In this post, I’ll explain how to reduce the amount of comment spam your WordPress blog receives by using an unobtrusive ‘handshake’ between the two files necessary for a valid comment submission to take place. I’ve written a few different articles on reducing comment spam by means of a challenge response test that the [...]
Defeating WordPress comment spam
Comment spam comes from humans who are paid to post it and robots/scripts that do it automatically. The majority of spam comes from the bots. There’s very little one can do to defend against a determined human being, but bots tend to behave predictably, and that allows us to develop countermeasures.
From my observations, [...]
Fixing warnings in the WordPress Sociable plugin
I’ve fixed some errors that I was experiencing with version 2.0 (dated 2007-02-02) of the Sociable WordPress plugin by Peter Harkins. Specifically, when running WordPress 2.2+, I would get the following warnings when saving changes:
Warning: implode() [function.implode]: Bad arguments. in PATH\wp-content\plugins\sociable\sociable.php on line 651
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in PATH\wp-content\plugins\sociable\sociable.php on line 762
For [...]
A plugin for adding the post date to wp_get_archives
The WordPress function wp_get_archives(’type=postbypost’) displays a lovely list of posts, but won’t show the date of each post. This plugin adds each post’s date to those ‘postbypost’ lists, like so:
Recently
07.10Completed contract projects for July 2008
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05.26A PHP script for testing a MySQL [...]
Halo 3 Service Record WordPress Plugin
This plugin allows you to add information from your Halo 3 Service Record to your WordPress blog.
The plugin displays your emblem, rank and grade, but with a little editing it could also display total the total number of games played, the date and time of the last game played, and any other information on the [...]
Apricot - A Minimalist WordPress Theme
Apricot is a text-heavy and graphic-light, widget- and tag-supporting minimalist WordPress theme built on a Kubrick foundation. Apricot validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict and uses valid CSS. It natively supports the excellent Other Posts From Cat and the_excerpt Reloaded plugins, should you want to install them.
WordPress version 2.3 introduces native support for ‘tags’, [...]
Halo 2 Stats WordPress Plugin
This plugin allows you to add an XHTML and CSS Halo 2 Stats sig to your WordPress blog, which you can then style to fit your layout. The plugin displays your emblem, your level in each of the ranked game types, and your overall rank, which is equal to the highest ranked gametype. [...]
Xbox 360 Gamercard WordPress Plugin
I’ve put together a WordPress plugin that will display a customizable XHTML and CSS Xbox 360 gamer card. There are plenty of sites out there that will make good looking gamer cards using image files, but this method will give you complete control over the appearance. It also acts like a gamer card, [...]
Wordpress comments feed in Google’s Supplemental Index
I was tired of seeing the majority of my posts’ comments feeds show up in Google’s Supplemental Index, so I changed all the individual posts’ comments RSS links to rel=”nofollow”. This should at least cause Googlebot to stop passing PageRank through those links, but what I really want is for Googlebot to stop spidering [...]
Showing a Wordpress post’s ‘last modified’ date
I’ll occasionally return to a post and revise it for improved methodology, test results or whatever. But the ‘posted on’ date always remains the same, even after the post has been updated. I feel that displaying only the ‘posted on’ date could be somewhat confusing, particularly when I state that I’ve updated the [...]
