Tag Archives: WordPress

WordPress 2.5 – The Best WP Yet

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For my money, WordPress 2.5 is the best WP version yet. [Yes, one hopes that software would get better as it matures; this is not, of course, always the case.] A lot of the things that can be automated have been, and the UI has been thoughtfully re-designed. As always, there are some small things that bug me, but I’m gonna see if those complaints hold up over time.

I’m hoping that having a new toy to play with is going to cause me to write more. I’m about ready to write about some of the things I haven’t been writing about lately, but I guess I need to hold off a bit more. Anyway… thanks to the WP guys. [And yes, I waited to post this until all the WP installs that I control on the box were upgraded. I think the count's now about 85. Yeesh.]

Tags, No Nested Categories, and Imports

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A few things have been going on behind the scenes:

  1. I’ve been categorizing the As-Yet Unfiled Entries over the last month. I’ll finish next week. I finally made it happen by just putting a recurring task in Tasks Pro to do 15 a day. I started with 450+ and am now down to 90. 29 Jan: DONE! :D
  2. I killed the nested categories today. Took a lot of SQL to map nested categories back to their parents, then create tags with WP’s category-to-tag converter. Sucked having to do that by hand, though. One would think that the category-to-tag importer would have an option for doing just that in the conversion; most people that had nested categories, like me, would probably go to the device of parent category as category, child categories as tags. Meh.
  3. I’ve been moving some stuff over from GFMorris.com. That took more SQL-fu, but I finally had an a-ha moment with joins today. I mean, I generated a working join on my own. It was a nice moment to understand WTF the syntax was doing for once.

Been a good thing to occupy time during conference calls today…

Splogs, Spam Karma 2, and the Pingback Bonus

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Lately, I’ve been seeing the same thing Alex has—comment spammers using pingbacks from splogs to evade most comment spam mechanisms. In particular, I’ve been getting a lot of spam from the maxblog.eu domain; tonight, I explicitly blacklisted this domain all over rmfo-blogs. Looks like Spam Karma 2 [at 2.3, anyway] sees the positive pingback, adds the +4 Pingback Bonus, and is happy from there. [I can't tell whether it ignores the blacklist at +4 or not; I thought it was, and then I checked the last maxblog.eu spam I just deleted, and it was prior to my explicit domain blacklisting.] Of course, I’m not happy with the spam, but hey … I can delete it pretty quickly. But like Alex noted, it’s a pain, and hey … isn’t that why I grabbed SK2 in the first place?

Let me address two potential objections before they arise: yes, I’ve contacted Dave about this [but admittedly just before writing this post, so he hasn't had any time to respond], and no, I don’t like running Akismet, even though I get how it’s designed to leverage network effects and all that. Man, I just don’t like depending on centralized stuff, and yes, I know that comments get processed on failure. I’ve thought about running Akismet and SK2 as a belt-and-suspenders approach, but honestly, SK2 does such a damn fine job 99% of the time that I don’t feel the need.

I guess the comment spammers weren’t content to ruin trackbacks only, eh?