Lee.org

(mouseover: And what about all the people who won’t be able to join the community because they’re terrible at making helpful and constructive co– … oh.  )

I get my news from The Daily Show and my blogging advice from XKCD.

Unconstructive comments will be marked as spam.

I just installed WPBook in a vain (as in “in vain”) effort to allow my Facebook friends to continue to read my blog.

My blog posts are now forwarded to my Facebook Wall.

I used Wordbook for about a year but it recently broke :-(. I’m sure the Facebook people don’t like this functionality because it sucks people away from their one-website-internet plan. So we’ll see how long WPBook lasts!

In the continuing effort to fight comment spam, I installed the Bad Behavior plugin on the blog. If this accidentally stops your legitimate comment, please email me at Lee at Lee dat org.

update 4-11-11: I removed Bad Behavior a while back. See the comments

Infinite Scroll looks like a fun plugin. It almost worked perfectly right out of the box (see my note about WP-FancyZoom). I found it on the Balsaman blog.

Just scroll down to the bottom of the page and the next page should load up automatically. :-)

To make the WP FancyZoom WordPress Plugin work well with Infinite Scroll, I figured out that I have to add the following to the “Javascript to be called” section:

addDOMLoadEvent(setupZoom);

Please tell me what you think of this change!

I’ve been using the NoSpamNX anti comment spam plugin for the last few months. It works very well. The best part is that it reduces the number of comment spams in my Akismet spam folder so dramatically that I’m able to look through the folder and rescue false positives.

Take a look at the image below. Spam comments are down from 300/day to 5/day. And now I rescue the  occasional  false positive.

Of course, as it becomes more popular, spammers will adapt. But it’s worked well for several months. I have noted that the Akismet chart above doesn’t track the number of false positives correctly. I’ve rescued more than the number of false positives that the chart claims.

Update 1-18-10: I have temporarily(?) disabled this plugin. Read the comments.

I just installed RSS Count Comments. Findable  on WordPress.

When you read my RSS feed, you’ll now see the number of comments in each post. So a title might read:

It Was on Fire When I Got Here (3 comments)

I installed this because comments are so very important but you’d easily miss them when reading just the RSS feed.

I encourage all my friends to install this very small plugin! It’s just 7 lines of code. :-)

I just installed the WP Ajax Edit Comments WordPress plugin. Mainly what I was looking for in this plugin was a way for commenters to edit their posts after writing their comments. But it has a lot of other nice bells and whistles too.

Since I installed NoSpamNX, I get far fewer comment spams in my Akismet spam box… like 5 per day and they are all from the one spammer who has so far figured his way around the plugin. The plugin blocks about 100 comment spams per day.

Now there are so few spams in my comment spam box that it’s possible for me to review them by hand weekly. Today I found a false positive in the Akismet comment spam pile. This would have been impossible without NoSpamNX.

If you have a WordPress blog, you should install NoSpamNX. No, wait. If everyone does it, then the spammers will all write smarter bots that get around this defense. So… umm, everyone use a different method! Don’t use NoSpamNX. This one will be used only on my site!

I’ve been using the Smart Archives plugin for a year to make a pretty and complete archive page for the site.

I just switched to Smart Archives Reloaded (author’s site). It works just as well and now updating my posts is much faster. The way the original Smart Archives plugin works, when you click “Publish” in WordPress, the user has to wait until the new archives page is generated before continuing. Now it’s done in the background. A 20 second wait is  now 5 seconds :-)

Thanks to the magic of open source, a really good plugin has been made even better :-)

I just installed the NoSpamNX comment spam plugin. Hopefully it will reduce the daily  drudgery  of me deleting all the inane comment spam I get. Each week I have to remove 5-20 spams that make it through Akismet. And I have 1,500 comment spams that Akismet caught from the last 15 days sitting in my spam box.  Hopefully that number will decrease.