Some comment spammer just started crawling my whole site, so I finally had to track down and install the SecureImage plugin for WordPress. It seems to have done the trick… Thanks Thom and Dave.

I just ran across agkamai’s Cat2Tag plugin for Wordpress — looks great. My first suggestion would be to add type-ahead tag guessing like on the del.icio.us post interface.

I finally got around to upgrading to WordPress 1.5. Why? To get back on the trunk, and to get some of the new features, especially templates and pages. Overall, my upgrade went pretty smoothly. I had to replicate a few of my core hacks, but 1.5 also eliminated the need for some of those.

To start with, I followed the 1.2 -> 1.5 instructions on the wiki. Surprisingly, I managed to create a theme based on my customized index page pretty quickly, which was a relief.

* I had capcha\-based anti\-comment-spam plugin installed before, and I haven’t put that back in place yet. I’m hoping the built-in stuff will improve things so that it’s not necessary, but that’s probably asking too much.
* The Loop has changed, and so I had to update my code that pulls in moblog and now_playing posts, but that went fine.
* I had written a function to fetch and echo out my del.icio.us links (filtered by category, if appropriate). I replaced this with rawlinson’s lovely rssLinkList plugin. Nice work!
* I had to fix what I consider to be a bug in. For some reason, this function doesn't include a seperator parameter, so that it spews out categories seperated by either <li> or <br>, neither of which is what I want. So I hackedto add this parameter toand. Ugh.
* Since my v1.2 setup uses the same index.php to display both the primary view and the archive view, I had added a couple of vars into to help me with this. I'm sure there's a better way, but for now I re-added a flag and a variable, but nastily pulled straight from the GET string.

A few other hacks of mine should be eliminated if I move to using Flickr instead of my own embryonic WP-based gallery. I'll post seperately on that topic.

Lastly, the only thing really missing is a tag-style UI for entering categories when posting/editing. I don't care for the plugins that add "tags" as additional meta-data alongside the existing category mechanism - I see these as one and the same. It's just a UI issue -- for me, the long list of checkboxes is awkward, and also makes it impossible to add a category on the fly. All I want is a single text field with tag guessing and the full list of tags shown below, just like the new del.icio.us posting interface. There's at least one plugin that seems to be heading in this direction, so I'll try that soon.

PS - the category edit screen is unwieldy when the number of categories gets large. There should be a nice UI solution to this.

More as I think of it. Thanks to the WP team for 1.5 - it's cleaner, and I like the new features. Way to go!

I’m in the process of upgrading to WordPress 1.5 — please bear with me…

wbloggar is a pain. It’s nice to have an editor app to write blog entries, but for some reason when I edit an entry with wbloggar and then post it again, it sets posts.post_category and post2cat.category_id to -1, which causes all wordpress to barf. You can’t fix it from the WP interface, so I’ve had to go straight to mysql to fix it when this happens. Ugh. Maybe someone out there knows of a better blog editor?

Why don’t I just use WP’s online post interface? 1) it’s online, and sometimes it takes me a while to complete a post, and 2) it has these f**king HORRIBLE keyboard shortcuts that cause the whole entry to be erased sometimes. I know that would be easy to fix, but I haven’t bothered yet because I usually prefer to write offline anyhow.

Also, Picasa2 is sooo nice — BUT I can’t get past the fact that I don’t have a way to easily post images to WordPress. I spent some time a while back scripting up an interface btw iMatch and WP, and it works so well I don’t want to abandon it. Luckily the edits and captions I put in place with Picasa seem to stick when I suck the photos into iMatch, so not too much is lost. It’s really too bad that Picasa isn’t a more open platform – maybe someone has figured out the database format? Or maybe there isn’t a database… But then where are the tags and captions stored?

Picasa 2 sure is neat. The interface is so slick, and it seems to do just about everything the right way. With one big exception — I want to be able to integrate Picasa with WordPress, as I did with iMatch. I want my captions, etc to be preserved, and I want to be able to create a blog entry for each photo, so I can reference them in other posts.

If I ever have time, I’ll have to have a look at the XML output from Picasa; some others are thinking the same thing. The thing about this XML is that I’d have to write some code on the PC to parse the XML, upload the images, and create entries in the WordPress database. Granted, that’s what I did with iMatch, but if one was to do that, it would be nice to have access to Picasa’s database, instead of having to word off of a static export file.

For some reason I couldn’t find a good WordPress post bookmarklet, so here’s mine. was already set up to accept post_title and content; I added support for feeding the referring url into the trackback url field. This requires a small change in bookmarklet.php and edit-form.php.

Even though WP Comment Auth seems to work, I still end up having to “moderate” WordPress comment spam. The Three Strikes plugin works like SpamAssassin to automatically reject comments that score above a certain threshold. I applied couple of hacks noted by others to send notification when a comment is blocked, and also to display the comment before it’s rejected, in case it is in fact legit. Here’s my version of the plugin.

A while back I thought about adding image thumbnails to the WordPress edit screen to make it easier to browse image asset posts… It turns out that this is just one line of code at the end of the post loop in edit.php: \n"; }

OK, I know that I don’t look like a hacker. But I was just at the Technorati Hackathon — (or was it Hack-a-thon?). I borrowed Rich’s PC (well, it’s actually a Mac) and did a little hacking. I learned about IRC, sortof, and Matt and I chatted about WordPress.

We were talking about tags, categories and trackback, and Matt reminded me of, TopicExchange. At first glance, TP seems like Technorati, but without the delay of crawling — but also without the benefit of search. Ahem. But it does let you view by posts and pivot on tags (categories). They have an XMLRPC interface, so WP could be set up to ping TP for each category on a new blog post. I think that I’ll do that later on…

I was thinking — would it be useful for something like Technorati to support tags/categories? It might.