Well, it was exactly three months ago that I shared the fact that this blog had reached the 100,000 spam mark according to the spam fighting plugin Akismet. But it looks like in the last 24 hours the count has crept up above the 175,000 mark.

76,000 spam comments in 90 days is just a little out of hand, don’t you think? So, this is why I heavily moderate comments and delete anything that looks spammy. You would have thought that maybe they would simply go elsewhere since it’s not getting through. But instead they just keep increasing.

The useful No Ping Wait Wordpress plugin was created by by Robert Deaton, but due to an apparent hardware failure he lost his entire site.

The purpose of the No Ping Wait plugin is to prevent Wordpress authors from having to wait for all of the update services to respond to new post pings. You may have noticed that when you actually “publish” a post there can be a delay as long as a minute or more. This plugin solves that problem by moving generic pings to execute-pings.php.

I highly recommend this plugin and you can download it here.
Read the rest of this entry »

While creating a couple of plugins and themes for Wordpress I became confused, disillusioned and disenchanted with the various copyright licenses found around the net. I didn’t want anything so “legal-y” because, well frankly I’m not going to have the time, energy or patience to actually enforce it. Plus, I’m giving these things away for free!

So I decided to create my own licence as follows. Feel free to use / link to it if you feel it meets your needs, and suggestions for improvement are welcome.
Read the rest of this entry »

WP Admin Bar is an indispensable Wordpress plugin which displays links to the Administration Panel at the top of a blog’s page - but only for users who are logged in and have permission to view the given functions.

I find this plugin to be absolutely essential to my enjoyment of Wordpress. It allows me to easily jump back and forth between viewing the blog and various management functions on the back end. If you’ve never used it before you’re going to wonder how you got by without it all this time.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Google Translator plugin allows Wordpress to add a number of alternate languages to your blog.

This plugin is derived from Scott Hough’s WP Translate, but makes a number of changes:

• The Google Translate service is used, which does a much better job of maintaining page layout then Babelfish.
• Height and width attributes are included for all images.
• ‘rel=nofollow’ has been added to all links to prevent search engines from following them.
• Alternate text for all images have been improved.
• The plugin fully validates under XHTML.

Read the rest of this entry »