Weblog Tools Collection

Thanks for visiting! If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. This blog posts regular Wordpress news, updates of themes, plugins, ideas, hacks, quick fixes and everything about blogging, especially about Wordpress. Go ahead, subscribe to our feed! You can also receive updates from this blog via email.

I thought that it would be useful to post my own experiences with the Three Strikes Plugin that I recently released.

Here are some preliminary numbers while the filter is learning:
Total Spam Comments in the past 5 days - 157
Total Spam Comments that got moderated by WordPress - 7
Total Spam Comments that I never saw anywhere (except my statistics logs) - 150
Total Spam Comments that showed up on the blog - 0

Since the code used by the plugin is not just my own work, I would not be tooting my own horn when I say that I am quite impressed by its performance. I am thinking of further refining the process by adding fuzzy signatures to each of the spam words and making the process of addition of spam words more seamless. For those of you that are not seeing the same kinds of results (and are facing a comment spam problem), I am willing to share my Spam Words list. But instead of publishing it, I ask you to email me with the request and I will send it to you personally.

Reblogging is the action of (re)posting information that is found on the internet (or other blogs). Almost all blogging tools can be used to maintain a reblog and there are many RSS readers and client side applications that facilitate reblogs. e.g. FeedDemon, an incredible RSS reader in its own right, allows its users to post news items from the client directly into an existing blog. Posting from FeedDemon is addictive and very easy, I know because I used to do it all the time. There are other tools such as Reblog which allows the same thing, but from a web based client. (FYI: the author of Reblog is looking for a WordPress hacker to develop a Reblog Plugin for WP). There are various other methods of reblogging content such as the “Press It” bookmarklet available inside WordPress and the “Blog This” FireFox plugin from Phil Ringnalda for Blogger blogs.

What do you use to Reblog?

Thanks to Poonam for pointing this out to me.
If you have visited my post on the “hacked” WordPress Javascript Quicktags you might be aware of a Mozilla bug that forces the page to jump to the beginning of a textarea when a tag is inserted. Alex first wrote about this bug in WordPress and fixed it and I have fixed my own version of the quicktags as well.

To remind my readers, the quicktags give you the ability to add:

• Automatic CSS dropshadows for images
• Automatic CSS dropshadows for text
• Capitalization (can be used for many purposes)
• Small size and large sized text
• Left or right floating pictures and text etc.

Download the modified WordPress Quicktags hack from here

Find more information, helpful hints and discussion on this post.

Two thumbs up is what I have to say! If you are looking to use mutliple machines to do your work and are looking for just a WONDERFUL way of performing just that, try Synergy. I am writing this post while going between two seperate computers, two seperate monitors and two seperate operating systems.

In other words, I have a connected at the hip set of machines that I can use. Good job Synergy team!! One suggestion, follow the install and setup instructions closely to save yourself any possible headaches. The install is really quite simple and painless if you know the direction you are headed.

CMS Styles: Cool site for CMS templates, themes and styles. Styles for various tools are listed including :

• b2evolution
• Blogger
• Expression Engine
• Generic
• Mambo
• Manila
• Movable Type
• Pivot
• Site
• Textpattern
• TypePad
• WordPress

I call this the “Three Strikes” Spam Prevention Plugin.

This plugin is designed to prevent comment spam from even hitting your system and leaving you with a flood of approval requests and a bunch of comments to be deleted. While dealing with some moderated comments on my system, I started to realize that most of the REAL Spam could easily be categorized as delete fodder by a “fuzzy” points system. In toying with the idea and testing the various scenarios, I have put together a plugin that keeps tracks of the “strikes” of a comment and then prevents the comment from ever getting into your database and making more work for you.

Here are the possible strikes (so far in the beta):

• Every SpamWord (default WordPress) match within the comment is a single strike
• A greater than allowed number of links inside a comment is a strike
• A match between the commenters’ IP and a SpamWord IP is a heavily weighted strike
• An empty referer field for the posted comment request is a strike

The strike system can be configured to be aggressive or moderate by a simple value change. I have it set at 3 and it seems to work well at that level. Higher numbers = more moderate spam checking (less spam gets deleted). Various users might have to play with that value to see what works for them.

Once a commenter/comment is determined to be “Struck Out”, they are redirected to (by default) the FBI site. This redirect site can be configured in the plugin as well.

The plugin can be downloaded here. Please post suggestions and bugs.

Installation is very simple. Just copy the plugin to your wp-content/plugins directory and activate through your admin interface. I suggest the use of a more moderate spam checking (SpamThreshold greater than 3) and the use of Kitten’s Spam Words for the first few days/weeks till you have some spam words filled up. The more robust your Spam words, the more effective this plugin.

[EDIT] For a method to get notified of Spam when it gets bounced, check out this comment.

[EDIT] 10/3/04 - There is a small bug in this plugin where the WordPress comment approval/delete was borked because of this plugin. To fix the problem, just download the plugin again and copy it to your plugins folder. In other words, the problem has been fixed in the download.

[EDIT] Now with Trackback checking built in.

(read comments to help make sense of this response) Or Perhaps just a moron that decided to violate the trust I had wanted to bestow upon readers. My mistake perhaps? In any case, all public postings have been shut off as of now. If you want to post to this blog, please register and send me an email telling me of your intentions.

Sorry about that.