All problems aside though, if you are a PHP developer, I would highly recommend using WordPress 1.5. It’s a great product.

I hope to have everything back to normal by this weekend.

If you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like “Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.” This is called comment spam, we don’t like it either, and we’ve been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

[Via: Google Blog]

All I can say is thank goodness. Maybe it’ll at least slightly reduce the 300+ comment spams this site gets a day, although to keep beating a dead horse, the great product Spam Karma has been blocking them all. I’m also glad to see that my blogging engine, WordPress is already on the case.

However, I do use several open source products which I assume are developed by people whose desired type of compensation are different than my own. I use WordPress for this blog as well as several plug-ins and tools to support it. Today, Dr. Dave, the creator of the Spam Karma comment spam blocking plug-in (a most excellent product), decided to quit development of this tool because of the mounting complaints about the “stability” of his plug-in in relation to the “alpha” versions of the WordPress engine. The straw that broke the camel’s back was a page long rant on Asymtomatic.com about issues he had with the recent releases of the Spam Karma plug-in.

I can say that I had a couple of issues in installing this plug-in, however, they were entirely due to my ignorance on folder permissions and were resolved with a tiny amount of research on these issues. At no time did I feel anger or resentment at the developer. He developed a product that would have taken me weeks for me to develop on my own and distributed it without charge because he thought it was cool enough for other bloggers to try out. I would have never thought to expect free support from him. At most, I would have dropped him an email letting him know about an issue that I couldn’t resolve only after I had exhausted all of my albeit limited knowledge. However, to self-righteously expect a bug-free product for which you have offered no compensation strikes me as the vilest sort of arrogance. If you can’t get the product to work, then develop your own, pay the developer for a support contract or shut the hell up.

I wouldn’t have posted about this except I noticed another egregious example of this behavior with another free product, although one that is not open source. The w.bloggar tool allows you to post to your blog from a Windows application. It is developed by an enterprising fellow named Marcelo from Brazil. Like Dr.Dave, he develops this app because he thinks it’s cool and wants others to get a chance to use his product. However, he’s also a very busy fellow and doesn’t get a whole lot of time to work on the product. After a long period of silence, he announced that he was still working on a new version of the product to which he got several condescending comments like this one:

Just a suggestion…
When you cannot work on a new version fast enough, you should at least give workarounds to make previous versions usable.

[Via wbloggar.com]

Where do you get off demanding that someone else work on a product that you haven’t paid for? I gave the guy a donation for the product because I used and liked it. However, because it was a donation and not a purchase, I would never demand that he get to work on the latest version. What gall!

These developers work on these products in exchange of the goodwill of those who use them. Their compensation comes from the numbers of users who use the product. If they don’t develop a good product, then don’t use it. But don’t complain about their inability to develop a good product. You have given nothing. You have provided nothing. All you have done is to consume their product for no cost on your side.

If anything, this has confirmed my distrust of the open-source consumer and hardened my resolved to remain a greedy, capitalistic and selfish software developer who demands money for my time.

Not that I have any strong opinions on the subject . . .

So I started doing some research and found a couple of great plugins called Kitten’s Spam Words and Kitten’s Spaminator both written oddly enough by Kitten of mookitty.co.uk. SpamWords makes it much easier to train WordPress 1.2+ to block spam messages by allowing you to “mark messages as spam” which adds their email address, IP Address and URL to the blocked word list. The Spaminator combines two spam blocking/retribution concepts (Tar Pit and Three Strikes) to help block spam from even getting into your system and to punish those who try. With the use of these products, I have effectively cut down my total incoming comment spam to 5 moderated messages. None got through the screen to the actual site! Not to mention, by using the SpamWords plugin I will continue to improve the effectiveness of the Spaminator by providing it a better word list to select strikes from.

So if your blogging via WordPress and dealing with the plague that is comment spam, check these two products out. They are the first glimmer of hope I’ve had in this war in quite some time.

There may be a more elegant solution to this problem, but I have to admit that I’m not much of a PHP programmer and am learning the syntax as I go. Additionally, I tried to research the ability to use the hack functionality in WordPress but couldn’t make heads or tails of it. So if you have any advice on how to make this cleaner, please let me know. In either case, you need to put this code into your xmlrpc.php file starting at line 63:

//Latitude and Longitude Hack.  Nathan Lorenz 2004
// Attempt to retreive Latitude and Logitude tags from Post Content.
$LatStart = strpos($post_content, "<lat");
$LonStart = strpos($post_content, "<lon");
//Decide which SQL Statement to Execute.
if(($LatStart!==false) && ($LonStart!==false)){
     //Retreive Latitude Information
     $LatEnd = strpos($post_content, ">", $LatStart);
     $LatNumStart = strpos($post_content, """, $LatStart);
     $LatNumEnd = strpos($post_content, """, $LatNumStart + 1);
     $LatNum = substr($post_content, $LatNumStart + 1, $LatNumEnd-$LatNumStart-1);
     //Retreive Longitude Information
     $LonNumStart = strpos($post_content, """, $LonStart);
     $LonNumEnd = strpos($post_content, """, $LonNumStart + 1);
     $LonNum = substr($post_content, $LonNumStart + 1, $LonNumEnd-$LonNumStart-1);
     //Remove XML from Post
     //Remove Latitude
     $post_content = substr($post_content, 0, (int)$LatStart) . substr($post_content, (int)$LatEnd + 1);
     //Because the Postions in the string have changed, we need to again find the start and end of the Logitude tag.
     $LonStart = strpos($post_content, "<lon");
     $LonEnd = strpos($post_content, ">", $LonStart);
     //Now we can remove the Longitude tag.
     $post_content = substr($post_content, 0, (int)$LonStart) . substr($post_content, (int)$LonEnd + 1);
     ///Convert values into float variables
     $post_lat = floatval($LatNum);
     $post_lon = floatval($LonNum);
     $sql = "INSERT INTO $tableposts
	(post_author, post_date, post_content, post_title, post_excerpt, post_category, post_status, post_lat, post_lon)
	VALUES ('$post_author','$post_date','$post_content','$post_title',
	'$post_excerpt','$post_cat', '$post_status', $post_lat, $post_lon)";
}else{
     $sql = "INSERT INTO $tableposts
	(post_author, post_date, post_content, post_title, post_excerpt, post_category, post_status)
	VALUES ('$post_author','$post_date','$post_content','$post_title', '$post_excerpt','$post_cat', '$post_status')";
}

Most the the site will look the same, however there are a few minor changes. First of all, I have heard several complaints about the amount of clicks necessary to move around the site. In that end, the galleries, writings and movie review sections have removed all paging from the listing of articles. This may have to be replaced as the site grows, but I’m sure I can do a better job than before.

Secondly, under the art section, I have added comments to most of the pictures along with information about the camera/film used.

Thirdly, the blog, which used to run using blogger, has been replaced with a WordPress system. This allows me a much larger amount of flexibility in posting as well has some additional cute features.

Finally, I have removed the Forums and Misc sections. The forums were never exactly what I wanted and now that the comments section is far more robust, I should be able to carry on conversations with my rare visitors. The Misc section has never filled out, so it is no great loss. I’ll replace it with some contact information.

Well, I hope you enjoy it. Let me know what you think.