SSWI — When in doubt, buff it out.

It has been roughly one month since I started my little end user tagging experiment, so let’s take a look at the results.

Mostly Harmless

I am sure some of you are wondering where I am lately, and what I am up to.  Quite a few irons are in the fire currently, let me show you a couple of them.

On the book front

Hot on the heels of my Blog Design Solutions experience I was offered a book deal of my own by Apress. I am 5 chapters in on a book that covers development with WordPress.  Aren’t you all excited?

Just a quick update for CJD Notepad.  You can find full notes on Notepads official home, there is one big addition and two smaller ones.

Why I love Open Source Software

CJD Notepad has moved out of beta testing and into a release phase.

I have squashed all the bugs that were identified in the beta, and Notepad is now feature complete, at least for this iteration.

So my buddy Kartooner tells me he had this great idea for a plugin.  What if we had a place to store information gathered for a post that was outside of the post mechanism, a place to take “notes”?  He had looked around (apparently not very hard), and couldn’t find one, so would I like to write if for him?

Oh and apparently our Binary Bonsai friend thought it sounded keen as well.

There is now a Spanish Localization of Spam Nuker, you can find it here: soteke’s weblog: Spam Nuker.  The download link is near the end of the article.  Thanks soteke for the great work!

I have released a pretty massive update to Spam Nuker 1.5(formerly known as Mass Delete)… already.  Sad I know, but some comments on the other announcement got me to thinking about an extra feature.  What is that cool new feature you ask… you can now select comments to mark as… NOT SPAM!  So if a comment has been mislabeled for some reason you can easily fix it.

Back in September of 2004 I released a plugin that allowed you to delete large amounts of spam with one click.

Some backstory

Basically one afternoon I was hit with a wave of spam that resulted in 1500+ comments awaiting moderation that were all spam.  That was not a fun prospect, deleting all of those comments via the admin UI.  So I took a trip to the terminal and issued one command, which wiped them all out.

So taking that experience I created a plugin that allowed you to delete comments by author, IP, email or URI.  Now fast forward to WordPress 1.5.  1.5 has some wonderful toosl to help you combat spam built in, a blacklist feature, moderation by keywords and so on.  At first I was stoked at how well these tools were working, I didn’t see any real waves of spam hitting my site, I was assuming that 1.5 was sending all that evil to /dev/null/ like a good little monkey.

I however, was very wrong.

Today on #wordpress my buddy Morydd (pronounced Mo - ry - th) was making some suggestions for novel uses of gravatars which sparked something in my mind.

I am a fan of heatmaps, but could never get excited about having one here.  I don’t care how many posts I have in each of my categories or any of that jazz.  Now what I am interested in is commenters and the amount of commenting that is going on here at Sillyness.

I really should have provided a link to a post that had alot of the coloring going on so you could really see it in action, so here you go.

So I have a new plugin running on my site at the moment that I whipped up today.

Well I guess it is now okay to talk about this little endeavour since khaled has seen fit to announce it and all.

Wow, talk about a “dream team” Michael and khaled are both fine designers and I think between Joshua and I we can handle anything code-foo wise that should rear its ugly head.