boakes.org » WordPress

Something’s broken on the database that runs this site, specifically there’s b0rkage in the comment table, and the ssh daemon is not reachable. Perhaps it’s to do with the larger than normal amount of spam that’s been arriving today (for “larger than normal” read: one metric truckload). More info later after I’ve had a poke around. Film at 11. More…

I’m in the process of rewriting the Worst Offenders plugin for the soon-to-be-released WordPress 2.5. Before I make a tested and polished version of the code globally available, I’d be interested to hear from anyone who’d like to alpha test it.

As before Worst Offenders works cooperatively with other anti-spam plugins: its primary purpose is identifying and deleting the comments that are 100% definitely spam (sent by the very worst offenders) so that any “false positives” (sent by real genuine humans) can be rescued from the spam bin! More…

It’s only 15 months since I mentioned the rocket-like acceleration of Akismet which went from a standing start to the point where it had fended off a million spam messages for its users in just 4 months. If things had continued at that pace it would have squashed a cool 5 million spams by now. More…

The plugin system on BBPress is still rather rudimentary (you create a folder called “my-plugins”) and any php that exists therein is considered to be an activated plugin. The good news here is, that (a) it works and (b) it’s so similar to the WordPress that many plugins will magically work without modification. My Google Analytics Plugin for Wordpress is (almost) one such example. More…

BBPress has been released today (try it). For quite some time now I’ve been quietly using BBPress for managing thoughts and discussions on another website. This has been possible for two reasons: firstly, the pre-release version of BBPress has been quite stable and secondly, I’ve been using it in a password protected area so it’s not been open to public use and abuse. More…

My spam counter in Akismet has been steadily rising of late, and it’s been approaching 10,000 caught spams very quickly. Yesterday it went through 9,950 and with my average of over 100 spams per day it should have gone through the 10,000 barrier by now. But instead I’ve had about 3 spams today. Did I just find an off button for spam? More…

This last few weeks the site has been very heavily hit by comment spammers hawking their usual reprobate websites and wasting internet bandwidth. Akismet has been doing a sterling job of catching this spam and not one message has made it onto the site (I wrote about Akismet’s effectiveness in the pre-launch testing previously). In the bad old days before Akismet I’d have to go through the “unmoderated comments list” in order to find the occasional real comment amidst all the spam, this is no longer necessary, which is wonderful. Comment-Spam-Nirvana has not been reached yet, however. More…

For some reason, ever since I upgraded to WordPress 2.0, the categories on this site haven’t been working. I’ve now upgraded to 2.0.1 and they’re still not happy. I had hoped that the upgrade would help… but alas… More…

Would you Adam and Eve it, we’re at number 2 in the BritBlog top 50. Cor blimey! Love a duck! More…

It’s a windy night in Portsmouth and I can’t sleep, so I’ll be updating the blog to WordPress 2.0 during the next few hours. If the theme changes, or if things break, that’s expected during the upgrade process. More…