boakes.org » WordPress

My colleague Barrett Abernethy has drunk from the WordPress fountain for the first time and found it to be good. He’s writing at bv2.co.uk on coding for GPUs, games consoles and (I predict) cycling.

One of the coolest future applications that was discussed at WordCamp UK last weekend is the WordPress client for the Apple iPhone. Well, it’s just arrived on the iTunes store (here), and I’m using it to write this short test article. More…

The very good news on the grapevine is that the first WordCamp UK has, already broken even (through sponsorship and ticket sales) with a full 10 days of ticket sales still to go. This is particularly good news since it pretty much guarantees the success of this years event, and future events. If you’ve been thinking about popping along to say hello, now’s a very good time to get your ticket!

WordCamp is coming to the UK.  WordCamp is a weekend event where the users and developers of WordPress (i.e. members of the general public) can get together for a series of formal presentations, less formal discussions and informal refreshments.

I’ve run this site on WordPress since 2003.  I’ve also written a couple of plugins for WordPress. So that’s why I’m interested in WordCamp.  It’s a chance for me to put some faces to names and hopefully to help others along the path to publishing using zero cost, free (as in liberty), open source software that adheres to, and promotes global open standards.

If you’re a user of WordPress, or if you’ve gone further and started to develop your own plugins, or if you’d like to start a website but don’t know where to start, or if you’re generally interested in the development of open standards or open source content management systems (and the satellite web services that support them) - WordCamp may be of interest to you.

Find out more at the WordCamp UK website.

Something’s broken on the database that runs this site, specifically there’s b0rkage in the comment table, and the ssh daemon is not reachable. Perhaps it’s to do with the larger than normal amount of spam that’s been arriving today (for “larger than normal” read: one metric truckload). More info later after I’ve had a poke around. Film at 11. More…

I’m in the process of rewriting the Worst Offenders plugin for the soon-to-be-released WordPress 2.5. Before I make a tested and polished version of the code globally available, I’d be interested to hear from anyone who’d like to alpha test it.

As before Worst Offenders works cooperatively with other anti-spam plugins: its primary purpose is identifying and deleting the comments that are 100% definitely spam (sent by the very worst offenders) so that any “false positives” (sent by real genuine humans) can be rescued from the spam bin! More…

It’s only 15 months since I mentioned the rocket-like acceleration of Akismet which went from a standing start to the point where it had fended off a million spam messages for its users in just 4 months. If things had continued at that pace it would have squashed a cool 5 million spams by now. More…

The plugin system on BBPress is still rather rudimentary (you create a folder called “my-plugins”) and any php that exists therein is considered to be an activated plugin. The good news here is, that (a) it works and (b) it’s so similar to the WordPress that many plugins will magically work without modification. My Google Analytics Plugin for Wordpress is (almost) one such example. More…

BBPress has been released today (try it). For quite some time now I’ve been quietly using BBPress for managing thoughts and discussions on another website. This has been possible for two reasons: firstly, the pre-release version of BBPress has been quite stable and secondly, I’ve been using it in a password protected area so it’s not been open to public use and abuse. More…

My spam counter in Akismet has been steadily rising of late, and it’s been approaching 10,000 caught spams very quickly. Yesterday it went through 9,950 and with my average of over 100 spams per day it should have gone through the 10,000 barrier by now. But instead I’ve had about 3 spams today. Did I just find an off button for spam? More…