blogging

Spam Karma rules the WordPress world

If I would have a choice to install the only one plugin for my WordPress (how glad I am that I don’t have to make this choice, by the way), I’d go with Spam Karma.

Last week I installed it to see if it was any good. It is. I needed just a couple of days to realize how big of a problem SPAM comments still were. They weren’t appearing automatically on my blog, but I was getting an email every time a new comment was submitted, and I had to mark it as SPAM in the admin interface. Of course, there is a shortcut ‘Mark all as SPAM’, but still, it required an action.

With SPAM Karma, I don’t have to do anything at all anymore. It checks all the comments and automatically marks SPAM as SPAM and aproves the good ones. I don’t get emails about each SPAM comments anymore. Rather a daily digest that tells me how many SPAM comments were caught and where I can review them, if I wish. For each approved comment I still get a notification – so that I could reply faster. And on those rare occasions when SPAM Karma can’t make up it’s mind, it sends me the request for approval.

In short, it works better than very good. It works excellent. And I didn’t even do any configuration what-so-ever (although there are plenty things to tweak). Just intalled it as it was.

With this plugin there is no need to use captchas or limit commenters to logged in only users. Great!

P.S.: I’ve also recommended this plugin to Michael Stepanov and he seems to like it too.

One million blogs

I’m sure by now everybody knows about One Million Pixels project. Interesting idea that earned the guy even more than a million dollars and that will make you go “Oh, Jez, why didn’t I think of it first?”.

The idea was so simple and effective that several projects spinned off of it. Some are simple copies. Others try to apply the same idea to something other than pixels.

One of these new projects got my attention – One Million Blogs. Instead of pixels it tries to sell one million spaces for blog links. If you have a blog, you can pay $1 and get linked to from that site. You will even get a 30×30 pixel square for your logo, or whatever else you want to place in there. Saying that they want to see one million blog links together, and not only one million dollars, adds a nice touch to the project.

In fact, I liked it so much, that I immediately sent them my $1 USD (via PayPal). Within a few hours I’ve got a reply confirming my transaction. I emailed my ugly face downsized to 30×30 pixels and this blog’s URL and got linked. I even received two personalized buttons – my number is 52 – that I can use anywhere to link back to One Million Blogs. Since I am not using buttons on my site, I’ll save them in this entry.

Check it out. While you still can find me in there…

WordPress 1.5.2 vs. WordPress 2.0 – the briefest fight ever.

For some of my recent new projects I have installed WordPress 2.0. I haven’t upgraded any of my WordPress 1.5.2 installations yet, because of all sorts of troubles that I keep hearing about. I am sure that developers are working to fix those, because, frankly speaking, using WordPress 1.5.2 after WordPress 2.0 is pretty close to painful.

And that I find really strange. I was always very happy with WordPress 1.5. It was almost as good as it gets for me. No annoyances, no bugs, clean design and interface. I wasn’t even thinking about anything better. There was no need.

But Admin area of WordPress 2.0 clearly showed me that there were some annoyances in WordPress 1.5. They just were so small that I wasn’t paying any attention to them. (if you are interested, the improvements that I care about are proper post preview, better editor, cleaner overall interface, file uploader and thumbnail builder with common sense this time) Still, it became clear that WordPress 1.5 wasn’t perfect. And who wants to use an imperfect thingy, when there is a perfect one.

I guess I’ll be upgrading this blog to WordPress 2.0 shortly. Very shortly. I just need to find a a goo time spot that would allow to do the update and iron out all incompatibilities and misbehaviours.

P.S.: While writing this entry the word “WordPress” was used 13 times.

Missing post

This is a missing post. I’ve been holding up an interesting post for you today. I was thinking it over and over again, looking for words to better express myself. And than someone interrupted me and I totally forgot what I was going to write about.

If I will remember, I will post it later. For now though, you’ll have to live with this excuse of a post o’mine.

Backposting record

Usually I blog every day. I write at least one post a day. But sometimes I am either too busy or too lazy to do so. When this happens I make either written or mental notes of a post that I want to write. Just to remember. And when I get out of my busy schedule or my lazyness, I write the actual text and backpost it (set the posting date to the day and time when I originally had the idea).

Normally, I get into my blogging mood pretty fast – one or two days, which is about five posts worth of blogging. I try to make the blogging vacations as short as possible, because it is very difficult to get back.

I was back from my blogging vacations yesterday, but I had so many posts postponed that I couldn’t bother. Today I said – “Enough!” and forced my sorry bottom to write everything down before my head would explode into tiny pieces.

Ladies and gentlemen – we have a backposting record! 15 posts were just backdated. Out of these 15 posts I had written notes of only 4. That means I had 11 posts in my head!

(the sound of standing ovations … Thank you! Thank you!)

I’ll try to never ever do it again, because it almosts hurts.