Blogging

I would like to point my readers to the Kevin Sites Blog, a weblog done by an embedded journalist in Iraq. Kevin Sites is the person that took the recently shown footage of a US soldier killing an unarmed, wounded Iraqi and thus documenting a war crime. Kevin takes the shit in Iraq, and tells on his weblog what he experienced down there, bringing all the events we witnessed to us in a both very interesting and also quite shocking way. Oh, and FreeRepublic.com calls him a scumbag Lefty, so he must be quite OK.

One year "AK's weblog", that is 279 postings in 366 days (~ 0.76 postings per day), lots of downtimes, changing from one blog software (b2) to another one (WordPress), and (mostly) useless information that still a few people seem to be interested in.

Because there are "bots" around that aren't actually bots but real humans. They're entering obscure search strings into msn search, come to my website, and then post their spam to my comments, and enter the code from the CAPTCHA. I would never thought this could happen, but it does happen, and it's documented in my Apache logfiles.

Nevertheless, this was the first comment spam for almost 2 weeks, so CAPTCHAs do help, also when it comes to keeping off Aspies.

Yesterday, I shortly discussed a CAPTCHA system for WordPress to stop comment spammers. I also criticized that the CAPTCHA generator is not quite advanced. Well, instead of just talking I decided to improve it, and I think the result is not too bad. You can find the source for the createCodeImage routine here. It adds a gradient background and horizontal and vertical lines plus semitransparent rectangles that should pretty much mess up any OCR program's edge detection.

I solved the blog spam problem with the following trick: I simply added a [[CAPTCHA]] to the comment dialog. This was inspired by Kristian Koehntopp's Serendipity advocacy, and fortunately, there's a CAPTCHA system available for WordPress. You can find it here. It took some hacking to get it running, but now it works like a charm, and keeps comment spammers off my site.

Of course, the CAPTCHA system is not really one of the most advances ones (there could be definitely more distortions than just a fancy font and a low constrast between font and background), it is IMHO definitely enough to make it too difficult for spammers to break the CAPTCHA in order to post the spam. On the other side: probably the spammers would really break the CAPTCHA and thus solve an [[AI-complete]] problem? Then we would move on to the next, better CAPTCHA system, and probably the spammers would break it again, and so on, and the comment spammers would drive on AI research.

Michael Prokop mentions a recent increase of blog spam. Yes, I also noticed that increase, and it sucks. Fortunately, most spams keep stuck in the anti-spam filter of WordPress, but some rush through.

At least that's what Kristian Köhntopp wants us to do[DE]. He's also advertising Serendipity, a blogging tool that does all the trackbacking stuff automagically. For those who don't know how Trackback works, there's a page briefly explaining it (which is a bit MovableType-centric, but the general explanation is blogsoftware agnostic).

WordPress is really nice when it comes to coping comment spam. You can configure that postings with more than a certain number of links shall be held for moderation. I, the moderator, then can go to the overview of the pending comments, and then decide which comments shall be posted, and which shall be deleted. It even supports a bulk-edit mode, which makes deleting or approving a lot of comments at once really easy.

So, as you can see, I'm still really happy that I switched to WordPress, as it makes so many things so much easier. It's even possible to get it conforming to XHTML 1.0 and CSS without a lot of work.

Right now, I created my first WordPress plugin, wikipedia-link, that enables WordPress to support the very same style of linking Wikipedia entries like Wikipedia itself by enclosing them with \[\[ and \]\] and optionally separating the linked word from the caption using |. This is also supported for the comments, so post some comments to link to your favorite Wikipedia entries. To write \[ and \] itself, use \ to escape it.

Here it is: the WordPress CSS Style Switcher. Really neat. And for a lot of wonderful designs, have a look at the results of the WordPress CSS Style Contest.

I won't miss you! Finally, with lots of hacking, I managed to move my weblog from the obsolete b2 to WordPress. And this is how I did it:

First, I installed WordPress to /wordpress/, including the usual installation routine, including the population of the tables in the database. Then, I set the table prefix from wp_ to b2, and started wp-admin/import-b2.php. After that, I had to drop the table b2options, and rename the table wp_options to b2options by running "RENAME TABLE wp_options to b2options;". After that, I moved the old /blog/ to /blog.old/, set the weblog URL to http://synflood.at/blog in the WordPress configuration (via the WP web interface), saved that configuration, and moved /wordpress/ to /blog/. Et voila!

As I see links to del.icio.us more and more often, I also created a del.icio.us account, which you can view here. To explain del.icio.us in detail, I would like to point to an excellent article written by Tim Pritlove about del.icio.us.