I just disabled two separate blog stats packages, each for a different reason. This move was partially inspired by the upcoming “F*** Stats - Make Art!” session on the docket at Northern Voice.

First, I disabled the FeedBurner FeedSmith integration plugin. This is a handy way to automatically redirect requests for RSS feeds to the FeedBurner service. I had decided to use FeedBurner as a way to reduce the load on my Dreamhost shared server - the feed would be cached by FeedBurner and served from there, removing a tonne of requests off-site. It did the trick, but at the cost of handing control of my blog’s feed over to a third party (who has since been absorbed by Google). One direct negative side effect of the FeedBurner plugin is that it seemed to interfere with tag- and category-based feeds. That shouldn’t be a problem anymore. I’ll miss some of the stats, but I really don’t need that much data. Now, how do I get the 1494 people sucking the feed off of FeedBurner to come back to the real source? FeedBurner offers to put up an ugly “BLOG MOVED. PLEASE UPDATE SUBSCRIPTIONS” notice to nudge people into resubscribing to the proper URL. But they provide pretty seamless redirection to get people TO FeedBurner. A bit of a roach motel syndrome going on there. You can check in, but you can never leave. (OK. ‘never’ is a little overblown, but it’s not realistic to expect everyone to update their subscriptions - I can’t remember the last time I did that…)

The second plugin to get switched off today is the very cool, extremely addictive, but ultimately creepy Blog Voyeur plugin. It didn’t track any additional info, but presented a list of people who have commented on the blog, and the last page they’ve visited, thanks to the “remember me” cookie. It’s not too invasive, but I felt like I should put on a trenchcoat while viewing the Voyeur report page. It didn’t help that feeling much by inserting “YOU ARE BEING WATCHED” on the comment submission form - I agree that notification is necessary, but maybe with less-creepy wording?

I’m not giving up on stats altogether, but am limiting them to just Google Analytics and Wordpress.com Stats. They’re both generic and anonymous stats packages, without the level of creepiness of Blog Voyeur, and the loss of control involved with FeedBurner.

The colophon, listing the various bits that get twiddled to run my blog, has been woefully out of date. I get periodic emails about the various plugins I use, especially the latest Podpress plugin, so I thought it’d be a good idea to automate the process of updating the list. Enter the bdp_setup plugin by Bryan Palmer at ozpolitics.info.

The colophon is now automatically generated, and guaranteed to stay up to date for as long as I’m using Wordpress to run my blog…

I just saw the PodPress plugin mentioned in the WordPress dashboard feed, so checked it out quickly. What a kick-ass plugin! Totally manages podcast publishing, enclosures, web players, iTunes integration. Handles files uploaded to the blog, as well as remote files (absolute urls). Presents mp3, m4a, mov, mp4, pdf, etc… files. Very nice.

I’ve updated the most recent 2 entries in my podcast section, to see how it works. Pretty slick.

Akismet is the “official” WordPress response to the soul-sucking rampages of blog comment spam. It promises to make spam magically vanish by harnessing the Hive Mind to banish spam en masse. But it doesn’t work. I’ve been getting a fair amount of spam approved by Akismet as ham, when they are obviously spam. Not sure what’s going on there, but I’d guess that since anyone can flag comments as spam/ham, that the spammers are getting in the game themselves. Total guess though.

A couple of weeks ago, I turned off Spam Karma 2 to see how Akismet performed now that the system has had a few months to “warm up”. The result wasn’t exactly impressive. False negatives, false positives, and excessive moderation.

I could live with a few false negatives - the occasional spam slipping through the cracks and appearing on my blog isn’t the end of the world. But I’ve also had a couple of false positives. Valid comments banished by Akismet. I can manually resurrect them, but what If I don’t check regularly? It’d be really easy for false positives to get lost in the sea of spam (ick).

Also, Akismet routinely pushes comments into moderation purgatory. Someone attempts to post a valid comment, to be rewarded with an “I don’t trust you. Please wait for your comment to be blessed by the High Priestesses of Blog before being deemed worthy of being displayed here.” OK, it’s not exactly as rude as that, but the sentiment is the same, and not exactly conducive to conversation.

So, I’m going back to Spam Karma 2. It rocks hard, and is intelligent enough to block spam and approve ham without intervention. It even has an Akismet plugin for SK2 to let me harness the Hive as a last resort. But even that limited role of Akismet has proven to be the only weak link in SK2’s otherwise impervious armour, so I’ve downgraded Akismet’s influence from “normal” to “moderate.”

Can’t say enough good things about SK2. Since I first started using it, back when the world was young and Grandfather Bear roamed the forest, SK2 has nuked over 8700 spam attempts. About 100 attempts per day, and for 99.99% of them, I don’t even get notified. And so far there have been zero false positives (it keeps the comments and I periodically eyeball it to make sure).

Ultimate Tag Warrior provided a really handy way to tag posts in WordPress, by just entering tags into a text field ala del.icio.us or Flickr.

But, it uses its own tags database, meaning external tools like Flock, MarsEdit, Ecto, etc… are unable to tag new posts. And I get to do some funkery each time I update the K2 theme to match the latest and greatest beta.

So, I just spent a couple of hours this evening manually migrating UTW tags to be stored in stock WordPress Categories. I would have played around with some SQL to do it, but would rather do some mindless copy/pastery in front of the tube.

Dropping UTW seems to have shaved almost 100 database queries from the generation of the front page of this blog. That ain’t half bad.

And, by using a combination of the Cat2Tag v 2.0 and WordPress Heat Map plugins, I wind up with a better solution anyway.

The “Performancing” folks just released a plugin for Firefox that provides a fully featured weblog editor, ala Flock. I’m trying it out now - it appears to talk to WordPress OK (well, if this made it to the blog, that is).

It appears to have a decent WYSIWYG editor, but the image embedding doodad doesn’t seem to have an upload utility - so I think you have to manually upload an image and then paste the URL into the image widget. Not fatal, but an “easy” improvement to the plugin. (I know, “easy” is oversimplifying it, since the plugin is aimed at being platform agnostic, so you’d have to have special cases for WP, MT, Blogger, etc…)

Update: Well, let’s see… the HTML it produces sucks badly. Editing a post appears to create a duplicate post (leaving the unedited original, and creating a new one with the edited version). Don’t think I’ll be using this one much…

Update 2: I was a little hard on the Performancing Firefox extension out of the gate. I wasn’t happy with the WYSIWYG HTML, but switching to “raw code” mode gives me essentially the stock WordPress text editor, which is what I’m used to. Also, I must have missed the “Publish as Edit” button - which is displayed right next to the “Publish to:” button - I don’t see how I could have missed that big button. Anyway, if this post was edited, then it works fine

Yup. that worked. OK, so now I see it as one step more advanced than the stock WP bookmarklets - since it gives you access to the post history so you can easily edit older posts. But, in WordPress, once you’ve been logged on, all posts anywhere you see them on your blog have an “edit” link, so it’s so easy to edit older posts anyway…

I wanted to update my Archives page to display the total tag count, but didn’t see a built-in method in Ultimate Tag Warrior to do that. So, here’s the recipe I followed - mimicking how the other methods are set up, in case the changes get rolled into the main distro…

In ultimate-tag-warrior.php:

	function UTW_ShowUniqueTagCount() {
		global $utw;

		echo $utw->GetUniqueTagCount();
	}

In ultimate-tag-warrior-core.php:

	function GetUniqueTagCount() {
		global $wpdb, $tabletags;

		$sql = "select count(*) from $tabletags";
		return $wpdb->get_var($sql);
	}

And, in K2’s page-archives.php (or anywhere you want the count to show up):

	 tags

I’ve also hacked my copy of wp-db-backup.php to automatically back up the UTW tables, thusly, starting at line 407:

$wp_backup_default_tables = array ($table_prefix . categories,
	$table_prefix . comments,
	$table_prefix . linkcategories,
	$table_prefix . links,
	$table_prefix . options,
	$table_prefix . post2cat,
	$table_prefix . postmeta,
	$table_prefix . posts,
	$table_prefix . users,
	$table_prefix . tags,
	$table_prefix . post2tag,
	$table_prefix . tag_synonyms);

I get occasional emails asking me about what plugins I use to run this blog. I don’t mind answering them *cough*Alec*ahem* but having an up-to-date colophon might be helpful, too.

I just copied the table from the WordPress plugin manager, trimmed out the “Action” column, and pasted it into the colophon for this blog. I’ve noticed that some plugins provide incorrect or incomplete URLs to the plugin description/download page. I’ll find/fix the links when I get a chance. And no, I’m not turning the colophon into a wiki

I just came across a reference to Joe Tan’s Flickr Post Bar plugin for WordPress. It adds a handy-dandy “add image from Flickr” bar to the WordPress authoring form. You can set it to add any of the standard Flickr sizes. I’ve set it to use “medium” - the 500px wide image. If it worked, there should be a fun picture of Evan, Teddy, and Daddy playing human totem pole…

It’s not quite as cool as the WordPress 1.6 version, but it’s here now, and seems to work well.

I switched my antispam tool from Spam Karma 2 to Akismet last week - wanting to play with Matt’s new toy, and see how a distributed spam blocker would work out.

Generally, it was pretty good. But, I had to moderate several comments. I’ve almost never had to do that under SK2 - it just works, totally, and invisibly.

But, I just checked my WordPress dashboard, and saw an interesting item: Owen Winkler: Spam Karma 2 Akismet Plugin BETA. Hmmm… Akismet as a plugin for SK2? Cool!

Turns out, SK2 will do its usual magic, and if it’s still unsure about a comment, it will then feed it to Akismet for clarification. The best of both worlds! Very very cool.

Thanks to a tip from Donncha O Caoimh, I was pointed to the new FAlbum plugin for WordPress. It’s a handy Flickr-integration plugin that uses the new Flickr API - even works with my merged Yahoo.com account!

I’ve installed the plugin, and added it to the tabs again. It’s got some minor display funkery, where it looks like it’s not playing nice with K2 (or vice versa), but the plugin itself works great! It would rock if K2 added support for this one…

Anyway, it looks like FAlbum rocks quite nicely. There’s even a mature-looking admin screen in the WordPress admin side, as well! Thanks SO much to Donncha for the nice plugin!

Update: Excellent! Thanks to a tip on the K2 support forum, I was pointed to this page describing how to integrate FAlbum with K2. I’ll be playing with that over the weekend…

Update 2: Fine. I didn’t wait until the weekend to play with this. It took a whopping 5 minutes to get the bits hacked into place. Looks MUCH better now.

I decided to give the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for WordPress a shot. It’s going to be supported natively in the K2 theme that I’m using, and UTW comes highly rated. I was a bit nervous about migrating from the Cat2Tag plugin I’m using now, because I wasn’t sure how it would handle ~900 posts that were already categorized. I didn’t want to have to re-tag all of those posts. I picked Cat2Tag because it used the Categories themselves to store tags - so if I decided to switch back to Categories, it was just a matter of turning off a plugin, and doing some housekeeping on the now-messy set of categories. I’ll assume there will be a magical “convert tags back to categories” function sometime in the future…

Turns out there is a handy dandy “convert categories to tags” function, making the migration to UTW trivial. Now, I’m just nervous about what happens when I want to migrate away from it. For now, I’ve got the “Automatically convert categories to tags” flag set, so when I add a new post, it takes the categories I enter (via Cat2Tag), and mirrors them in Tags. Duplication for now, but until I’m comfortable with UTW, it’s the only way to go

It does provide a nice heatmap of tags, as displayed in the “archives” section. Doesn’t provide the heatmap of dates, though, so I’ll still be using WP-Heatmap for that.

The compelling reason for looking at UTW is the ability to view boolean sets of tags. I could look at /tag/projects+rants to see all posts that were tagged both “projects” and “rants” - something that wasn’t readily possible using straight categories-as-tags.

Just thought of a cool feature to add to UTW - “copy tags from my del.icio.us account” - let me tag my blog posts with the same vocabulary I use to tag the rest of the world.

I did have some fun getting the clean URLs working with UTW, though. The automagic .htaccess updater didn’t want to work, so I had to manually add this to my .htaccess:

# Ultimate Tag Warrior
RewriteRule ^tag/(.+)$ /index.php?tag=$1 [QSA,L]

Update: Just tweaked the setup a bit… Posts will now be put into one of only 3 categories: “entry”, “link” or “aside”. I’ve removed category display from post listings, and replaced with the tag list. I’ll try this for awhile, and decide if I want to stick with it before the number of uncategorized entries gets too big.

Update 2: Looks like there’s a bug in UTW - if you add only one tag to a post, it generates invalid XHTML (no after the localtags links). Simple fix for now - just add more than one tag per post Less simple fix - modify line 483 of ultimate-tag-warrior-actions.php to be able to deal with arrays containing just one item. I don’t know how to do that at the moment, so will be adding multiple tags.

I just switched the default theme of this blog to the latest K2 theme by Michael Heilemann at binarybonsai.com. Michael created the Kubrick theme that I was using before (and which was also adopted as the default for all new WordPress installations).

K2 is a really nice design, with some great thought to functional layout. It supports a boatload of useful plugins, and displays their magic if they are installed.

Check out the cool ajax-powered search dealie - just start typing a query, and out pops a list of matches. Pretty cool. Comment submission also uses some ajax juju, but it’s a bit funky at the moment, and isn’t quite fully baked yet. Still, quite cool.

So far, I’ve lost my fancy schmancy banner image rotator, but that’s not such a bad thing. I’ll work on adding it back in when I get a chance - I have to recreate the images for the new wider design anyway).

Also, while having another less-than-fully-productive day staying at home with The Boy™ while Janice is sick in bed, I was able to download (but not yet compile successfully) the Ming library for creating .swf files. King suggested this during the Pachyderm developer’s conference call (which I missed because I am out today), and it looks like a much nicer solution than Josh and I were thinking of - Ming would provide a nice happy medium, where we just alter how we generate our .swf-wrapped images, and the dozen flash template files don’t need to be any the wiser. The other option is JSwiff, but it’s a much lower-level library, meaning we’d have to be messing with the icky details of the flash file format. With Ming, we just create objects, and tell it to do stuff. Much nicer

I’d been using a “tag” plugin that was kind of a hack - it used its own table, and didn’t integrate with Categories, so it was double duty sometimes to properly tag stuff and categorize it.

I just stumbled across the Cat2Tag plugin, which provides a fully integrated folksonomy/tagging system that uses categories to store the tags. It creates new categories if necessary, and provides a tag cloud for tag entry - now it works almost exactly like del.icio.us does.

On top of that, I also found the WordPress Heat Map plugin, which provides a tag cloud for a set of categories in a WordPress blog. I’m using it in my “Archives” page now.

Very cool combination of plugins, making a much more dynamic and organic tagging system for my blog.