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Thanks Akismet. In the less than two-year history of this blog, the erstwhile spam-blocking service has filtered 10,000 pieces of spam for me. Compare this to the roughly 250 actual comments I’ve gotten, and you’ve got an idea of the pain and suffering that email administrators and others who deal with spam daily have to go through.

akismet, spam, blog

Designed by the Armenian Eagle (Armenio to his friends), Category Converter is the only plugin you’ll ever need to keep your blog categories perfectly organized. This is pretty much the simplest and downright fastest way to convert categories in the popular Wordpress blogging software. Not only does it allow you to move stories from one category to another, it also helps you easily reduce and combine existing categories that you may no longer need. Plus, it’s fast. Very. Fast.

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wordpress, plugin, wordpress plugin, category converter, convert categories, blog

The Blackberry: Sweet, juicy….Internet.

As PDAs and similar handheld devices continue to advance, it becomes more and more realistic to consider them in one’s site design, in order to reach the widest audience possible. Since I happen to have a Blackberry right now, I’ve been trying various sites in order to see what’s compatible and what fails miserably.

The usual suspects, such as Google and Gmail, performed flawlessly, as expected. The folks over at Google seem to a have a special little spot in their hearts for the mobile user, and their most popular offerings don’t disappoint in this regard.

Once I was sure that I’d maxed out my PDA’s capability to process client-side markup and scripting (you have to manually add JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and XML support, otherwise you’re basically running Internet Explorer 4.0 on a teeny-tiny screen–a browsing experience that would make even the most desperate bsuite-hound run for the nearest Mennonite community), I headed over to this blog.

The front page loaded flawlessly, though it takes quite a while, and the Blackberry’s status bar indicates a laborious process of running scripts and proccessing CSS at what is, relatively, a snail’s pace. What surprised me the most was the appearance of a photo that went with one of the stories, nicely formatted and filling the screen. It’s easy to scroll through and read posts, click on related articles, and do pretty much anything else you’d want.

With the front page test complete, I tried logging in to the admin section. Navigating to /wp-admin yielded a standard userID/password dialog, and within 30 seconds, I was on the admin dashboard, free to click on any tab, change any options I wanted, and even post an article. As far as I can tell, WP works with the Blackberry, or rather, the Blackberry has no problems handling WordPress. It’s a far cry from the cell-phone internet I’m used to.

I plan to continue trying out sites to see where the Blackberry might get stuck. I’ll post if I find anything, and update this entry if I find any more significant sites or webapps that work.

UPDATE: I found a page with a really nice intro to CSS and web development on the Blackberry. Read about it here.

Filler Bunny: He takes up space

One of the best ways to add life to your blog posts is to include images with the text–your reader’s eye is naturally drawn to the large visual well before the text itself, and the addition of a picture can bring an element or realism to your post that would normally be missed. Many templates available on the web, however, fail to include a simple way to add captions to your images, limiting what you can do with them. For example, anyone posting a picture of, say, two dogs would be hard-pressed to indicate which was Rover and which Fido without the aid of a caption. The easiest solution is to place the image in a table with a caption, of course, but this adds several ungainly lines of code which you must type in by hand in order to add a single captioned image. Even copying and pasting, this method of posting captioned images is a serious pain at best.

Thanks to WordPress‘ QuickTags (the row of buttons directly above the post content itself on the Write page), however, it’s relatively simple to edit the ‘img’ button to create custom captioned images.

First, replace the function edInsertImage in /wp-includes/js/quicktags.js with the following javascript:

function edInsertImage(myField) {
var myValue = prompt(’Enter the URL of the image’, ‘http://’);
if (myValue) {
myValue = ‘<img src="’
+ myValue
+ ‘" alt="’ + prompt(’Enter a description of the image’, ”)
+ ‘" />’;
myValue = ‘<table class="alignright" width="’
+ prompt(’Enter the image width’, ‘250′)
+ ‘" border="’
+ prompt(’Border size:’, ‘0′)
+ ‘" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">’
+ ‘<caption align="bottom"><b>’
+ prompt(’Caption:’, ”)
+ ‘</b></caption><tr><td>’
+ myValue
+ ‘</tr></td></table>’;
edInsertContent(myField, myValue);
}
}

Now, at this point, once you’ve replaced your current quicktags.js, the ‘img’ button on the write page may or may not do what you want it to do. Chances are that you’ll have to add to your CSS as well before you can reap the benefits of the modified ‘img’ button, though. If so, place the following in your template’s CSS sheet:

table.alignright {
padding: 4px;
margin: 0 0 2px 7px;
display: inline;
}

table.alignleft {
padding: 4px;
margin: 0 7px 2px 0;
display: inline;
}

That should do it. Now whenever you go to add an image with the quicktags img button, it will prompt you for all the appropriate parameters to create a nicely captioned image like the one above. Should you wish, you can add other elements to the javascript, such as the ability to choose the color of the photo’s border.

UPDATE: Make sure you refresh the ‘Write Post’ page of WordPress after you modifiy your quicktags.js file. Otherwise, the cached (unmodified) version will continue to be used.

The WordPress development team announced the release of the new Widgets feature today. The idea behind these Widgets is apparently that they allow you to edit your blog’s formatting and design (in this case the sidebar) through a GUI, eliminating the need for coding knowledge. Although I’m a bit afraid that, like the WYSIWYG editor which made its way into WordPress 2.0, the new Widgets might prove more cumbersome than helpful, I also think it’s important to look at the big picture of blogging as it exists today. There are hundreds of thousands of people out there with excellent blog content and the crappiest looking template imaginable, because they lack the knowledge to edit the source code directly. This tool will help them incorporate the little additions and gadgets that make the blogging experience enjoyable for the reader, without forcing them to spend countless hours debugging changes on multiple browsers and multiple OS’s. Additionally, since WordPress claims that writing Widgets should be as easy as writing plugins, the open source world should soon be contributing a plethora of them to match the output of plugins that we currently see. I know that it’s popular to hate things like this within the IT community, where obscure wisdom is prized as a status symbol, and the general attitude is ‘if you can’t do it the hard way, you’re not worthy of doing it at all,’ but if Widgets can help expand the two-way communication that thrives on blogs, more power to ‘em.

To create the previous post, I obviously needed to incorporate some Fireworks HTML into WordPress 2.0’s post editor in order to show the example. Having long since given up on the WYSIWYG editor that shipped with this new release, I started by trying various methods to get the image into the post by cutting and pasting various bits of HTML and JavaScript from the fireworks .html source file. The most important thing to remember is that you need to include Macromedia’s JS functions in the header of your theme, as high up in the code as possible, but at least before the CSS. What you’ll need looks like this: