Quite some time ago I wrote a visitor counter, and discussed it here. It’s been tweaked many, many times, but the latest version is a widget suitable for WordPress themes. If that interests you, you can read more the visitor counter widget for WordPress here.
It’s time to get the comments…
If you use a WordPress blog, then you know that checking the comments is a huge deal – and needs to be done far too often for what is mostly spam.
What to do?
Awhile back for ActiveBlogging members, I wrote a plugin to kill comments dead – Dave’s Comment Killer for WordPress – but it’s not your typical comment plugin.
Why?
Because it lets you dump ALL comments!
WordPress has a real problem with comments. Even if you refuse to accept any via the WP settings, spammers can still blast them – and you still have to clean them out. For non-blog blogs it’s a pain.
My plugin lets you automatically dump ALL comments – silently – perfect for regular sites where commenting isn’t used (or needed).
And for sites like this one? I have a setting to detect links – more than ‘X’ links in a comment (which I can adjust in the plugin) and the comment disappears automatically.
Think about it – most spammers want something for their time, and that ‘something’ is a link (or two, or fifty). With this plugin, comments with huge numbers of links are deleted automatically.
And as a final option, I can get an email every time a real comment makes it past the filter – allowing me to approve good ones ASAP.
Take a peek at Dave’s Comment Killer for WordPress – if you need a new way to kill comment spam on WordPress for ‘non-blog’ blogs, this will do a treat for you.
I heard about another “Beginner’s Guide” release today – and every time I hear that phrase I cringe.
Not because beginner guides aren’t useful or good – we all started out with them (and despite the truly insulting title, I find the Dummies line of books to be great introductions, great “beginner’s books”).
It’s because of a small subset of those books – beginner’s books on online programming topics, like PHP, Perl, mySQL, Ajax, Javascript, and so on.
The reason – teaching BEGINNING online programming teaches you just enough to be dangerous to yourself and others!
I can teach you PHP, and I can call it a beginner’s guide – but if I leave out security programming, then I’ve done worse than nothing – I’ve given you just enough details to think you can write safe code – but you can’t, and you will well pay dearly for it.
For example, most beginner’s books talk about getting in form data with a command like this (here in PHP):
$x=$_POST['x'];
Sounds good – but that line holds a huge amount of pain if that’s all the teaching that goes into it:
It’s not a minor thing – people online delight in seeing what a form can “take” (I know, I’ve done it too). And there’s some people out there that aren’t just having fun – it’s serious (and illegal) business for them. Crack a site, and there’s a new base of operations for nasty stuff – and YOU pay the price for it.
So to everyone offering “beginner’s guides” for online programming (and you know who you are) – add a solid chapter on security to it. If you don’t, then you’re hurting everyone – by giving beginners a false (and dangerous) sense of accomplishment, and providing the rest of us problems needing to be cleaned up.
I admit I’ve been in a cave for the past decade or so – but remember when Open Source was the greatest thing since sliced bread?
Collaborative software and the philosophy that “to enough eyes, all bugs are small”. It sounded so good, and the future was so bright.
What happened?
I have a theory: we all got broke.
The fact of the matter is, Open Source is wonderful – but ask most OS folks, and they’ll tell you, it doesn’t put bread on the table.
Now I don’t want to fight anyone out there on this, and I’ll be happy to be proven wrong, but the fact of the matter is, when you have to work all day, and then do a little free programming at night, what goes first when the job situation gets tough?
And while all night coding sessions are fun in the teens and twenties (I know; I’ve been there) what do you do when you get older and settle down – and the rent is due, and the kids need new school supplies in September?
Goodbye Open Source – and hello, closed source (paid) programming.
Now there are exceptions to this: the people that work on some of the most popular software are doing well, and some can make decent money. But compare those somewhat rare exceptions to the majority of people working on Open Source – and needing ‘real’ jobs as well.
And then compare the ceiling for those people: how many of those OS people will ever reach a Larry Ellison or Bill Gates in earnings?
I embrace Open Source. I think it is the future for software. And the quality is there (notice Apple’s success in using the Open Source FreeBSD operating system for the Mac). But obviously, there must be money in it. So here’s some ideas:
In reading this, it’s obvious the real issue – a centralized authority is needed to get cracking on getting Linux and Gimp and Open Office and other Open Source products out there in a professional manner. Some company that manages it all, from software to updates to tech, to programming to design to support, and makes gobs of money doing it. Somebody kinda like Microsoft.
Hey – maybe that’s why they’re so successful…
In an interview Monday, Larry Hryb, Chief Programmer of Xbox Live at Microsoft, announced that the problems being experienced from hackers with the online gaming platform Xbox Live were really the fault of the Internet. While declining to explain specifically what part the Internet played in the failure, he assured us that the bright minds at Microsoft were hard at work solving it.
In related news, President Barak Obama announced that the current financial crisis was the fault of ink manufacturers. While declining to explain specifically what part they played, he did indicate that by their not producing enough green ink, which could then be placed on little slips of paper and used to pay for goods and services, a financial crisis was caused. He assured us that the bright minds in the government were hard at work solving it.
Finally, the Big Three Detroit auto makers have announced in an interview that the current energy crisis is the fault of American highway developers. While declining to explain specifically what part they played, they did indicate that current highways led to inefficient vehicles. They assured us that the bright minds in the Auto Industry were hard at work solving it. Their proposal, involving a cross-country system of highways that would all go downhill, and allowing motorists to coast to their destinations, would save billions of dollars in gas each year.
