Command-Tab

Saturday, September 3rd, 2005 at 2:15 AM

I just implemented Gravatar support on Command-Tab. If you haven’t heard of them before (I hadn’t until recently), gravatars are up to 80×80 pixel images displayed alongside your name when you leave a comment on a website.

Gravatars differ from normal avatar images in that they are stored on a server — gravatar.com — and universally referenced by the email address you use to comment, as opposed to uploading the same image to multiple sites. Best of all, signup is free.

Enabling Gravatars was quite painless, with the installation of the WordPress gravatar plugin, and some minor editing of comments.php. The gravatars are visible on any post with comments, and anyone who has not yet signed up will have a default faceless icon (borrowed from digg).

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 3rd, 2005 at 2:15 am and is filed under WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Monday, August 29th, 2005 at 3:35 PM

Lately, I’ve been getting a ton of comment spam on Command-Tab. Fortunately, WordPress (combined with an extensive “bad word” blacklist) has been able to catch 100% of it, so you never see it. However, I have to deal with the comments held in moderation and actually delete them. I’m wondering how to stop it altogether…

I’ve considered several options, including challenge/response schemes like a question or a captcha image script, but I want to make it as easy as possible for real humans to leave comments (without registering — I don’t like that idea), but near impossible for an automated machine.

For now, the spam is from a specific few IP addresses, which I’ve blocked altogether by blacklisting them in my .htaccess file. What are your suggestions on stopping comment spam?

This entry was posted on Monday, August 29th, 2005 at 3:35 pm and is filed under WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Wednesday, July 13th, 2005 at 4:16 PM

Several people have emailed me, asking how I managed to separate the comments and trackbacks following my posts. It was surprisingly easy, thanks to a different comments.php file by scriptygoddess. For the most part, it was just opening the file and pasting in that new script. I modified it slightly to work with my CSS, and added some small images as well, but now all content is separated as it should be.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 13th, 2005 at 4:16 pm and is filed under WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Saturday, May 14th, 2005 at 1:41 AM

I’ve just added a new gallery section to my site featuring photos from my various projects. The storage and bandwidth are provided by Flickr and imported into my site using the great Flickr Gallery WordPress plugin, which I modified to suit my needs. Go check it out!

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 14th, 2005 at 1:41 am and is filed under WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.