What makes you happy ?

There is some good stuff not long out:

Carthik has written one that will mean only registered users can see the blog at all. The forum post is here.

Scott Hanson has an auto close comments plugin that will shut comments, so preventing Comment Spam, whenever any changes are made to the database. So basically install it, forget about it.

The SpamWords list has been updated if you use that feature to auto-moderate any suspect comments.

MooKitty has upgraded her plugin that will kill any comment spam from sources that may have hit you in the past. Kitten’s Spam Words 2.0

Planetphillip found a site if you like those little buttons which ‘adorn’ so many sites – www.gtmcknight.com/buttons. (I have to say I think they are foul creations. There’s only 2 possible ‘buttons’ you need on your site, and both of those are from the w3 validator. All the fancy buttons don’t make up for crap coding.)

Right….now I’m off to try yet again to find a map.

Ever go to the World Geoblog link over on the right ?

I wanted to play with this a while ago, then got distracted. Then last night I read an entry on the WordPress Wiki and today decided to play.
I’ve gone to all the blogs I link to, checked to see who has decided to live at map reference 0,0 (it’s fairly crowded there I can tell you!) and put everyone else into my linkmap.
It’s static right now and does not show any last feed – I’m working on that – but it’s a neat way of showing who links and where they live.

If you want to activate the Geo info in your WP blog, or otherwise use Geo data so that others could pick you up into such a map, the format that geourl.org (the site is down) uses is:
<meta name='DC.title' content="What makes you happy ?" />
<meta name='geo.position' content="52.633005;-1.234245" />
That’s my info there obviously, and it’s Lat first.
(WordPress looks after this info once you have entered the details into the Options section, so you don’t need to bother with that format above.)

One place to get your info is www.maporama.com

Anyway, here’s my LinkMap

For the Unteins plugin :)

Will this encode a < and a > correctly ?

Those blogs listed in the ‘Friends’ and ‘Reading’ list have changed order – and just so you know, here’s why. If, when you publish to your weblog, you ping weblogs.com, then that will be picked up here and your name will get to the top of the list – ordered by update they are. If you hover your mouse over a name near the top, the date and time that a blog was last updated will appear – saves you having to visit an un-updated blog (I didn’t hear someone say RSS did I ? :grin:) That plugin is 2fargon’s LinkRoll. If you don’t ping that source, then I suggest that you put this into your ‘Pinging Services’ section of your blog – http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ – as this service will ping just about everyone for you. Damn good tool – send it one ping, and it sends out several, and no, it’s not a WordPress exclusive.

If you’ve commented in the last couple of days you’ll have seen that I’ve now got Threaded Comments, and as of just now, a “Subscribe to Comments” checkbox. If your email address is valid, then when a comment is posted after yours, an email will head your way. This last plugin is courtesy of Scriptygoddess.

Why is it that you always get the worst toothache very late on a Saturday night and you’ve always run out of your preferred painkiller ?

Anyway … productivity has been good.
The tutorial page I have here on the ClrMamePro Rom Manager has just had a small update, and tomorrow (today) I’ll probably pull it apart and re-write it. It wasn’t so long ago that I actually did it, but having looked at the code, I can most certainly do it a lot better. I’ll also be able to reduce the image sizes which won’t harm.

DElyMyth has produced a comprehensive tracking script for WordPress, and it’s very good indeed. I installed it at 21:17 while chatting in #wordpress, and within 2 hours, I’d had over 120 hits or so – sounds great until you know that 83 were from googlebot.
I’d emailed google about their bots this (yesterday) morning as even by mid-morning I had had several hits, so I mailed them again, and again included enough of my stats to make my point. Looking at the ticket number on the auto-response I got, it was about 1500 more than this mornings mail.
Now I do want google – and other SE’s – to find and index pages like the cmp tutorial, the wordpress ftp and css tutorials, but I’m not hugely fussed if they index T2 or not. But there’s indexing, and there is walloping my bandwidth for no good reason.
Yes, I know I can use META tags and the like – I’m not stupid – but even so, their bots should be better behaved. They have no choice but TO behave now as the robots.txt now keeps them out of here until such time as Google reply with something constructive.
The latest email I got from the server says this:

Your site tamba2.org.uk has exceeded its
bandwidth quota in the period beginning on 2004-05-01.
Your quota is set to 1048576000 bytes ( 1000.0 MB ), and
your site has consumed 170500013 bytes ( 162.601 MB ) beyond that quota.

So I’ve used – to now – 1162meg. In 29 days. That’s 40meg a day. That’s a LOT. And I will find out where it’s all going …..

I am soooooo tempted to write something …. . . . . …. . …… but I won’t. Yet.

Photoblog is offline for next month – not that I did a lot with it anyway, and I’ll disable the Waypath as well, just to see what happens to the b/w.

And I need to do the .htaccess tutorial again – it’s asked for sometimes in the WP forums.

Ever had all your file associations screw up ? Neither had I til a few hours ago … and boy does that take some time to fix, especially when most programs I use are not made by the ubiquitous m$. Took ages, and several reboots to get things back to where they were….. sometimes I hate software.

Have all but finished installing the last of the plugins. I’d been waiting for the official release to do that here, and they worked well on my testblog. I’ll link them here probably tomorrow – after what promises to be a damn good F1 in Monaco.

And Ken Livingstone, a man who I admire for his principled stand on many issues, agrees with me. Mind you, his language was a tad restrained compared to mine ! Ken brands 4×4 drivers ‘idiotic’

Bri now has a WP blog :)
It needs to be ‘prettied up’ by her – and me – before it becomes known, but the Greymatter import went smoothly, and so far all is well, very well actually. I’d not imported into WP before.

Another plugin installed here. The ‘disemvoweller’ will, when someone comments from a specified IP, remove all the vowels from their post. It’s one of a number of plugins that the recent flood of MT emigre’s are creating for WP.

And I got DC++ through the router firewall too.

The post below was made by email, so that’s all lovely and working now.
Not that I need it, or that I need to ask the ISP to set up what’s called a ‘cron job’ (it’s a task that the server runs at times you specify – in this case to test for incoming mail to post) but it’s there should I ever feel the need.

About 9 ‘hacks’ which I had on my previous WP are now installed as plugins and I’ve also installed the latest stats plugin – click the link near the bottom of the column. It replicates some info in the column already, but it’s neat either way.

Remember the “Top 5″ things that were posted to the ng a while back ? I’ve linked that page from the index of this site now too – so it doesn’t get lost. Also made some other small changes to bits (not that you’ll notice) and gone through the folders on the server and deleted any un-needed files.

Now …. remember my ‘Angry’ forum on IAM ?
How about I create an ‘Angry Blog’ ?
I’ve set a blog up for this, you can register and post in moments and you can do this totally anonymously. In that last part lies a wee problem, but I think that with full email notifications to me of a posting / comment, and additionally having IP tracking on the site it could be kept a close eye on ..
I have yet to write a preamble – I’m waiting to see if it’s a ‘goer’ first – but basically, although we have all these sites where we can post to about this and that in our lives, if someone close to us pisses us off, we can’t really go writing that on our blog can we ? If your boss – who knows you have a blog – gives you a hard time, you can’t then slag him/her off on it can you ?
So, having a blog where you can register, then write, then publish totally anonymously could be useful for venting those feelings.
Yes, there is a risk of abuse etc, but what do you think ?

Made some small alterations to the linkage on the right. Duplicate links removed (links in cosmos mainly were being duped, so I removed the others) and the order changed. If it screws up cosmos, I’ll revert back.

Played a bit with Waypath too. One of the settings governs how strictly a match is found for your post, and I’ve set it to the middle of those settings (’normal’) to see what happens, and the text size is a wee bit larger too.
I followed a few of the links last night, and it really is a good way of following a line of random blogging. Some good reading out there ! It’s not just a WP feature either – there are plugins for MT at www.waypath.com

I would really like to alter the page too, but I’m lacking – as usual – any sort of inspiration …….