I’ve run this site on WordPress since 2003.  I’ve also written a couple of plugins for WordPress. So that’s why I’m interested in WordCamp.  It’s a chance for me to put some faces to names and hopefully to help others along the path to publishing using zero cost, free (as in liberty), open source software that adheres to, and promotes global open standards.

If you’re a user of WordPress, or if you’ve gone further and started to develop your own plugins, or if you’d like to start a website but don’t know where to start, or if you’re generally interested in the development of open standards or open source content management systems (and the satellite web services that support them) – WordCamp may be of interest to you.

• Date: Saturday and Sunday 19-20 July 2008
• Venue: Aston University, Birmingham
• Venue: The Studio, Birmingham

Find out more at the WordCamp UK website.

Update1: Comments recovered, the DB had become corrupt somehow, possibly an overloading issue as the trackback comments were recorded.

Update 2: I’m not sure what caused the see-saw to tip over but when rebooted the load average was starting at 1 and heading skywards through 6 before the ssh session died. This all happened after I upgraded to WP2.5 (though I’ve been on the bleeding edge builds for ages, so it’s unlikely to be related… For a while I thought it could be file permissions. Thankfully the folks at bytemark provide a VM admin shell that enabled me to reboot the machine whilst it was under siege, gaining a couple of minutes after each reboot during which I could invoke some countermeasures.

Update 3: I’ve installed Donncha’s WPSuperCache plugin which has reduced the load average down enough that the server is at least usable again, so I can do more investigation.

Update 4:Looking at my helpfully rotated log files I notice that today’s log is approximately 25x the size of a normal log. a grep of the logfile suggests that we’ve been hit with approximately 25000 trackback spam messages between 4am and 2pm … hmmm.

labs:/home/www/boakes.org/logs# grep -c "/trackback HTTP" access.log.1
24447

Update 5: I’ve also installed Mike Hampton’s Bad Behaviour and that’s helped reduce the load too…

The sooner I can get automatic htaccess level banning working again on WP2.5 the better! Today the server’s fielded fewer trackback requests, just 7000 between 4am and 11am, a mere 1000 per hour.

Update 6 (48 hours on): top is now showing a 15 minute load average of 0.15, something way better than the previous normality has been resumed. What’s particularly interesting is that Google analytics for the day shows a lower than normal page view count and the number of advert clicks was also proportionally down. This suggests that spammers do little or no automatic clicking on adverts, which will be reassuring to customers of Google Adsense!

Update 7 4 days later: After more tweaking of super cache (it seems it was only enabling the default cache due to a mod_rewrite configuration problem) the load average on top now looks like this…

top - 19:05:01 up 3 days, 20:51, 1 user, load average: 0.07, 0.00, 0.00
Tasks: 62 total, 1 running, 61 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.7%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.3%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st


That’s a fifteen minute load average of 0.00 … very low!

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!

Download it from
WordPress.org

I’ve got it working on this site already, where it’s proved faster than the previous versions – it also has a nicer user interface. There are a few minor operational features that need to be finalised, but it’s basically capable of doing what it’s supposed to.

This version has a pluggable interface, so different “litmus tests” can be applied to spam at the same time, and third parties can easily write tests without having to write a whole interface.

I’m keen to hear from people who:

• Know their way around WordPress/PHP already.
• Can take a look at the litmus test API and comment on ways to improve it.
• Suffer from very high spam loads (hundreds or thousands per day) who’ll be able to give the existing litmus tests a bit of a workout to check if their SQL is as efficient as I hope.

Development SVN is being kindly hosted by Automattic and releases will be available here.

There’s been a bit of a ramp, however:

1. Nine months ago Akismet caught it’s 100 millionth spam.
2. Sometime this week Akismet will kill spam number one billion.

Check out the stats, watch it happen live.

A virtual high-5 to everyone at Automattic. Great job guys, a great service, and the scaling has been perfectly handled.

Perhaps we should start a sweep-stake for how long it will take to hit one trillion?

Web advertising is dying. Banners, pop-ups, pop-unders, text ads and video ads; all dead horses. Their time has come and gone.

The First Web Ads

The first paid-for banner appeared in 1993, when most people still hadn’t heard of email. A global marketing phenomenon has built up around that simple concept in the intervening thirteen years as the web’s user base has continued to grow.

During that time many companies have grown rich and respected by promoting responsible and non-irritating adverts, conversely the get-rich-quick merchants have (with the same natural and misguided competitive zeal that will destroy humanity), destroyed the market by their desire to get rich quicker than the next guy by any means possible.

Blocking Ads

The result of this advertising abuse is ad-blocking software which is starting to come as standard in web browsers. Today (still), only a fraction of the planet uses the world wide web, but as new, naive web users come online they will be protected from adverts from the outset and can no longer be harangued by irresponsible advertisers in the same way that the first wave of web users were.

We, the people, with our open-source software, have made the web less annoying, but advertising and marketing are important, they promote and reward investment in the web, so blocking ads has a downside.

As of today, 50% of the visitors to this site have advert blocking software installed. That’s probably higher than average, because a lot of visitors are at least a bit tech-savvy, but it’s indicative of a significant upward trend.

It’s also getting easier to block adverts. As web standards (such as XHTML and CSS) have evolved, web pages have become described in terms of what the content is, rather than how it should be displayed, so even if an advert is not marked as such, then the advert blocker can still make a fairly good guess at which part or parts of a page are advertising.

The remaining market

So the future audience of web advertising is a sporadic, poorly defined group of people who have mis-configured ad-blocking software, that’s not a particularly lucrative or stable market for any global advertising business, and it’s certainly a difficult sell-on to the advertiser.

The alternative to web advertising

So my alternative suggestion is that a major broker buys the right to advertise to me and my counterpart web users.

I agree, as a consumer, to enter into an exclusive contract with said advertising broker and in return, they provide me with responsible, bespoke advertising wherever I visit. It’s a win-win-win-win situation.

The four wins:

1. I win because
   1. I get paid to be advertised to.
   2. Advertisers can bid on my time, they can bid on how many times I get shown their advert, or what percentage of my daily browsing is laced with their message.
   3. The ISP bandwidth that I pay for is not being wasted by an advert that I didn’t ask for
   4. The screen that I paid for isn’t being wasted by an advert that I didn’t ask for.
   5. All adverts are relevant to me, because my broker knows me.
   6. All adverts are restrained, they don’t blink at me with garish flair and I never get pop-ups or pop-unders, because my broker is considerate.
2. The broker wins because they have dedicated groups of consumers that can become the target of concerted long term advertising programmes. Problems such as click-fraud are massively reduced and they can sell larger and more integrated multiple product (i.e. lifestyle) advertising programmes to advertisers.
3. Publishers win because they can provide the page and let the broker deliver an advert that may be unrelated to page content but still relevant to the user, so the publisher gets rewarded for publishing what interests the consumer, and not for publishing articles comprising mostly buzzwords that are intended to trigger adverts.
4. Advertisers win because they can target a specific group of consumers rather than a selection of consumers who happen to visit a particular website, plus, their advert can if they wish, be shown on every page I visit.

Advert blocking and page filtering will eventually destroy the basic web-based advertising model, but advertising helps pay for innovation and site development. If the web user enters into a contract with the advertising broker, there may be an intermediate solution that benefits all parties.

I was surprised, upon installing the forum at how many people were signing up, and I wanted to be able to monitor it’s popularity, so naturally I set about porting my existing plugin with a view to keeping it usable on both WordPress and BBPress platforms.

In total it required about three small code changes, and the upshot is that the same code can now be installed on BBPress and WordPress.

The main difference is that if you’re using it on BBPress there is no nice user interface in which to set the uastring, you must do this by hand.

Instructions

1. Download this file
2. Edit line 27, changing $uastring = “UA-00000-0″; to whatever your ua string is.
3. Create a folder called “my-plugins” within your bbpress directory.
4. Save the file as “googleanalytics.php” to your my-plugins folder.

…and that’s all there is to it. Of course, it takes Google a few hours to actually show any results, so I have no idea if it’s working perfectly yet, but if you reload any forum page and scroll to the bottom of the source you can see the analytics code in place, doin’ it’s thing.

BBPress is, quite simply, just another PHP based bulletin board (BB) system which to the layman means it is the software that runs forum websites. So in a market where BB software is two-a-penny (or cheaper, given the open source nature of most good software) what’s BBPress got that made me use it?

1. A Trusted Open Source
   It’s core development is being handled by the same loose group of folks that build WordPress, which has powered this website for the last few years.
2. Minimalist Design
   Every other BB that I looked at was full of bells, whitls, frills and flourishes that I didn’t need or want – and I certainly didn’t want the hassle of mainting or disabling such irrelevancies. BBPress eschews these in favour if a lean core, everything else (just like wordpress) can be done with plugins.
3. Extensible
   Yep, I said plugins.
4. Integrable
   I mentioned WordPress already, well, it can integrate nicely with it’s user database, so if you’ve got wordpress ID’s and roles that you already manage, they can be seamlessly used by bbpress, keeping admin to a minimum.
5. No Spam
   BBPress can be protected by Akismet, the same service that already protects this site, which has now been blissfully spam free for over a year.
6. Released
   I started using it before it’s release because I knew I had a fairly safe walled garden in which to get friendly with it. Now that version 0.72 “Bix” to give it it’s full name has been released, others with more public websites may want to have a play.

If you’re wondering what it feels and looks like, you can have a go on this site. Eventually I plan to move most discussion over to the BB side of things and leave comments open for trackbacks and pingbacks only.

Comments (and comment pages) appear to be working again now, as does the handy “related articles” code, which gives pointers to likely stories of interest.

*Technically minded folk may raise an eyebrow that this is yet another tale of a twin disk RAID1 setup where both disks have visited kaputsville at the same time.

Long ago I took the decision to use the shortest URL fomat possible, which is why you see pages from “boakes.org” not “www.boakes.org” and critically, why each story isn’t hidden away in an impossible directory structure like “/this/that/here/there/” it’s just “boakes.org/postname“, simple.

Well, it should be simple, and it’s worked up until now; but something’s clashing with the category names and I can’t spot what it is. Previously, wordpress made heavy use of mod_rewrite, but that doesn’t seem to be the case any more, so it’s gone from the voodoo art of url re-writing (which is complex, but documented) to a more proprietary format, it would seem, which appears to be too cutting edge to be well documented.

This then, shall grow into a solution, once I find it, or as soon as someone offers a little wizdom. In the mean time, I’m afraid the categories are temporarily bent out of shape, so please use the search instead.

FWIW, the “custom structure” in use is “/%postname%” and the category base is “/category“.

WordPress Categories Fixed

The problem, it turns out, was to do with a redirect plugin I had forgotten I was using. I diagnosed the issue by downloading the latest version, then adding an extra header so that I could be sure it was the output from the plugin that was doing the redirect. With the plugin disabled, categories are once again working like a charm.

Originally I’d instaled the plugin to ensure the folk who requested pages using “the old system” of (for example) http://boakes.org/index.php?p=222 would get redirected to the approriate “nice” permalink of http://boakes.org/ameri-who. This also ensures that any search engines don’t get confused and think the content is duplicated.

It seems that with the upgrade to 2.0, and with my particular setup, the plugin is a bit broken. Hopefully there’ll be another bugfix along soon and it’ll all play nicely again. It may, in fact, already handle this specific case through a passthough mechanism that’s recently been added, but it’s not exactly clear yet if this is the case – time, and experimentation, will tell.

Perhaps it’s got something to do with the WordPress plugins I’ve written (AutoMeta, Analytics and MostWanted); these tend to generate a fair bit of traffic, because they are quite popular among a diverse cross section of the planet’s population. It’s also probably got something to do with the continuing popularity of the Ameri-scam articles which have somehow ended up helping many hundreds of people who’ve fallen prey to telemarketers. It’s also got something to do with my occasional posts about Google – they are surprisingly popular.

Up until last week we were sitting at around #49 (out of the 4020 listed blogs) in the BritBlog rankings, but thanks to Mark’s (who run’s BritBlogs) decision to switch to a traffic based algorithm for blog ranking we’ve hit the top-10 with some gusto.

What is popularity anyway?

I’m still not convinced that traffic is a particularly good overall measure of popularity, as I’ve previously mentioned (oh, the irony) on Mark’s BritBlog Blog. I think traffic ranking helps ensure honesty, but it’s full of caveats.

What I’m really getting at is “what is popularity anyway?”. Is it this website site that’s popular or the software that helps other people with their sites? How can the middle ground be measured when, this website, after all, is a mixture of opinion and code? I suppose that’s part of the quandary of blogging, it’s a pot-pourri.

A top-n of anything on the web is a strange thing: websites are popular with their readership because they fulfill a role, so if you don’t fit into the group of people for whom the site is useful, then there’s a very low probability that visiting any site just because it’s popular will provide you with any worthwhile content – people in general are just too diverse.

In Defense of Ranking

The real benefit to having a set of rankings is when they’re combined with other services, a – for example – a search engine that takes account of page popularity are more likely to provide relevant contemporary results.

Patriotism Follows

Notwithstanding these reservations, right now we’re delighted to be at number two in the British rankings, exporting quality British Built Code to the rest of the world, supporting the open-source movement, and generally helping folk enjoy a better internet.

Time to celebrate; I’m off to the corner shop to buy a Kazoo and a small plastic Union Flag.

Update Stages.

1. Upload new WP files. OK.
2. Update the database. OK.
3. Fix the theme if necessary (at least one sidebar fix) OK.
4. Look for breakage.
   1. Cacheing: OK
   2. Paged Comments: OK – thanks Keyvan!
   3. XHTML validity: OK
   4. Comments need re-formatting: OK
5. Fix any of my plugins that are not yet compatible.
   1. AutoMeta: OK.
      The latest version of AutoMeta works – there is (however) a bug in wordpress 2.0 which breaks it (the target release for the bugfix is 2.0.1) – in the mean you can update your functions.php to get it working.

Installation instructions

To use it:

1. If you have a previous version of the plugin, delete it.
2. Download this file
3. Rename the file googleanalytics.php and copy it to your /wp-content/plugins directory.
4. Enable it on the plugins page.
5. Enter your Google Analytics User Account string (it’ll be something like UA-12345-6. It appears when you “Add a channel”)
6. That’s it.

You don’t need to look alter the code in any way to make it run; of course you’re welcome to improve it and send me any updates for inclusion.

Features

• Zero Coding
  A zero coding install enables both the default tracking and the use of different channels for specific posts.
• Outgoing links
  Track which outgoing links your users click on – i.e. the ones that don’t traditionally register in your logs. Separate tracking streams for outbound links that are in the main article, comments, and comment author URL’s
  
• Multiple Channels
  Assign a specific channel to any article by entering the channel ID as metadata. i.e. simply type “analytics” as the metadata field name and the channel ID as the value and you can run a channel for each specific post

Requested Features

• Filtering the Sidebar
  WordPress provides hooks for filtering articles and comments, but not for filtering the sidebar and footer. Since the sidebar often includes the blogroll there are page-exit clicks that cannot be tracked. If anyoen has a clean solution to filtering the sidebar then please speak up!
• 100% Point’n'Click UI
  I’ve asked on the forums to see if there’s away to automate the retrieval of the account id, so hopefully the plugin can become a configuration free install.

Versions

A historical list of releases.

Contribute

Please neatly tuck any feedback, comments, suggestions & requests onto the forum!

The images you see associated with each story on this website are available in two formats. The first (and preferred) format is PNG. The second format is JPEG. JPEG is still good, but doesn’t include alpha transparency information.

Content Negotiation

The two formats are used so that browsers which cannot display PNG’s are instead sent JPEG’s automatically. This works because of an Apache feature called content negotiation. The idea of content negotiation is that it enables the client to tell the server what kinds of file it can use.

The assumption of this technique is that the client knows what it can and cannot display, and that the client is correct when it gives this information to the server.

In the case of Internet Explorer version 6, this is not the case. IE6 cannot display PNG’s properly.

What I want to be able to do is to have the Apache server refuse to send PNG’s to IE as part of it’s content negotiation, thus leaving JPEG’s as the only option. Such behavior, however, has eluded me; so please speak up if you know how to achieve it.

It’s also worth mentioning that although it could quite easily be done in PHP, it would mean that the pages could no longer be cached, so this is not solution.

Alternatives

If you’re viewing this site using IE6, it probably looks bad, sorry; IE6 sucks and there’s only so much time I’m able to commit to cleaning up Microsoft’s mess.

IE7 is on the way but in the mean time you might like to try an alternative. Personally I use Firefox but Opera is also very good. Both are capable of rendering content properly.

I am trialling a piece of code that should improve the overall look of the site for IE users. This is necessary because IE is now several years old and does not correctly support many of the open standards that underpin the World Wide Web; standards which this site adheres to.

If you’d like to view the site as it should be seen, why not try the free, standards compliant, Firefox browser? It takes less than five minutes to download and install, and I highly recommend it.

Incidentally, the software that I’m testing is called “IE7“, and it’s by a guy called Dean Edwards – it uses Javascript in order to both rewrite the page content and change the browser’s behaviour so that IE appears to function as the standards say it should. It’s called “IE7″ because it provides an “upgrade” from IE6 – it has nothing to do with the forthcoming version 7 of Interenet Explorer, which is in restricted beta testing at the moment.

Dean couldn’t replicate the problem so if anyone does see this happening please leave a comment below.

On my machine, when the images disappear it looks like this.