Schonhose

It has been a while since my last post and like always I managed to find a good excuse for not posting anything. The last month (!) I have been busy trying to solve a riddle which involved the Defensio addon. As you have probably read on this blog or somewhere else on the web, Defensio is used to protect a blog against comment spam. A few months back I was very excited about the version 2 release of the api and I modified the plugin for the photoblogging software Pixelpost for this new version.

About a month ago I noticed that huge amounts of spam were actually published in my websites. Pretty strange, considering Defensio was active to prevent this behavior. It took some long nights to discover that my hostingcompany had disabled the fsockopen functionality, something that is extensively used by Defensio. So we had to switch to Curl, although that wasn’t completely operational just yet. The guys at Defensio put in some extra hours and provided me with a working test version. After some modifications Defensio was yet again stopping spam in my photoblog.

However, I also have a WordPress blog (you’re reading it) and that also attracts tons of spam. So much in fact I updated some core files of the WP addon with the newly programmed files and a fresh copy from GitHub to enable Defensio again. To bad it didn’t work. Over 100 spam comments a day where published on my blog and had to be removed manually. It took me and Camilo from Defensio about three nights debugging to catch the offending line of code and finally the plugin (which stopped working at March 21, 2010( is fully operational again since last night.

Finally all spam is getting caught again which frees me up to do some more bug hunting in some code I wrote instead.

Much to my amazement the upgrade of WordPress 2.7 to WordPress 2.8 didn’t quite go as expected on my blog. Somehow after the upgrade all content of my posts, pages and comments on the output of my blog just disappeared into thin air.

The first thing I did was checking the database and I was relieved to see the content was actually still there. Then the debugging session began: deactivating all plugins and switching back to the default template showed no improvement. Hence, the conclusion it was not template or plugin related.

So there has to be something else happing with the core files. After some more debugging, with the help of the WordPress IRC channel, I found out which filter was responsible for the disappearance of my content, a WP filter called: convert_smilies. The obvious step to show the content again is to remove the filter in question by adding the following lines to your wp-config.php:
remove_filter('the_content', 'convert_smilies');
remove_filter('the_excerpt', 'convert_smilies');
remove_filter('comment_text', 'convert_smilies');
At least this will show the textual output again, but smilies are not translated to images. While I’m still debuging the issue I’ll continue to post my findings in this post. Read the rest of this entry »

John Godley over at UrbanGiraffe.com has released the updated DrainHole plugin, which is compatible with WordPress 2.7. This means the downloads are up again! Happy leeching everyone!

At the end of November I blogged about my idea of taking 40 of the highest rated images and turning it into a book. In the post I have described a method for selecting the highest rated images but there were some flaws in my reasoning.

So I took another approach, which is much easier. Let’s assume everyone who has visited my photoblog has voted, but (and this is it) people who didn’t vote actually voted zero stars. In other words, they didn’t found the picture worth at least 1 star. When we assume this, the selection of the images becomes easier because now we only have to select the pictures with the highest total. But to narrow the selection a bit down I have included another rule: an image must have at least 5 votes to participate. Perhaps you’re wondering why I enforce this rule? The reason is quite simple. This way I know at least 5 people found the image good enough to give a rating between 1 – 5 stars.

Furthermore, whenever there is a situation in which two or more images have the same total rating the image with the least votes will be given the highest ranking.

For those of you wondering what the SQL looks like (you do need to have the AjaxRatings addon installed and I assume the prefix of the tables is “pixelpost_“) I have it included below. As can be seen I also let the statement I used earlier (weighted ratings) in the SQL for comparison:

SELECT
`pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`img_id`, `pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`total_value`,
`pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`total_votes`,`pixelpost_pixelpost`.`headline`,
`pixelpost_pixelpost`.`body`, `pixelpost_pixelpost`.`image`,
((`total_rate`/5)*`total_votes`) as weighedRating
FROM `pixelpost_ajaxRatings`,`pixelpost_pixelpost`
WHERE `pixelpost_pixelpost`.`id` = `pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`img_id`
ORDER BY `pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`total_value` DESC, `pixelpost_ajaxRatings`.`total_votes` ASC
LIMIT 0,41


So, how does this look compared to my earlier approach? Well, the top 30 of my images stayed the same, some images shifted a bit but there were no real surprises. At the bottom of the list there were some small changes which has surprised me a bit. For instance: on number 37 (at the time of this post) was the Mosaic image I created containing the 200 images I had on my blog at that time. I’m not sure if I have a high resolution of the image lying around somewhere. In case I don’t I have chosen to omit this file.

Anyway, have a peek at the current output of the script.

It seems the Drain Hole plugin used on this blog to manage the downloads of the Pixelpost addons is not compatible with the latest version of WordPress.

The author of the plugin has been notified of the problem and is currently working on a fix. I expect to have the downloads up and running pretty soon again. In the meantime, please be patient and keep your eye on this space to see if the issues have been resolved.

Thanks to everyone who bothered to notify me of this problem and once again my sincere apologies for the inconvenience.

I have been so busy with the new Googlemap addon for Pixelpost so I completely forgot to mention some things. Therefore I decided to put them all in this post in random order:

• Yesterday we released the final 1.7 version of Pixelpost. Grab it from the Pixelpost homepage.
• You can now subscribe to comments on this blog (by popular demand).
• I found this cool site called ajaxrain.com with loads of AJAX examples for Prototype and Mootools.
• Some minor templates changes were done, none really noticeable really. But somehow they were bugging me.

Well, that is it for now. Enjoy the rest of your day.