Tag: blogging

Bits and pieces

New WordPress plugins appear every day or so it seems. Old ones are improving at a constant rate too. Once in a while I revisit plugin directories to see if anything worth installing or upgrading had appeared. Today I discovered a couple of new plugins that I decided to install.

  • Rate My Stuff is one of straight forward plugins that add a nice touch to the website. It allows to show those small stars when posting a rating of something. I thought since I have so many movie reviews, it would be a good idea to have the stars added to them. So I installed the plugin, resized the original images to smaller versions (15×15 pixels) and wrote a small perl script (wp-rate.pl; make sure that you have a fresh backup of the databases) to update all movie posts o’mine.
  • pluginsUsedPlugin does a very simple, but useful job. It tells everyone what plugins are installed and activated for the current WordPress installation. I have added the list of currently active plugins to the About page. The list is dynamic and thus always up to date. All plugins in the list are linked to the appropriate websites where they could be downloaded.

I’ve also found a couple of other plugins that I am planning to install, but they require some work on my behalf and so I left them for after I’ve slept.

Daily del.icio.us bookmarks

A huge list of blogging services was bookmarked today. Some of these are very well known, others are not.

Continue reading Daily del.icio.us bookmarks

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.

The teaching fun is back

I’ve always enjoyed teaching. There is something in it that makes me feel good. I don’t know what is that though. Maybe I feel the satisfaction from the process. Maybe it is easier to see the results. Maybe it’s all the communications envolved. Or maybe I like well defined goals.

Anyway, it seems that I will be enjoying whatever is that I am enjoying so much about it again. This time though it is teaching on steroids. Instead of single students, I will have a whole group of about 10 people. I will give them a 12-hour course (3 hours a week for one month) on effective data mining. It’s just a fancy title for a bunch of common knowledge though.

The course will include a brief overview of search engines, detailed coverage of Google, and a bunch of new tools and services such as RSS, Atom, blogosphere, Bloglines, Delicious, Technorati, Flickr, and stuff like that. I don’t yet have course notes or anything for that matter except for course outline, but I hope I will develop all I need during the next week and a half. The course will start from the beginning of October and I think I have plenty of time to do everything properly.

In the meantime, if you have any links that you might think I will find useful, let me know via comments.

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.