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.

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.

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.

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?

Another change I’ve made since I first posted about this issue was to remove the comment policy plugin. Because that method relied on javascript, it wasn’t the most accessible solution. Anyone visiting the site with javascript turned off would not be able to post a comment, and when it comes to the web I feel pretty strongly about the whole accessibility thing.

I’ve had the Bad Behavior plugin installed for a week now. According to the statistics log, it has blocked 3239 access attempts in the past seven days. I highly recommend it for website owners facing the same problem.

Update: December 31, 2006

I thought I should mention that I am no longer banning by I.P. addresses. That was okay as a temporary measure, but it does have an aspect of throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. It prevents good users as well as bad ones from accessing the site.

What I have done instead is implement some .htaccess rules that (so far) have been very successful. I’m using a variation of rules I found on the WordPress site, combating comment spam. Those rules, the Bad Behavior plugin, and Akismet plugin have been a very good combination for fighting the problem.

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.

What features? Better searching in the archive, listings of posts by subject, an RSS feed (for those of you who like to read blogs through a feed aggregator), and I am also enabling comments. For now, to avoid comment spam, they won’t be posted until approved by me. We’ll see how that goes…

I’ve also given the site a more consistent navigation scheme throughout all of the pages — something should have been done when I first came up with this design.

I think I gave everything a thorough check and things are working properly. But but if you do see any weirdness going on, don’t hesitate to leave a comment and let me know.