Weblog Tools Collection

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I received a ping from Anil on their newly released beta product TypePad AntiSpam while I was on vacation. I told Anil that I would look into it and write a balanced article on it when I got back. I procrastinated on writing the post for quite a while but that also gave me the chance to think about the product quite a bit, have some conversations with Anil and others about the product and ruminate on the merits, usefulness and finally the viability of the service. It came as no surprise to me that Six Apart would come up with such a product and the choices made for the product are even lesser of a surprise. I had some initial thoughts on branding and the nature of the product that I communicated to Anil privately but the rest of the review of the technology and the service is my opinion verbatim.

From the main page for TypePad AntiSpam, here are the salient features:

• Free for everyone, regardless of how many comments you receive
• Adapts to changing spam tactics
• Retains quality comments
• Already built in to the TypePad blogging service
• Plugins for Movable Type 3 & 4
• Plugins for WordPress 2.5
• Open Source
• 100% Akismet API compatible

The product is being tested by quite a few bloggers and has already received positive feedback for effectiveness from big names such as Michael Arrington of TechCrunch. But I hope that the initial successes are not short lived.

The plugin(s) and the core engine that runs the service are both Open Source (GPL v2) and though Six Apart is not sharing all of the rules and logic that run their implementation of the TypePad AntiSpam engine, they are willing to share the core engine code in order to facilitate others in developing similar services with their own sets of rules and logic. Worthy of note is the fact that the TypePad API is completely compatible with the Akismet API (which is incredibly simple to use, BTW) and any plugins that make use of the Akismet API, will be able to transparently use TypePad AntiSpam as well.

What is “Hot” about TypePad AntiSpam?

• It is Open Source: The API and the core engine being OSS provides a lot more flexibility and gives developers a lot of insight into the product. Innovations are the likely result.
• It is free: Free is always good, but can have its shortcomings.
• Simple API: Kudos for building interoperability into the service. We have a common enemy.
• Written in Perl: I am not a Perl snob but have written enough OO Perl to know the benefits. Akismet fought with language barriers and scalability for quite a while.
• Extensible: Developers can write plugins for the service that will provide added functionality, rules and logic that could make the service better and more versatile.

What is “or Not” about TypePad AntiSpam?

• The Engine is Open Source: This poses a serious set of problems for the Spam Mitigation service providers. Akismet can keep spammers guessing because a select few people know how it really works. The rules and logic are not the only secrets but the whole ball of wax is closed to prying eyes.
  It might become easier for spammers to figure out ways around the TypePad AntiSpam service and they could start tainting information to suit their purposes. OSS in this case can be a double edged sword.
• We might see in spammers posing as anti spam services just like we have anti virus and anti spyware services mushrooming over the web.
• While a well funded corporation can keep up with the scalability needs of floods of Ham Vs Spam, smaller services will find it hard to manage and still be effective. Free anti spam services can easily die under the load and reduce trust amongst users.
• Too many sites offering the same service will water down the effectiveness of the intelligent rules that depend on real spam data to target spam. Akismet, GMail and other services that rely on their users’ feedback to fine tune their Spam targets, depend on the large amount of positive and negative re-enforcement to increase their effectiveness. Though this is speculation on my part, my understanding of intelligent, knowledge based systems is the reason behind this guess.
• Though the engine is Open Source, there seems to be no plans to incorporate advances developed by end users directly into the codebase. This might change with adoption and maturity of the product but at first glance, it seems to be lacking foresight.
• Since their API is compatible with Akismet (which is a good thing), this might encourage plugin developers to try and overlap spam services in order to increase the effectiveness of their anti spam plugins. However, doubling up on spam checking will not only increase comment posting latency, it could potentially make their plugins less potent in recognizing spam.

TypePad AntiSpam is a step in the right direction. Six Apart is providing tools to fight a common enemy and is offering up the tools with the right attitude. Some of their choices are suspect in my eyes as more competition for Akismet and Automattic than in support of their real belief in community service and benevolence. Nonetheless, it is a step in the right direction and they should be applauded for their efforts. I sure hope that the weaknesses that they have built into their product does not reduce its effectiveness in the long run and they can help the blogging community reduce the scourge of Spam.

The folks over at PerfectSurf.de have published a tutorial which goes into detail on how you can create your own personal slideshow to appear on the frontpage of your WordPress powered site. This slideshow feature has been seen in numerous premium themes as of late and now you can create one for yourself via this tutorial. A slideshow is great for showcasing images within a gallery or showing off images related to top news items on your blog. The tutorial is not meant for beginners, but those of you who understand terms such as The Loop, excerpt and permalink, you should be fine.

There are some caveats to this process which are outlined in the requirements:

There are many ways of embedding slideshows to your website. This tutorial is based on a Wordpress 2.5 installation (with some files customized and of course all files updated that were critical in WP2.5 concerning security issues!). Moreover you need to BUY a plugin that was originally developed for “Joomla!”, which is an open source Content Management System (CMS). The plugin is called “frontpage slideshow version 1.6? (FPSS) and it was transformed by its creators into a so called “static version” that fits into ALL websites that are PHP-based.

After going through the tutorial, you’ll notice that you need to change the slideshow file manually in order to update the content the links within the slideshow point to. This seems like a mundane approach. I believe this can be done via custom fields but I’d like to know what other ways this effect can be accomplished without having to purchase anything and without having to manually update the slideshow?

*NOTE* Tobi of the perfectsurf website left a note in the comments regarding this post:

No need to buy the FPSS anymore. I made a new plugin out of Jason Schuller’s FCG plugin, I called it FCS (Featured Category Slideshow) You find everythin at perfectsurf.de/category/fcs (by now, take the first post)

Magnify.net has released a media search and upload tool in the form of a plugin for WordPress (and for Movable Type). The plugin requires WordPress 2.5 or above and the plugin lets the user search and embed video and images from a variety of networks into their posts. The plugin also provides the ability to shoot and publish videoblog posts using a webcam from within the WordPress and Movable Type platform and users can search and embed video from YouTube, AOL, Yahoo, BlipTV, Metacafe, DailyMotion, Clipsyndicate, Google Video, Veoh, Red Lasso, and more.

Install is relatively simple, though it involves more than just uploading one file. The plugin adds a small button to the post page and provides a search and embed interface for the various multimedia elements including a tab for webcam capture and embed. I would imagine a natural extension of this plugin in the form of enabling video comments for blogs like Seesmic and a screencast capture tool would be a very nice addition for the future. Read more reviews and opinions on the new plugin on Techmeme.

Disclosure: Weblog Tools Videos is built on the Magnify.net service

Asides from having one of the simplest looking websites on the net, Yougler is a newly launched service which aims to provide bloggers the ability to establish a professional looking profile along with other perks. Using Yougler which is pronounced (Yoo-Guh-Ler) users can create profiles that bloggers can link to for spam free contact information. One of the long standing problems that bloggers have faced is the way in which end user’s can communicate with the blog author. Usually, this would consist of typing out your email address as so ( blabla at blabla.com). Replacing @ with at was a very inexpensive way of defeating the spam bots which would scrape the content of websites looking for printed email addresses but this method creates a few caveats. The first, user’s need to manually type out your email address which is far less convenient than clicking a link. The second, the look of the email address doesn’t look very professional.

Creating A Profile

There are two types of profiles you can create. The White Pages Profile is for those who want a presence on the Internet, more or less to be found within search results. The other is the Blog or Blogger Profile which is tailored specifically for blogs or bloggers. This is the profile you would want to use if you want an easy way for your readers to contact you which I’ll explain in a minute.

For the purpose of this article, we’ll focus on the blogger profile.

After typing in your information, you’ll be greeted with a CAPTCHA image which is used to prevent automated bots from creating Yougler accounts. I’m sure those profiles would be rather interesting to see. After the CAPTCHA process is complete, Yougler sends you a confirmation email which you’ll have to confirm in order to activate your account. Once your account is activated, it’s time to download and then install the Yougler WordPress Plugin.

The WordPress Plugin

The plugin provides an easy way to provide a contact link which is attached to the top of a post and then at the bottom of the post. The link forwards people to your Yougler Profile Page where readers can get a gist as to who you are via your profile and then, send mail-forwarded mail. Providing a means of communication in this way is supposed to keep communication between the blog author and his or her readers easy while at the same time, blocking unwanted spam.

Installing the plugin:

1. Download the Yougler plugin to your desktop. Upload the entire Yougler plugin folder to your WordPress plugins directory under wp-content/plugins/.
2. Activate your plugin under the WordPress Plugins tab.
3. Click options, click Yougler, set “add signature and Yougler link at end of post to yes.” Enter whatever signature you would like to add to the end of your posts in the box provided or you may leave this blank. Click update and you are done.
4. The Yougler Plugin will now create a link to your Yougler Profile page at the end of all your posts. The link name will be your “Display name publicly as:” setting under the User’s tab in WordPress. Yougler will display the author’s name and url on each post so if a blog has multiple bloggers this should not be an issue.Your Yougler page will provide a form mail page for your readers to contact you. On your Yougler page you can also tell your readers a little about yourself or your blog. You can also add a picture (and maybe some more things in the future).

Here is a screenshot that showcases a Yougler configured plugin in WordPress. Click the image to see the full size.

After the plugin is configured, each post will contain a link to your Yougler Profile page at the end of your posts. The link name will be your “Publicly displayed as name” which is configured under the User’s tab in WordPress. Your Yougler page contains an avatar, a small bio section and a form for people to contact you. Aside from that, readers can insert their own Yougler Profile URLS in their comments so others can contact them as well without worrying about spam.

Yougler is free at the moment and it looks like it will continue to be free. The site/service is still in it’s early stages of development which is why Pete is taking comments and suggestions via his own profile link Yougler.com/pete.

Overall, I think what Yougler is doing is a novel idea. However, as far as the spam communication goes, I think the same affect could be accomplished by publishing your email address in the form of a picture that when clicked on, opens up your preferred email client. Also worthy of noting is that, if you were to browse someones About Me page on their blog and that page had a contact me button or form on that page, would there then be any reason for you to use this service?

I think the true strength of this service is for multi author blogs where the about me section is usually limited to the information about the blogging network or the domain and not the actual blogging authors.

If you happen to use this service, I’d be very interested in knowing what your experience is like. I’d also like to know how you have implemented this service into your blog/blogs.

SezWho Offers Portable Reputations : Web Worker has a thorough writeup on the SezWho service which allows commenter reputation and rating across the web. Installation is really simple with their Wordpress Plugin (also for MT). Web Worker seemed cautious about professing the success or viability of this service. However Read/WriteWeb, who is already using SezWho, was a lot more upbeat about the prospects. WeblogToolsCollection on the other hand, has been bitten hard by third party services and their scalability issues and I am going to shy away from this one for now. Sadly, it is quite hard to determine the dependability of a remotely hosted service from just their SLA and their promises, especially if their financial model is shaky.

More stats from whos.amung.us: I really liked the service when it was first started and the recent improvements just add a little more icing to the cake. Now you can view the number of simultaneous users on your site or blog in graph format for the day, month or year. There is also a neat little search feature to modify your past stats for a certain date range. You can now tweak the widget for your blog by choosing the color of the background and the text in the widget to suit the layout of your site and there are options for the size of the widget.

I chose the TechCrunch stats because they are much more interesting to monitor but as you can tell, I installed the widget on this blog on the first day I found it and unlike other tools, it is still displayed on this blog. I like it since it is unobtrusive and quite enlightening if not somewhat entertaining. The new features and the growing popularity seems to have affected performance of their statistics page a little but I am hoping that is temporary as their revenue grows and they are able to add more resources towards this project. The performance hit has had no effect on the display of the widget. [EDIT] Of course, I jinxed their server(s) and they are down at the moment with no display of the tracker.

In completely unrelated news, Wordpress 2.2.1 was released today and the upgrades include important security fixes and some bug fixes. The nicely polished upgrade is well worth it.

Web 2.0 free button maker: After the success of the Stripe Generator and the Ajax Loading Gif Generator, here is a Web 2.0 Button Maker that lets you upload your own icon and build gel buttons for your site or blog. I agree with Mashable that the script is not very Web 2.0 ish itself since you have to “Apply Changes” every time you make a change but it is fun nonetheless. I tried building a PNG with the flame logo of weblogtoolscollection.com but I was spending so much time on it, I just gave up and made something simple.

It turns out that we like “generators” on WeblogToolsCollection.com!

Technorati Competitor: Gnoos Australian Blog Search Engine Gnoos is providing a similar search engine (as Technorati) but with an Aussie influence. It is still much faster than Technorati and seems to produce sparse but spam free results. Not nearly as many features as in Technorati, but that might be a benefit rather than a disadvantage in maintaining a fast response. Also, in related news, TechCrunch is reporting that Ask/Bloglines is offering a limited blog search and they are conducting their news searches from within 7000 pre-approved blogs and news sites. This blog is not one of those being searched.

The Simple Ajax Code Kit (SACK) is a javascript library that takes the hassle out of AJAX programming.

This could be especially useful to any WordPress Plugin authors out there that don’t want to spend time messing around with code that isn’t directly to do with their plugin. Implementation is as simple as three lines of code so it makes your code look a lot neater as well.

Key features are:

• Simple and light to implement.
• Addresses security issues that toolkits such as SAJAX have.
• Handles international strings (UTF-8).

Full documentation is available at the link above, and it will soon be part of other plugins such as WordPress: Touched. Enjoy, I hope you find it very useful.

If you are using the Technorati Link Cosmos using PHP then links that this tag generates will be counted by Search engines as being valid - which they may well be. But if a spammer sets up a blog, and links to you, you will be counted as providing a valid link. You might not want that to happen.

The altered script can be grabbed here: http://www.tamba2.org.uk/downloads/cosmos.phps

It won’t remove the link and it’s not ideal as you are tarring all links with the same brush, but it will make the spammers link useless for pagerank purposes.

I bring into your attention, my new WordPress Plugin.

Previous ‘n’ Posts

This will list the previous posts as hyperlinks to their permanent link.
Go to http://wpthemes.info/posts/2004/12/07/previous-n-posts/

Check it out !