Schonhose

Recently I received some information about a new way to fight spam. Some guys from Canada really hate spam and developed a new anti-spam routine called Defensio.

This new routine is more accurate then anything known at this point (*cough*Akismet*cough*) and actually makes managing spam comments a breeze. This project is still in beta right now, but is scheduled to go live pretty soon. The last few days I’ve been working on a Pixelpost addon that uses Defensio. It wasn’t easy, we had to upgrade the look of the comments section in Pixelpost to make it work but I finally managed. And today is the day I put it to the real test.

I disabled all other anti-spam measurements on my photoblog and rely solely on Defensio (and my coding skills). Hopefully Defensio does a better job then Akismet.

Let me provide you with some stats for the last 275 days on my blog. Around 98% of all the comments where spam and these were all blocked by my defensive lines. My defensive lines consists of several things: accepting no urls in comments, using the token and the Project Honey Pot addon (PP1.7 only)

Additionally, 64% of the 2% that got through my defensive lines were also spam which I had to deleted manually. My best lines of defense are currently the Token support and the Project Honey Pot addon. But still these things will let spam through and hopefully Defensio will do a better job.

In a couple of days I’ll post my results here and in the mean time I’ll just keep my fingers crossed

Ik heb vandaag mijn blog bijgewerkt naar Wordpress 2.3. Alles draait weer lekker en stabiel. Geweldige nieuwe opties, zoals automatische meldingen wanneer er een update van een plugin aanwezig is en ingebouwde tags. Ik ben nog wat aan het spelen met de instellingen, dus wees niet verbaasd als er nog wat veranderd.

De overheid probeert het openbaar vervoer te stimuleren en hoopt hiermee de automobilist uit de auto te halen. Vanochtend moest ik vanwege mijn werk (een rant op zich) naar Amsterdam en de makkelijkste manier is dan toch de trein.

Vanochtend stond ik dan ook met een heleboel anderen als haringen in een ton gepakt in een trein naar Amsterdam. Je betaalt een bedrag van 12 euro (das 25 gulden) voor een staplek. Een staplek waarbij je achterbuurman in je nek zit te hijgen, je linkerbuurman aan het telefoneren is en de rechterbuurman de muziek zo hard heeft staan dat zelfs ik het kon horen.

En dat de hele reis lang. Het is dat parkeren in Amsterdam nog erger is, maar zo hoeft het van mij niet. Ik ben een groot voorstander van het OV, maar zorg wel dat je a) voldoende materieel hebt en b) je als machinist ook een beetje druk maakt om de veiligheid. Wanneer we een noodstop hadden moeten maken waren de gevolgen niet te overzien.

Enfin, voorlopig kan ik weer reizen zonder het OV.

As mentioned in my previous post I completely redesigned the downloads section on this site. I saw some nice examples on another blog and created a modified HTML version to achieve a similar effect. Once I was happy with both the HTML and the CSS I transfered the CSS to the stylesheet and the HTML into a post.

When I previewed the page I was shocked. The layout was totally different than what I had in mind. So I decided to check the source. It was than that I discovered something in Wordpress has changed the original code to something totally different. This was why the layout was totally off.

I first suspected the wpautop function, which auto formats your posts in Wordpress. After disabling this functionality the HTML got through as intended. However, it also left me with a lot of changes to earlier posts. I relied on the autoformat to get the job done.

Since disabling the function was not an option, I decided to dig a little deeper. It turns out that TinyMCE, the visual editor in Wordpress, is programmed to replace tags it does not recognize. Sure enough, after disabling the Visual Editor in the Users panel and enabling the wpautop function, my blog returned to a normal state.

Older posts are displayed as usual, newer posts with HTML and CSS display also as intended. Three hours gone, problem solved.

The last couple of weeks and probably the weeks to come will have a reoccurring theme: bug squashing. I’m currently looking for bugs in software at work and some open source products. Although I thrive on the bug hunt, i’ve found that sleep derivation seriously damages ones judgment.

That reminds me, I need to get a) some more sleep and b) a native speaker to spell check this post.

Edit: thanks Jay!

Edit2: I finished the rewriting of the download section. Have a look at PP addons
\m/