A Bloy and his Blog

Earlier this week I upgraded this website to version 2.3 of WordPress.

A great new feature that comes with the new version is native support for tagging (a very flexible system that lets me assign “tags” to each entry). I spent the last couple of days assigning tags to each and every one of my posts. To work with and manage the tags, I’m using the very nice Advanced Tag Entry Plugin. I also set up a tag cloud on the archive page.

As long as I was updating that archive page, another addition I made was a link that will let you browse chronologically through all of the posts. Something that wasn’t available before.

I just upgraded to version 2.2 of WordPress (actually 2.2.1), and there are a few display problems going on with some of the pages. Hopefully I’ll have it fixed soon.

Update: Problem solved. For those of you interested in the geeky details…

The new version of WordPress didn’t like the spacing in between the object elements I’m using to insert Flash files. I had carriage returns after the opening object tag, and the param tags. For some reason, WordPress inserts paragraph tags after those single carriage returns. That in turn would take those elements out of their containing DIVs, and mess up the layout. Once I eliminated those carriage returns, things were fine.

This website has had basically the same design since I bought the domain name (way back in 2000). It is definitely time for a fresh look. I’ve named the new design “Color Bar” and I plan on changing the photograph in the heading occasionally (and perhaps some of the site colors too).

With the new design, the list of my current musical recommendations has been moved from its own page to the home page. Any web geeks out there may be interested to know that the entire site is now managed through WordPress (not just the blog entries). Those static html pages are so twentieth century…

So the previous design isn’t lost to the ages, I have archived a sample of it on a separate page. If you get nostalgic for the old Shield Swoop Design, feel free to go there and reminisce.

Update:
I discovered a few minor issues with how the Internet Explorer 6 was displaying the new design, which have been fixed. See any other problems? Just let me know.

For those of you interested in this stuff…

The raging river of comment spam has slowed to a trickle for me. I have started banning I.P. ranges of the largest offenders, which has helped a LOT. A majority of these are from Asian countries. Not surprising when it’s been reported that a great deal of spam (email and otherwise) comes from internet service providers in that area. Looking at my logs, it’s also interesting that a few are coming from scattered ISPs here in the States. No doubt these are zombie computers, infected with software that is sending out comment and email spams. Is your anti-virus software up-to-date?

read the rest of: Comment spam update

Starting about a week ago, I’ve been getting over 1000 spam comments on this web site per day. Yes, that is not a typo, I said over one-thousand. The spambots are certainly busy during the holidays, aren’t they?

While the vast majority of these comments have been caught by the anti-spam plugin that comes with WordPress, I’d like to stop them before they are submitted. So, I’m trying a couple of other plugins: Bad Behavior and Comment Policy. The first one blocks spambots by analyzing their requests and comparing them to known offenders, and the second forces you to agree to this site’s comment policy before your comment can be posted (which because of the way it is set up, spambots should not be smart enough to check the box properly).

As always, let me know if you have any problems.

I’ve just completed a major overhaul of this website and am now running WordPress as my blogging software. While the design of the site may not look a whole lot different, the change to WordPress brings a lot more flexibility for me and more features for you.

read the rest of: Now using WordPress