Category: Site News

This website is very old. It’s been with me for many years. There are plenty of articles which are useful both for myself and the rest of the world. Bit by bit, word by word, link by link, image by image, this site was filled and filled over the years. Technologies changed. Some new techniques and concepts came up. Some old ones faded away. Spending as much time as I possible can (after everything else) on this site, sometimes I manage to introduce big changes – like a new bit of functionality or a totally different look. Not to confuse and scare everyone, I try to be open about the changes that were made. When something big is changed I post a description of what it was and why I felt the change was needed. These updates are published in this category.

Blog SPAM fighting. Let it start.

WordPress has excellent support for SPAM fighting. I was satisfied with the default functionality so far. The only thing I did was setting up pre-moderation of comments that match the list of words.

No SPAM comments were posted on the site since I migrated to WordPress and that says something. I can still remember the pain I had while using Nucleus CMS. At those times all comments were posted straigh away and I had to go find and delete them manually. That was very time consuming and error prone procedure that resulted in a lot of swear words and lost comments.

Anyway, with time I became confident of WordPress filtering and now I think that I am spending too much time pre-moderating comments. Most of them are very obviously SPAM and should be killed upon arrival automatically. Thus, I have used the bigger part of the list mentioned above to filter comments that should be blacklist. That is I won’t even see that the comment was posted if it matches one or more of the words.

Another problem that was annoying me recently is referer SPAM. I am checking the list of refering sites on a daily basis and all those SPAM links break my concentration. To solve this problem I installed the AutoBanReferer plugin.

With all these changes there is a chance that something will go wrong. Either I will be missing comments, or pages won’t be displayed, or I won’t be visiting back to your websites. Nothing in this list scares me as long as you can always Contact Me and let me know that you noticed something malfunctioning.

Progress with the Gallery2

I am satisfied with the process of my migration to Gallery2. Most of the things work already. Here is a brief round-up:

  • All images and albums are imported, sorted, and thumbnailed.
  • Few albums are tagged for easier searching.
  • Old style of URLs is configured and working. All old links should be fine now.
  • I have familiarized myself with Gallery2 internals a bit. Maybe even more than I intended to.

Continue reading Progress with the Gallery2

Migrating to Gallery2

I’ve decided to move all my photo albums to Gallery2. I have already started the migration, so don’t be too surprised if you can’t access some images or albums.

A whole lot of new functionality will be available after the move. Among the few are:

  • Searching for albums and images
  • RSS feeds
  • Comments

I will also try to integrate the new gallery into WordPress via WordPress Gallery2 plugin. This should provide for a unified look for all of the site as well as save some mess with user registrations and management – all your current accounts should be good enough.

I will also try to configure URL rewriting so that most of the old paths would work.

Stay tuned.

On Flickr

I really really like Flickr service, but I can’t find a good way to use it. Since I have my own server that hosts all my photographs, I don’t really need to upload anything anywhere else. My current photo albums don’t have all the functionality that I could get from Flickr – tags, search, feeds, comments – but I hope that I will migrate to some powerful album software soon enough.

Once in a while I still upload some pictures, go through galleries, and leave some comments here and there. That’s about all I do with it.

Does anyone of you uses Flickr? What’s your profile? Do you know of any way I could use Flickr together with this blog?

By the way, if you are interested, my Flickr gallery is here.

WordPress plugins revisited

Since I just upgraded my WordPress installation, I thought it would be a good time to check what’s new in the plugin area. WordPress has a lot of attention recenlty, and thus, all sorts of extensions are flourishing. Here are the plugins that I decided to try out:

  • AuthorHighlight. The number of comments on my site is slowly rising and I thought that it would be nice to highlight my own comments differnently. I still have to configure the style.
  • Archives by Year. A really small change that makes a difference. I think archives are easier to use this way. More structure is better.
  • DoFollow. All comments on this site come pre-moderated and there is no SPAM at all, so there is no good reason not to give linked sites some credit.
  • List Manager. This is one of the most useful plugins ever! I wonder how come that I never wrote it myself. It allows to manage all sorts of lists through administration interface, rather than edit posts directly. I have switched my wishlist, movies to see, and 200 things to do lists already. While switching, I’ve updated and corrected some.

I’ve also seen a number of plugins that I considered for installation or even tried, but decided to leave out for the time being. If you have nothing better to do, I suggest you check them out once in a while – things grow and expand much faster than I want to follow.