K-Squared Ramblings

Comicbook.com Power-Up Plugin for Wordpress

I’ve put together a simple plugin for self-hosted WordPress blogs that adds a “Power Up” button to your posts for submission to Comicbook.com (a Digg-like site or comics-related news).

No configuration needed – just install it and activate it.

Yeah, I could have just pasted the code into my theme template, but I like to keep functional changes separate in case I ever decide to switch to another theme.

At present it will only show on individual posts. It won’t show on pages, or the front of the site, or any sort of archive page.

You can see it in action on Speed Force.

Download:
ktv_comicbook_powerup-0.1.zip

That Welcome Message (WordPress Greet Box Plugin)

I’ve been trying out something new here and at Speed Force over the last two weeks: a customized welcome message to readers who come in from certain web services, particularly social networks where I’m also set up. Twitter users see a link to my Twitter profile, for instance, and LiveJournal users see a link to the syndication feed for this blog. In theory, it should only show you the welcome box once (or once a week at the most), depending on whether you allow cookies.

I’d actually tried out a similar idea when I first launched Speed Force this summer, but the implementation I used did all the processing on the server, so it wasn’t compatible with caching. (It also only detected two built-in sites and one custom site, and I didn’t feel like hacking it up to add more.)

So when Weblog Tools Collection mentioned a new plugin called Referrer Detector, I figured I’d give it a whirl. It didn’t quite work right with my setup at the time. I fixed the bugs I could, and reported the issues to the author, then tried out a similar plugin — which, as it turned out, had inspired him to write his own — called WP Greet Box. It also had a few hiccups, and again I reported the issues I’d encountered. Both plugins went into a period of heavy development over the next few days.

I’ve settled on WP Greet Box, which seems to be more flexible than Referrer Detector (though the latter seems to be getting more attention). The author has also been very responsive to both problems and suggestions.

Spam Switch

With the recent rash of Trackback spam, I finally bit the bullet and am now experimenting with Akismet in addition to Spam Karma. I’m not sure how well they work together, or, at this point, which plugin processes the comment first. Update: I’m trying Akismet on its own for now. Or, more precisely, Akismet as the sole second line of defense. Bad Behavior is still holding the front line.

Update (Feb 14): I’m now back to using Spam Karma 2, but with a plugin that uses Akismet as one of the score components. This seems to be working well, as SK is able to block the ridiculous stuff (100 porn links in one comment, etc.), and Akismet is able to catch the trackback spam that’s been passing SK2 by temporarily including an inbound link.

The big problem I had with Akismet was that aside from the age of the target post, the blocked comments weren’t sorted or filtered in the admin interface. I was having to look through ~30 comments a day for false positives. Spam Karma will show only the borderline comments by default, and uses a table structure that makes it easier to skim.

This way, though, I get the proverbial best of both worlds.

Automattic Stats, or PHP 5.2.2 vs. WordPress XMLRPC

Experimenting with the new Automattic Stats Plugin that uses the WordPress.com statistics infrastructure to track traffic. So far, so good… except for one problem. Titles and links are missing from all the “most visited” posts. They’re just listed as numeric IDs.

Update: Actually, today’s posts seem OK. The plugin seems to just send the blog ID and post ID. I’ve been trying to figure out how the central server is retrieving the permalink and title. It doesn’t look like Bad Behavior is blocking it. And it doesn’t seem to be using the RSS feed, since posts that are still on the front page (and presumably still in the feed) are also showing up as numbers. *grumble*

Update 2: I just noticed that all of the number-only posts show the same placeholder graph showing “Region A” vs. “Region B” for 2003-2005.

Update 3: It’s a problem with WordPress’ XMLRPC interface, and affects other uses (like connecting with Flock). I’ve got a workaround, though (see comments).

Update 4 (May 10): Thanks to the pingback below from dot unplanned, it’s confirmed to be a bug in PHP 5.2.2. With any luck, the workaround will cease to be necessary when the next PHP bugfix is released.

Where’d the spam go?

Aside from the occasional massive spam run, there’s been a fairly regular trickle of spam targeted at the comments on this blog. Dr. Dave’s excellent Spam Karma plugin takes care of nearly all of these using a combination of content filters, blacklists, form checks, signs of proxy use, and more.

On Tuesday I added IO Error’s Bad Behavior. This plugin looks at actual HTTP requests, identifies known spambots and looks for signs of cloaked bots—those that claim to be a browser like MSIE or Mozilla, but don’t act like it—and prevents them from even getting in the door. The advantage here is that you can save processing time and bandwidth on all kinds of bogus requests, not just comment spam, but address harvesting bots, referrer spam, and so on.

Maybe it’s coincidence, but Spam Karma hasn’t seen a single spam attempt since I installed Bad Behavior.

Of course, blocking bots won’t catch the occasional person who posts comment spam the old-fashioned way: by surfing to the page and filling in the form. And eventually bots will do a better job of imitating real visitors, just as phishing attacks have moved from crude, badly-spelled notes to sophisticated forgeries with real logos and disguised links. Spam Karma will still be needed for those.

But the combination looks very promising!

Plugin Experiments

I decided to try out a few WordPress plugins. Here’s the status:

• WayPath for WordPress: List related posts on other blogs. Nice, but cluttered and slows things down. If we keep this, we’ll need to get caching to work. Active, seeking comments.
• Spell Check: Only for posts so far. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to actually work. Disabled.
• Link Relationships: Adds next/previous post elements for search engines and browsers that support them. Painless to install, simple and elegant. Active.
• Staticize Reloaded: Cache each page so that the server doesn’t have to regenerate it every single time. Very nice, but unfortunately isn’t compatible with HTTP compression right now. Disabled.
• Live Preview: Add an instant preview to comments. A bit of tweaking to install, though I managed to modify it to play nicer with WP’s plugin API, but very cool! Active.
• Random Posts: Add a list of random posts to the sidebar. Simple and possibly interesting. Active.
• SameCat: List posts in the same category as the current one. Combined with the Related Entries plugin, this provides a good set of links to similar posts. Active.

Other ideas I’m looking at (some of which I’ve seen plugins for):

• Comment threading (Katie suggested this, but the last time I looked for plugins the only one I found required serious database changes)
• Email notifications
• Polls
• Category and author icons
• True-a-Day sidebar

So, any opinions on the new features? Any suggestions for others? In particular, any thoughts on the WayPath feature? I’m not sure whether it’s worth keeping around or not.