These are my links for August 25th through September 1st: The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity First essay of the late Prof Carlo Cipolla.<br /> Law1: Everyone underestimates the stupid population. <br /> Law2: Stupidity is independent of other characteristics.<br /> Law3: A stupid person causes loss to others while deriving no gain or incurring [...]

These are my links for August 6th from 05:40 to 05:45: Full Frontal – JavaScript Conference – 12th November 2010 – I recommend this. The 2009 show was very good indeed. Shifting Mind » Postalicious – Alternative to delicious auto-log-posting. Control the conent. No XMLRPC necessary.

Wow, my iPad article from 5 years back is having a bit of a friendship day, and as a result the server is having its busiest day ever.

Last year’s WordCamp UK was a huge success. Around sixty people turned up to the Birmingham gig with backgrounds as diverse as one might hope for and expect, given that WordPress is used by all kinds of people for all sorts of things: bloggers, developers, hackers, journalists, authors, academics, idealists and dreamers were all there, [...]

My colleague Barrett Abernethy has drunk from the WordPress fountain for the first time and found it to be good. He’s writing at bv2.co.uk on coding for GPUs, games consoles and (I predict) cycling.

One of the coolest future applications that was discussed at WordCamp UK last weekend is the WordPress client for the Apple iPhone. Well, it’s just arrived on the iTunes store (here), and I’m using it to write this short test article.

The very good news on the grapevine is that the first WordCamp UK has, already broken even (through sponsorship and ticket sales) with a full 10 days of ticket sales still to go. This is particularly good news since it pretty much guarantees the success of this years event, and future events. If you’ve been [...]

WordCamp is coming to the UK.  WordCamp is a weekend event where the users and developers of WordPress (i.e. members of the general public) can get together for a series of formal presentations, less formal discussions and informal refreshments. I’ve run this site on WordPress since 2003.  I’ve also written a couple of plugins for [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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?

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 [...]

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 [...]

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…

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

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.

After a long period of growth by invitation only WordPress.com has today thrown open the doors for public consumption. WordPress.com (naturally) runs on the popular WordPress personal publishing system (that this website uses), so I can heartily recommend it. Get your free, hosted WordPress ‘blog today.

This plugin will automatically generate and include HTML Meta Tags and Technorati Tags based on the full text of your post.

This is the first beta release of a WordPress plugin that can add Google Analytics to your website without you needing to code one single set of <>’s.

I’ve spoken with two new users of my MostWanted plugin during the last week, both of whom were keen on using the fixstats feature, which I’d written, but which I’d never actually linked-in to he code. So here’s a new version of MostWanted the at includes the capability to fix the stats which StatTraq doesn’t [...]

This website – like any website that allows readers to submit comments – receives comment-spam, usually advertising medicines, gambling, or other vices. I’ve been trialling a new anti-comment-spam plugin since mid September. It’s called Kismet, it’s from Automattic, (hence Akismet for short) and it’s working very well.

Two small updates to the MostWanted plugin, rolled into one release.

Like a chosen few before me, I have become the posessor of a WordPress.com golden ticket; a rather rare invitation to join wordpress.com and start a free ‘blog, on what is one of the most sought-after domains on the net. It appears that I am at liberty to pass this ticket on to one lucky [...]

A special trans-global thanks to Murky who pinged me from NZ a few moments ago after noticing that this site was spitting out SQL errors (instead of gracefully presenting pages full of useful content). The outage was caused by a large file that was taking up the temporary space that our content management database needs [...]

Hopefully I just spoiled a spammer’s whole week. How? I bought the domain that he’s trying to promote (MyNiceMailAt.com) before he did.

Yesterday I began to realize that WordPress (the software that manages the content you are reading now) might not be able to do something we need on this site: the capability to record and communicate that several people have authored an article.

I’ve just made a small update to the MostWanted plugin that solves an output validity issue.

Referral and Comment spam continues unabated, with several new domains this week, and several new machines doing the spamming. Here I present two regularly updated URl’s that list the domains and ip addresses of the machines that are hitting me, and the two scripts that generate them.

A small improvement to this site – page cacheing using WP-Cache-2.

I’m just trying out Brian’s Threaded Comments plugin which will make articles that generate a lot of response more like a forum than a guge list. Apologies if I’ve broken enything until it’s properly inserted .

If you use StatTraq and WordPress, or if you use any kind of open-source statistics package on your website, you may benefit from this. Whilst reading around the intricacies of MySQL yesterday I discovered something so blindingly obvious that I think there must be a conspiracy to not talk about it.

The server that runs this site has endured a minor injury to it’s long term storage (one of the disks, or the RAID card that the disks connect to, are kaput) – fortunately we have backups and a fairly resilient machine, so it’s serving the pages from it’s RAM cache at the moment. The bottom [...]

I spent a while chatting with StatTraq author Randy Peterman over the last few days, we’re both interested in how to remove (or hide) referral spam from site usage statistics in order that they may be a realistic and meaningful reflection of actual human visitors.

Following a disk failure last night in the DSG, I’ve lost approximately 48 hours of blog entries; so the entry titled “Wedding”, where I thanked lots of people for all their lovelyness during our wedding last week has gone the way of the Dodo.

I’ve managed to get this (wordpress based) website moved over to a permalink structure using apache rewriting – that will mean absolutely nothing to non-teccy people, but, users of my MostWanted plugin who have asked if it can work with permalinks will be pleased to know that I can now do the necessary tweaking to [...]

I was pleasently surprised this morning to discover a website that links my fellow web authors in the Portsmouth (UK) area. It doesn’t look like there’s any syndication yet, just one story per blog, but I’m sure that could be accomplished given time.

One more minor improvement to the MostWanted plugin for WordPress + StatTraq.

This is another minor improvement to the MostWanted plugin for WordPress + StatTraq.

This is a minor improvement to the MostWanted plugin for WordPress + StatTraq.

A StatTraq based “Most Popular Posts” plugin for Wordpress.

ViewCount 0.0.3 can now discern between page views and page visitors

I’ve made a small modification to the ViewCount plugin following the unexpected and very welcome interest in v0.0.1.

A wordpress plugin that adds a view counter to the metadata available with every post – requires stattraq.

i’ve coded on many systems over many years, starting on the ZX81 in 1981. it’s surprising how over the last 10 years or so, code highlighting has become the norm – i take it for for granted. times have changed since those days on the sinclair and acorn machines where blocky white capitals glared fuzzily [...]

the ability to ignore an ip address in stattraq is rather useful and i wonder if it could be extended to be a part of the main plugin. the above article describes a method whereby an ip address is hard coded into the stattraq.php file, which is not particularly flexible, or easily upgraded.

i’ve just installed the StatTraq 1.0a beta and (barring a few beta-level hiccups) it’s very nice. unlike several other stats mechanisms i’ve looked at, StatTraq was a doddle to install requiring only the uploading of files (no .htaccess fiddling), and no manual adding of filters, which is always a bonus. by the time i got [...]