Posts Tagged ‘Wordpress’

Reading List

Sunday, August 27th, 2006

Well, it appears that the site I was relying on for tracking my reading list, Reader2.com, is down (SQL connection error) and has been that way for several days. The programmer, it seems, last updated it over six months ago–along with all the other related sites–so it looks like it’s reached the state of abandonware. It was a great service while it lasted and I managed to load in some 90+ books, tagged, reviewed, and cross referenced so loosing it is a bit of a downer.

Regardless, it’s passing gives me the chance to pull the reading list into the site which gives me a greater degree of control and to do so I’m using Roblog’s Now Reading plugin–after some hacking of the default templates it flows decently with K2. On the left you’ll see a grouping of pending books, currently reading, and finished as well as a link to the “Library,” while at the moment is a tad sparse I’ll be filling it out over the next couple of days. Hopefully, I’ll be able to revamp the existing reading list page to reflect the information from the plugin to make the page a little more useful.

In other site news, I’ve moved onto the latest K2. I’m finding it to be a more polished experience; live search is tightly integrated and commenting flows smoother. One minor annoyance was that page template with comments was broken so I had to make a copy of the non-comments one and commenting to it. Beyond that I decided to change the background color to draw eyes to the posts rather than have them sort of bleed out into the surrounding page.

Good times.

Russian Spam Lords Clog Up The Arteries of 0.333.

Tuesday, May 30th, 2006

Trying out yet another plugin to cut down on the amount of spam. Since most of it is directed at older posts I poked around for an auto-attendent and found this quick and dirty solution. Fingers are crossed that it doesn’t destroy the database.

UPDATE: It works and now any posts older than 21 days will be auto-closed for me, including tracksbacks.

Doing Battle with the Russian Lords of Spam

Thursday, May 25th, 2006

In order to combat all the spam comments as well as fake trackbacks from countless porn and mortgage Adsense blogs I’ve decided to go back and use the Bad Behavior plugin. My first go around wasn’t entirely successful as it blocks some 50% of my meager readership–are they all really coming from porn and mortgage Adsense blogs? So rather than keep cleaning out the crap from the Akismet net and trying to massage my Awstats into something more closely approximating actual readership I’ve re-enabled the plugin. This time around though I’m making use of the white list, having tracked down the IP addresses of those people who were blocked last go around. Hopefully this will give me some peace of mind.

Ultimate Tag Warrior

Thursday, April 20th, 2006

Seeing as I cannot go more than a week or so without playing around in the guts of this site I’m trying out another plugin.  This one is to assist in tagging up my posts, hopefully to yield better Technorati results as well as give another way to view the content on the site.

UTW, as plugins go, appears to be on steroids with a million ways to Monday to tweak and configure.  I’ve only had it installed for a whole 3 hours but have managed not to kill the site so I’ll chalk that up to being a success thus far.  I’m hoping that it works out well because I would like to see tags become a sort of sub-category, sort of loose and fast.  If it works out I’ll likely carry it over to Candied Pop as I am looking for a more flexible system of tagging our posts over there.

Over the next couple of weeks the tag list should grow and then I should be able to implement one of those nifty Tag Clouds in the side bar.  All the cool people are doing it and at the end of the day don’t we all just want to be cool?  I thought so.