A very nice update – not much changed from the visitor’s standpoint (basically, nothing!), but the admin bits are very nice.

This little “Quickpress” editor could have a few more features, but it’s quite a handy way to drop in a short note.

Wordpress 2.7 “Coltrane”

Wordpress 2.3 was released a few weeks ago. I was waiting for the software manager my ISP uses to offer it as an option, but that never happened… happily the manual upgrade was as simple as ever, so I ran some backups and made the move to the upgrade. I am continuously impressed and amazed by the improvements the community puts into this free software.

Thanks folks!

I’m still amazed at the effectiveness of the anti-spam security tools in place here. Akismet is the most “proud” of the lot, and rightfully so…

“Akismet has caught 2,000 spam for you since you first installed it.

You have no spam currently in the queue. Must be your lucky day. ”

The daily numbers are still way down, as compared to before the “King of Spam” was tossed in the slammer. Not a coincidence, I think.

Wordpress has added a pile of new features, and as I’ve just discovered, no longer works with a number of plugins I had been using. Part of this was expected – the better plugins are now obsolete, as Wordpress has the same functionality built in now. Some will need upgrading, and I’ll get to that soon. In the meantime, this layout will do.

Sorry for the mess!

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, maybe it’s “Bad Behavior” doing a better job lately. I don’t know, but there’s been a huge decline in comment spam filtered out by Akismet lately, and then I read this… damned good news.

‘Spam King’ Arrested and Charged – News and Analysis by PC Magazine

A top spammer known as “the Spam King” has been arrested after years of investigations.

According to news reports and anti-spam organizations, Robert Alan Soloway, which appeared on the spamhaus.org list of top spammers, was indicted by a grand jury in Seattle on charges of fraud, money laundering, and identity theft. Soloway is accused of violating the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, among others.

Since the day I gave up on Greymatter, moved to a different host, and loaded up Wordpress, I’ve been running Akismet to monitor comments and keep out the spam… today my counter is over 1000 junk emails, with no false positives and (if I recall correctly) only one spam-ish comment making it through. That rocks.

Akismet has caught 1,012 spam for you since you first installed it.

You have no spam currently in the queue. Must be your lucky day.

Thanks, Akismet!

Some of the plugin/enhancements from the older version aren’t working properly… sorry for the mess!

Akismet has caught 100 spam for you since you first installed it.

One of the best things about Wordpress is the default inclusion of Akismet to keep the spam generators from getting their hooks into the site comments. It’s only a few months since I installed WP, and Akismet has just racked up it’s 100th spam caught. Combined with Bad Behavior, I get zero spam here.

Quite nice.

Once again Cox & Forkum hit the nail on the head.

(Title of this cartoon refers to this famous quote: The first casualty when war comes is truth)

This is a hoot. Reuters photographers are photoshopping images and publishing them as news. Bloggers catch them, professional photographers out them, and this is all we get by way of an explanation?

Mideast Conflict on Yahoo! News Photos

PICTURE KILL FOR LBN20 TRANSMITTED AT APPROXIMATELY 1408GMT ON AUGUST 5, 2006. PHOTO EDITING SOFTWARE WAS IMPROPERLY USED ON THIS IMAGE. A CORRECTED VERSION WILL IMMEDIATELY FOLLOW THIS ADVISORY. PLEASE REMOVE THE IMAGE FROM YOUR SYSTEMS. WE ARE SORRY FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE. REUTERS LBN20 Smoke billows from burning buildings destroyed during an overnight Israeli air raid on Beirut’s suburbs August 5, 2006. Many buildings were flattened during the attack. REUTERS/Adnan Hajj (LEBANON) REUTERS NEWS PICTURES

It’s hard to argue that there’s no media bias when the international wire services are publishing blatantly faked work as news. It makes one wonder what “proper” use of photo editing software is in regards to the news… the ones that don’t get caught?

LGF has more.
Michelle Malkin points out this ironic Reuters official policy:

Our policy is to send news to our customers only after scrutiny by a group of production editors who ensure quality standards are maintained across all our news services. When we get something wrong, our policy is to be honest about errors and to correct them promptly and clearly.

This is more a note to myself than anything else, but it may help others as well.

YouTube videos/links are one of the hottest things going on the web today, but like so many other services, they can’t seem to be bothered to provide XHTML valid links for their “post this” data. For instance YouTube provides this to ‘embed’ a video:
Read more »

And now for something completely different…

This is the cutest new comic I’ve seen in a long time. Definitely worth bookmarking to see where they go.
Being Five

[image:160:l] A nice view of the evening sky out my back door to test the functionality of the Coppermine -> Wordpress integration plugin. This is a beta version, but so far the integration has been fairly seamless.

[image:196:r] Ok, there seems to be a problem with the insertion script… and the layout on the “write” page is nasty; however I think it may be because I’m not using the WYSIWIG editor, which I happen to detest. I think I can fix that on my own later, though. Also looks like I need to fix some CSS foibles, as that first picture appears to be overlapped with the text.

Here comes an album:

Kali

Early 2004* - 12 Jan 2009 Friend, companion, joy

25 Photos

Pusa

1 Photos

Flag Case

Sword Case

Carpet

2 Photos

Hungry

1 Photos

Political

1 Photos

 

You can click on any image (thumbnail, album, etc) to visit the gallery – I’m not really a photographer, so it’s a little sparse…

Problems:

1. Editor/plugin layout was whacked till I switched to WYSIWIG editor and back – now all is fine.
2. Image tags display as Thumbs
3. Quick buttons are not putting a : (colon) in front of the alignment tag
4. Options/Groups/Images buttons do nothing

Trying to find a way to offer feedback to the author before I go off to try one of the other (many) coppermine plugins.

New Note (20 Jul 07): Mr. Mist has improved on my and Simon’s work – his version can be found here, please give it a look!

NOTE: This post now contains the latest version alluded to in the comments – it can be copy/pasted from below, or downloaded in .ZIP format here.

Since moving to my new host and installing WordPress, I’ve spent a LOT of time looking at and installing plugins. One that I’m very happy to be using – after years of having to manually block and delete comment/trackback spam – is Bad Behavior. The one downside (or upside, depending on how informed you want to be!) is that it all works “behind the scenes”, and there is no easy way for the user to see what the program has been doing.

I came across the Bad Behavior Log Reader, and immediately downloaded a copy – but alas, it was written for an older version of BB. Fortunately for me, it was not complicated, and despite my complete lack of knowledge of MySQL and extremely limited (but growing daily!) knowledge of PHP, I was able to massage it into a form that works for the current version. I even added a little bit of functionality to make the output more user-friendly.

I left a comment on the original author’s board explaining this, and mentioned I’d post about it here in case anyone wanted to use and/or expand on my changes, so… with no further ado, here’s the code:

(Note: If you’d like my version of this reader, please use the download link (here’s another, if you missed the first).