Stan’s Obligatory Blog

We haven’t had any comment spam since I implemented my home-made CAPTCHA some time ago. But last night we got hit by TrackBack spam. 293 separate spam trackbacks. Sheesh. So I went in and deleted them by hand in MySQL:

mysql> delete from wp_comments where comment_content like ‘%poker%’;

Then I implemented the ‘moderate-trackbacks’ plugin from http://dev.wp-plugins.org/browser/moderate-trackbacks

If it wasn’t so annoying, it would be funny…

I see that both Karl Elvis and Laura Lemay are doing the Technorati tags thing on their blogs. Sensing a bandwagon, I thought I should find out more about this. Turns out that I’m already in it, and never knew it. My blog categories are all automagically turned into tags when I post. As an example, look at stuff tagged as ‘life in l.a.‘ and there we are.

Of course, putting tag links on posts is a bit of a problem. I tried editing some posts and inserting the links by hand, but that’s kind of a pain. Ideally, there should be some WordPress plugin that just makes a footer on each post with links to the tags based on the categories of the post. But if such a beast exists, I haven’t found it yet. And I don’t feel like hacking WordPress right now to add it myself. So this will likely remain a problem for a while.

And there you have it.

A while back, I had the number one match in Google for the phrase “I hate Texas”. That was before I moved our web site to the new domain name. After the move, Google crawled us again, but that page had fallen to #73. But now that we’ve been on our new domain name for over four months, it’s climbing again. Today I see that my page is now up to number 34 in a search for “I hate Texas“. Things are looking up.

I saw that Ryan at News to Hughes joined up with Google Adsense recently. I serve about four times the traffic of his site, so I thought I’d give it a try. So far, I’ve only put ads on three sets of pages:

http://www.1134.org/stan/dot-com – My gallery of dead dot-com web pages.
http://www.1134.org/stan/tattoo-faq/display.php – The interactive database of tattoo artist reviews
http://www.1134.org/stan/tattoos/gallery – Photo albums of tattoo conventions

These are the pages that people mostly seem to come to from Google searches, so they seemed like good places to try it out. And I see today that I got my first $0.03 from a click-through. Woo-Hoo!

I added some logic to our main page to have it automatically pull out the last 10 blog posts marked with a category of ‘adventures’. It then uses these to make a list of links to the posts on the front page. All of our older adventures have been relegated to the ‘old adventures‘ index page.

A long time ago, I wrote a little PHP routine for our main home page to automatically add holiday decoration at the top of the page. I adapted it for WordPress today. I made a file ‘wp-holidaydecor.php’ which queries the database to get the next holiday and its lead time. If there is a holiday coming up, it calls a function to insert an appropriate image from the ‘holidayimages’ directory. I had to hack the main WordPress ‘index.php’ file and add one line:

< ?php include (ABSPATH . 'wp-holidaydecor.php'); ?>

I added this right after the ‘<div id=”content”>’ line.

The other part of this is the ‘holidays’ table I added to the database. I wrote a little Perl script that calculates the dates of the holidays and populates this table a year at a time. Right now, it’s filled through 2005.

I added an image to the header on this page, following the instructions I found here:

http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/graphicalcss/header/index.html

The picture is one that I took last Saturday when I was riding over Mt. Hollywood in Griffith Park.

I modified ‘quicktags.js’ to default to opening links in a new window. I found the instructions for how to do this here.

For a long time, my “I hate Texas” page has been either #1 or near it in Google. I recently moved our whole site from its old domain to a new one, and Google has finally crawled the new site and gotten the current URL for the page. But now I see it’s fallen all the way to page seven in the search results. I suspect that this has something to do with how Google calculates page rank, and the fact that the ‘1134.org’ domain site is relatively new. It will be interesting to watch and see if the rank of that page climbs over the next few months.

Cathy had a problem with her Mozilla profile, and I had to create a new one. Then she was complaining about how the messages were displayed. They were shown threaded, and the threads were collapsed by default. ‘*’ worked to expand the threads, but I was not able to find a way to make that the default. So I had to set it to display unthreaded. This setting was under ‘View/Sort By’. Then she said that it wasn’t showing which messages had been replied. I found this under the menu under the little square icon at the right-hand side of the ‘Subject/Sender/etc’ line. This chose which fields to display, and I just added ‘Status’ to the list. After all this, I thought I ought to write it down so if this happens again, I’ll have some record of what I did.