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.
I’ve modified the site theme a little bit. Calendar of posts is now only displayed on the main page. Additionally, when looking at some category, the category description and the link to category RSS feed will be displayed at the same place where calendar used to be.
Categories RSS feeds were a long time TODO list entry and were requested by many people. Hopefully, they’re all happy and celebrating now.
I came across this excellent resource with a bunch of WordPress plugins. It doesn’t display very well in my Firefox, with titles being written in green over the green background, but if you can get over that, it has a lot to offer. For example, I’ve immediately downloaded and installed two plugins:
And there are a few others that I am looking at and thinking if I need them or not and if I should try them on or or not.
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! :)
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.
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:
.htaccess file to properly handle permalinks for the new page.
<phpcode>
<?php
include ('http://rpc.bloglines.com/blogroll?html=1&id=leonid');
?>
</phpcode>
Note: change ‘leonid’ in the above URL to your BlogLines username.