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

Surprisingly, to me anyway, I have much less 'tag spam' than expected.  I think I have blown away maybe 40 tags that were spammy (profanity, single letters and gibberish mostly).  On the upside every post I have written since quietly going live has been tagged by end users.

My next step is to look at augmenting the built-in WordPress search with the tags that I am gathering.  I might just write a replacement search for the site that uses tags and content indexing... who knows.

In case you were wondering

Yes, I am planning on releasing my customized version of UTW as soon as I can. My apologies to Chris Pirillo, things have been crazy yo.

Right now I am using a 3 tier classification structure for my content: categories, author tags and user submitted tags.  After a year of collecting this could be very interesting.

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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?

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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

Everyone give a big round of applause to http://economysizegeek.com/ for contributing the code to get the bookmarklets going.  Very much appreciated.

Go on and download it and be amazed!

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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.

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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.

I am such a push over

So I of course said, "Sure that would be easy.. all it really does is throw data into the DB and then take it back out again."  What a maroon.  I had forgotten how much I like to tinker, and how I like to add features out the whazihoogee to stuff I write.  So a few hours turned into 3 days of an hour here, two or three there.

I have been asked to expound on why this is better than using a draft or private post.  Well for me

, and it is all about me, it is better since I am using the post_id in my design.  So if I am planning a longer article, say like my Secrets of WP Theming series, but want to shoot off a couple of smaller posts between, then I don't have to worry about the numbers getting out of order. >

For other people, I have no idea.  Kartooner and Michael think it is a good idea, so I could really care less.  3 people wanting to use it is enough to convince me it needs to be written.

So if you would like to check out this plugin, and help beta test, then by all means go over to the announcement page and read through the notes and download it.

And oh yes, I know there is another plugin that does almost the same thing, I found out about it today... but I like mine better, so there.

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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.

So yeah you can grab 1.5.1 in the same exact place as 1.5, enjoy.

There is now a changelog included in the plugin itself, on the plugin manager screen you will see a changelog link in the plugins description.  Click the link and be astounded.

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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.

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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.

This lead me to create Commenter Heat Map.  You can see it in action over at this page.  Now as the page says this is a work in progress and not ready to be released into the wild, but I am hoping to have it ready for anyone who wants it by the end of the week, along with my commenter coloring plugin.

So you know the drill, check it out and leave me some feedback.

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