, so don’t be too disappointment if they annoy you right now.

Why are the ads back?  What happened?  Well, first of all, I accidentally wrote a couple of very popular posts.   I wanted to see how well these posts can do financially.   Secondly, with the latest theme changes and a round of plugin shakes, there seems to be more activity on the blog (more people are coming in, they are standing for longer, and they do more – read, comment, bookmark, etc).  I started wondering if it’s possible to get a penny out of all you people.  So, you can say that this AdSense comeback is an experiment on my side, with some hopes of earing an extra cent.

Of course, I can be totally wrong and off the track (which happens pretty often, if you need to know), and all the positive activity that I’m seeing around here is fueled by the lack of ads.  If it is indeed so, not only will I earn any money with the ads, but I’ll also lose some of the audience (something I’d much rather not happen).

Anyway, call me what you want, but the ads are back. At least for now.  If they are too annoying for you, all I can suggest is start using Firefox browser with AdBlock Plus and AdBlock Filterset.G Updater add-ons.  You won’t see another web ad in your life…

#cyprus IRC channel on UnderNet

Somehow I ended up connecting to the Undernet IRC network today and joining #cyprus channel.  Last time I did it was a good 10 years ago.  Maybe even more.  Back then IRC was a huge thing in Cyprus and all Internet clubs were full of kids chatting for hours.  I remember, it was so packed, that I had to buy a club membership to get some priority in queue for my HTML hacking.  And, of course, I did IRC too.  What was happening back than on #cyprus channel?  It was exactly as it is now.  Here is a screenshot for you (I won’t go as far as posting a log of this noise).

#cyprus@undernet

What is different about it now?  Well, it looks like they use a tiny bit less of colors.  And they have their own web site now.

Me? I’m living on the FreeNode these days.  That’s where most of the open source fun is happening (#fedora, #wordpress, #perl, #php, and others).

Legal and educational systems are lagging behind technology

I’ve mentioned this many times before and, I guess, I’ll need to mention this ever more – the technological progress of the recent years (the digital world, yes) has left many systems of our society behind.  Educational and legal are the most noticeable.   Here are a few words in the insightful and funny video (originally from the Ted.com – a place of many more insightful videos).  Here is a quote from a recent Boing Boing post showing the state of the legal system:

… pictures of Ford cars cannot be printed. Not just Ford logos, not just Mustang logos, the car -as a whole- is a Ford trademark and its image can’t be reproduced without permission.

Memories : beGucho

Yesterday I came across a bunch of my old files. Some things dated back to one of my first jobs in 1999. Others were slightly more recent, but almost forgotten about. One of these recent collections of files was the beGucho project. I did it with a few friends of mine (Michael, Slava, and Igor – the guy who helped me with the theme of this blog), but somewhere on the way we got lost and the project faded out. It was actually released back in June 2006 (I blogged it) and survived for a month or two. Here is a screenshot of how it looked like (slightly resized):

beGucho screenshot

The idea was basically to have a mood-o-meter of the web in a sort of Twitter style. (We haven’t heard of Twitter back then). People would just come in and share their mood with the rest of the world. There were two short comment forms – one for bad mood and another one for good mood. Scales with a huge arrow at the top of the page were indicating the current mood of the web. History of all moods was available in archives and via RSS feeds. The whole thing was written in Embperl and was lightning fast and extremely simple.

But as I said, the project didn’t take off and was taken off the web without anybody actually noticing it. Still, we had a lot of fun building this thing, and I’ve learned a thing or two about team working and user interface design.