An Aussie geek stuck in Texas

There is a new Akismet plugin for Spam Karma 2 that is currently in beta that sounds like a great idea where SK2 is still used to determine if the comment is Ham or Spam but if it needs assistance instead of sending a comment to moderation it will then check with Akismet but even if it doesn’t it will submit the comment to Akismet as either Ham or Spam to help build the central database so classifciation at Akismet can be improved over time.

Sounds great, eh? But Matt’s comment on the Akismet plugin page states that it is no good to just send comment marked as Ham or Spam back to Akismet unless they had been previously classified incorrectly by Akismet itself so that means any classifications made locally by SK2 won’t be fed back to Akismet. It is almost like Akismet is setup to become the only spam detection service available and be exclusive to other systems like SK2 and well that just doesn’t sit well with me so I’ll just keep using SK2 on it’s own as it is yet to give me any problems.

[tag]Wordpress[/tag][tag]plugin[/tag]I finally worked out that LiveSearch was barfing when the search term was 3 characters or less (probably because of some MySQL error or timeout) so I modified the Javascript used to wait for 4 characters or more before firing off the search.

I still need to tweak the CSS to fit my theme but at least it isn’t throwing ugly PHP errors now and functionally works but the search algorithm is pretty weak:

where post_content LIKE '%$item%'"

Might have to do something about that…

EDIT: ARGH! It is still borked for certain terms like “girl”, WTF? I think it is something wonky with get_permalink, maybe the posts with girl in them have some weird characters in them or something.

EDIT2: Seems like there is a bug in template-functions-links.php on line 92:

$pagestruct = $wp_rewrite->get_page_permastruct();

Commenting that out seems to fix the problem but now to find out why *scratches head*

Akismet is a new online anti-spam service that has recently been launched by Matt (the main guy behind Wordpress) to prevent spam reaching your blog through comments and trackbacks. Basically what it does is send details of the comment/trackback including it’s content to the Akismet server(s) where it is analyzed and determined to be spam or not and then a flag is sent back to your blog accordingly.

What do I think of it? Well first a disclaimer, I haven’t tried nor am I likely to. A third party service that you depend upon for commenting to work in your blog? Uhm no thanks, what happens when it is down? I know they probably have all sorts of privacy rules but really it is hard not to think that they will eventually do something with your comments like inject contextual based advertising (again their policy may state they will never do that I just haven’t read it so it is a gut feel only). Plus it isn’t free for all bloggers and requires a Wordpress.com account to use although you don’t have to actively use your wordpress.com blog.

Spam Karma 2 has been doing a wonderful job so far for me, in an early version it had a couple of false negatives but since then it has caught all spam and let everything else through without any dramas so why do I need Akismet again?

I already have an open offer out to offer Wordpress hosting for all who are interested but thought I’d add another post about it, this time specifically in case any Hurrican Katrina evacuees/refugees want to start a web log to keep friends and family infomed of what is going on or even if they just want to share their thoughts on their experience to the world.

I would prefer to limit any such hosting to Wordpress installs only but will consider any other reasonable requests so if you are interested please leave me a comment here or email me at jbainbridge@gmail.com.

Just name your price.

Yes I know there is one on ebay but I’ve managed to avoid ebay up till now and I’ not particularly interested in changing that fact!

I don’t think I have ever braved meeting up with a group of fellow geeks in such a situation before, no hang on back in the day I used to hang out with my chat buddies from Alamak (oh those were the days, weren’t they?) but I am set to do it again tomorrow at the Houston Wordpress Meetup.

So if anyone is reading this that is located near Houston then you should think about coming along!

Just in case I somehow end up getting a deluge of hits for whatever reason I have just installed the excellent WP Cache 2 plugin so my pages are smartly cached for example by posting this post it will clear the appropriate caches allowing this post to appear instantly.

If anyone notices any weirdness caused by this please let me know although I’m not expecting any problems but it could well improve performance, which would be nice.

It seems Google AdSense and sites served as application/xhtml+xml don’t get along well due to the document.write calls the Google AdSense Javascript uses so seeing as I am experimenting with adding some hopefully unobtrusive AdSense ads to select posts I have temporarily reverted to serving text/html for all browsers until I can come up with a workaround.

I haven’t personally received any cease & desist letters or anything of the sort but it seems a certain script and plugin based on it has annoyed Polaroid as it infringes on their trademark and as a precaution I have disabled the plugin in question.

However I can’t see how they have any problem with anything except for the name of it so a bit of searching and replacing should make the script/plugin squeaky clean or are they trying to actually enforce something about how the framed image looks?

http://trac.wordpress.org/changeset/2715

It is taking me a while to find my way around the internals of Wordpress but I am getting there.