Tag: plugins

Yet another status update

I think I am done fighting with the design of the site. Currently everything seems to look just fine in Firefox, Konqueror, and Opera. The site also validates without any errors against w3c HTML and CSS validators, meaning that if you are using a standard-compliant browser, than the site should behave. Otherwise – you’re on your own. Microsoft Internet Explorer is not a standard-compliant browser, but it mostly works too. It just shows a couple of glitches here and there and I am not goingto fix them until Microsoft will fix their browser. Yes, I know, that will not happen in any near future. But enough about it.

I have also installed and activated another plugin to make finding things easier – Terong Related Links. Withthis plugin I can clearly link to related articles at the end of each post. The related articles links will only be referencing posts in this blog and not any outside resources. At least for the mean time.

If you see any misbehavior or some missing functionality, please let me know and I will fix it. Don’t take that as a promise though.

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.

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.

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.