Digmann.com

If you read many of the comments coming into this site, you have noticed there is a bit of spam sneaking through. I apologize first off. Secondly, I am trying to do something about it.

Ideally, Akismet would never have false positives or false negatives, but that just isn’t very likely, especially when my friends host their sites on wacky domains *cough* Brandon *cough*.

The next hope is to make sure nothing ‘ugly’ or ‘hardcore’ gets through as well as no ham being marked as spam.

Enter moderation. Today I started another step in moderating the spam on this site. Before I let Akismet deal with whether a comment should be: ham, moderated, or spam. All commenters must have a comment previously marked as ham to be automatically approved as ham, otherwise they will be moderated.

FYI this can be done by going to Options -> Discussion -> Comment author must have a previously approved comment.

I would also like to see the opposite situation be an option here. If a commenter has been approved before, any comments thought to be spam should then be moderated.

So how about we do some testing folks? Place comments below.

Jeff emailed me today and asked why his name on the Heaviest Commenters list (on the side bar) did not link to his site even though he had added his website URI when commenting. As far as I can tell, if any of your comments do not provide a URI then it assumes none of them do - thus not giving a link. This is not how I would have made the plugin, but I didn’t make it, Nate did. Thank you Nate for the plugin.

I also updated Jeff’s current comments for him, so that this will now link. If anybody else would like me to do the same, just ask.

You may also be wondering why this is only my fifth post of the month. To be honest I have not done anything lately which is exciting enough to write about and unless I fill my post with uninteresting tidbits, there is nothing to really write about. This is not to say I have been watching paint dry. A possible post I may have written yesterday could have been:

I went hiking today. It rained. I got soaked. The End.

See not exactly exciting. (I realize the exaggeration). I am going to work on writing more about what goes on in my life and my opinions of the world in the coming weeks. Five posts a month does not cut it.

I thought I would put together a list of the plugins for Wordpress which I use on this site to make it more happy.

• Akismet - a check to make sure spam comments do not get though to the site. I have not had any slip through yet.
• Contact Form ][ - exactly what it says. Mine is here. One thing that annoyed me was that the text was originally on the left of the text fields statically. I had to physically modify the file to fix this. It would be nice if in the future this was an option.
• DoFollow - by default WP puts a no-follow attribute on the URI links for a comment. This will mean the search engines will not register these links as my site linking to the commenter’s. To thank a commenter for commenting, this plugin will remove said attribute after a specified time (10 days for this site). Thanks for the comments.
• Feedburner Feed Replacement - WP has many avenues for how one can subscribe to an RSS Feed. This can be very annoying for anybody who is using Feedburner to track its subscribers. This not only brings those together but also connects them all to Feedburner.
• Related Posts (plus 404) - generates a few related posts to the current post and places links on the pages you set it on.
• WP-Cache - adds caching to posts to lower DDoS attack potential.

Those are the ones I am currently using, but there are a few out there which I would also like to add.

• Integrated photo album without third party site - there are a few plugins to link your Flickr or Gallery accounts to be skinned into your WP site. I do not like this idea for my site. I would like one that only uses my site and WP software. Yellow SwordFish has a plugin which is quite similar to what I am looking for. The thing is that the back end, administration side is designed for somebody who knows how WP works. This is not the ideal design for a photo album CMS. I am looking for a add, edit, update type of system with multi-user support. I might write my own.
• Family Tree - I have not found a genealogy plugin which does not use third party software either.

One of the guys I went to school with, Ray, has created a post about how Wordpress performs poorly requiring sites to install extra ‘patches’ to fix it.

I thought it would be fun to play devil’s advocate on this one just for kicks…

One of the major goals of WP - software which helps running a blog easier for my site including this one - is to have as small of a hhd impression as possible. Of the blogging community there are sites that get a ton of traffic and there are the rest of us (> 95% of all blogs). Those in the 95% area are typically not writing about pertinent enough information to get dugg, slashdotted, de.lico.used, ProBlogged, Blog Herolded, etc. Most of these blogs are not trying to become more than a ‘I had toast for breakfast’ blog either. Of the small amount of sites who are not heavily traveled but are trying to get there, they would have the where with all to know they may need to worry about high traffic numbers in the future and adopt accordingly. For the rest of the world - the ‘toast’ sites - adding some addition code to assist in huge traffic amounts would be not only over kill for these sites (the majority of blogs) but also against the goals of WP.

With all that said, I have plans to add the WP-Cache plugin to my site.

Happy blogging.

I added a few sidebar links which are worth mentioning.  Before I start, if you have been reading this site for a while now (since before this year), you might have noticed that I typically write about every update - even the stupid ones.  Well that will change.  There will only be posts for significant update (either large or important material).

This post falls into the latter.  I have added five links to the sidebar, and they are (ordered top to bottom):

 LinkedIn: A link to my LinkedIn profile.  If you do not know what LinkedIn is try this Wikipedia article.  Basically though, it is a social networking for professional.  It could be argued that it is useless, but I would argue that you will get out of it what you put into it.  If, for example, you want to get in touch with, say, an investment banker in Kansas, you could pile through your network and your network’s network until you find one.  Either way, give it a try and connect with me.

My iCal: My calendar, in a nice viewable state.  So, if you ever want to know where I am at any give time (minus physical location), check it out.  It is quite helpful for scheduling meetings.

My Vita: My Vita, My Resume, My Work. Whatever you would like to call it, the electronic version is here.

Technorita: The importance of this site is a bit arguable.   The nature of this site is to be a blog search engine (even though all search engines search blogs anyway).  I wanted to add a link here though to thank anybody who links to my site.  I wanted to make this page be indexed in the search engines so that those who link to me get one more link to that post.  Hey it could help.

Alexa Ranking: This site seems even less important.  I am still not sure why Amazon bought them.  Maybe Phil can shed some light since he is closer to the ventor world.  There is no really point of adding this link; I just thought it would be fun.

I hope you enjoy what you see.