I’ve been spending a while updating some of my WordPress plugins over the past day or so. It turns out that The Frame Buster had a bug that was stopping it working on some servers. If the version you are using is failing to override framesets as intended, or if you get an “undefined function does_host_match” error, you should upgrade to version 1.0.4. If you’re not sure, I’ve put up a page where you can test it here.
I’ve also released another plugin that I’ve been using for ages on end on my own blog, called Include. As its title suggests, it is similar to the <!--#include--> directive which is familiar to Apache or ASP/ASP.NET developers, in that it lets you include a file or PHP script in your blog posts.
Here is a WordPress plugin that automatically shuts off comments on older posts, unless they still have an active discussion going on.
Like everyone else, my blog was getting pretty heavily spammed. I have been using a combination of Akismet and Bad Behavior and this has had considerable success. However, I noticed that a lot of the spam comments that were coming through were targetting posts that were over a year old.
I’ve come across some popular blogs that are getting thousands of spam comments a day. Amazingly, nearly all of them keep comments open on all their entries, in some cases going back as much as four or five years. Why would anyone want to post a legitimate comment today on your trip to New York five years ago?
Since I started using this approach a couple of weeks ago, it’s proven to be pretty successful. Beforehand, Akismet was handling an average of five spams a day, with one day chalking up more than seventy. Bad Behavior knocked that figure down to typically one a day. Now, spam comments seem to be almost non-existent.
Some blog software such as CommunityServer and dasBlog has this functionality built in, though as far as I’m aware the ability to keep active discussions open is a new one. Unfortunately, WordPress has hitherto had no such facility, apart from a much simpler plugin which isn’t configurable and doesn’t allow for active, ongoing discussions.
This is a beta release of the plugin, and it has been tested on WordPress 2.0.5. Any feedback would be welcome.
[Update 28/12/2006]: I’ve created a separate page for the plugin, and released an update that is compatible with WordPress 2.1 alpha 3.
Just a short note to wish all the readers of my blog and any passers-by a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year. Sit back and enjoy the YouTube hit of the moment “Christmelicious”:
I came across Firebug this morning via Matt Mullenweg’s blog. It is without a doubt one Firefox extension that no web developer should do without.
It’s an awesome plugin. You can debug and profile your Javascript code, step through it line by line, set breakpoints, inspect objects and variables, and quickly find errors when they happen, with detailed and useful information. It has a command line that lets you execute Javascript on the fly. You can edit your HTML and CSS on the fly and have the changes show up immediately, explore the DOM, and monitor the network activity involved in each page request, showing you the HTTP request and response headers for each file that it fetches.
All in all, it has just about everything you need to develop client-side JavaScript effectively and easily. And best of all: like Firefox itself, it’s free and open source.
Just one thing I don’t understand though. Once it is installed, it is disabled by default and you have to enable it, either globally or on a site-by-site basis, before you can use it. I presume that there’s some rationale to this — possibly something to do with either security, performance or stability — but I’m not sure what it is. Can anyone enlighten me?
For the record: I do not speak Klingon.
The rumour that I am fluent in “thlingan hol” stems from a geekiness competition that a few of us had at work a couple of years ago. For a day or two, one or two individuals were attempting to out-geek each other by sending MSN messages encoded in binary, hexadecimal, octal and Base 64, and some of them even came my way. I didn’t pay much attention at the time, until someone managed to dig out the Klingon translation of the Bible from somewhere on the web and sent Psalm 117 round to us in an e-mail. Needless to say, when I committed it to memory and recited it a day or so later, the general consensus was that I’d out-geeked the lot of them. It wasn’t actually a big deal. Psalm 117 is the shortest chapter of the Bible, and the Klingon translation consists of a mere fifteen words. It’s the kind of thing you can work out and memorise in ten minutes or so if you are that way inclined.
Apart from that, my knowledge of Klingon is zero, and I intend to keep it that way.
The fact is, it gained me a bit of a reputation, and people still occasionally ask me to recite it for them. I did at first, but now I generally refuse to do so, partly because I started to think it was a bit disrespectful to the Word of God, but also because most people tend to regard you as a bit of a nutter if you speak Klingon.
According to French company XiTiMonitor, Mozilla Firefox now has a 23.2% market share in Europe. (The report is in French: it’s not appeared in English on their website yet, but no doubt will do shortly.) They have published a couple of interesting maps giving breakdown of usage by country within Europe as well as for other parts of the world.
It seems that it’s taken off the most in Europe and Australasia, where its market share is 23.4%. The USA and Canada are lagging behind on 14.5%, and Latin America comes bottom on 11.1%. Even so, it’s quite clear now that it’s posing a fairly significant challenge to the dominance of Internet Explorer. It has a whopping 40.5% market share in Slovenia, and 15.8% here in the UK.
These figures would indicate that it’s gaining a pretty firm foothold among non-geeks and Microsoft’s dominance of the browser market is no longer something to be taken for granted. Interestingly, Firefox usage goes up at the weekends, suggesting that people are installing it on their home computers though they may be restricted from doing so at work, where they don’t have administrative rights on their Windows machines and can’t install software, condemning them to Internet Explorer.
I use Firefox almost exclusively at home myself, in combination with Google Reader for my RSS feeds. Even though IE7 has been released, and it gains RSS support, tabbed browsing and anti-phishing features, there’s little that it does that the Firefox 2.0/Google Reader combination doesn’t do better. Firefox 2.0 also has a spelling checker for form fields, which Internet Explorer doesn’t. Sweet.
Some of the best Ajax websites out there actually say that they’re best viewed with Firefox, though they usually work fine with Internet Explorer too. There are still a few websites that don’t work properly on Firefox and recommend Internet Explorer, but they tend to be fairly poor quality both technically and graphically. This is no doubt down to the fact that the best developers tend to be geeks who use Linux and view Microsoft with suspicion, if not as the evil empire, and the best designers all use Apple Macs.
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Posted at 18:03 on 28 December 2006.
Feel free to take a look round the site — if I
say anything that 
