Who is this is?

I recently discovered that, unbeknownst to me, my Akismet spam blocker plugin was actually doing something–blocking comments!  The only problem is.. it was blocking my own comments.

So, I think it may have caught a few other visitors’ remarks as well, and automatically deleted them after 15 days.  If you commented here and were confused to see your comment missing, that’s probably why.  Sorry

Anyway, I really hope more people will post and comment here, so feel free.  If you register an account and post something, don’t be alarmed when it doesn’t show up right away.  I just have to OK it and change your userlevel, so you’ll be able to submit on your own from then on.

Edit:  I almost forgot…

Suddenly everything has changed..

Now that’s a dramatic (song) title.

So, I put some Google Ads on the site a while back, and have been playing with them since. I’m not sure why–it was mostly Julie’s idea, but she got kicked off Google AdSense, since she’s a bad, unloving, disloyal person. I’ve most recently scaled them down in size from “pretty-damn-huge” to “not-quite-so-large,” and I think I like it. It’s fun having ads, since it makes me feel like Gonad.org is very important (beside it being the underground hub of all internet activity–can someone help me substantiate this?).

I had been thinking about other ad options (since I seem to be developing an ad fetish), and J-List came to mind. At first I thought, “ads! I don’t need no stinkin’ (uh, additional) ads!” but AJ randomly mentioned J-List’s ads while we were chatting, and it pushed me over the edge.

If you haven’t been there, they provide an amazingly large assortment of just about everything related to Japanese popular culture–from anime to porn, with a little Domo-kun on the side. They also have very eye-catching ads, which I’ve noticed on a number of websites I visit regularly. I’m actually very proud to put J-List on Gonad.org!

So This Is The New Year..

Happy New Year

Anyone have any good resolutions? I forgot to make one, whoops!

Ok, I decided that my New Year’s resolution should be to upgrade to WordPress 2.0. So, I did. Therefore my resolution was a success and I have nothing to worry about. The upgrade from 1.5 was a piece of cake (as is usually the case), but I was forced to create a WordPress.com Blog (that I will most likely not use, but you never know..) to get a WordPress API key for the Akismet anti-spam plugin, which is included with 2.0.

I don’t think anything important is broken, but I haven’t taken a chance to look at things very well yet. If you see any problems, please post a comment to this post and let me know! I only know of one little hack I added (to a divider button to the post buttons) that I’ll have to revisit, since the entire post writing interface has been amazingly rewritten, but I don’t think I’ll worry about it yet Hm.. and a couple plugins are acting funky, now that I look at it, but they seem to have been mostly replaced by new features included in WordPress 2.0 anyway (And a couple css things need some tweaking, waaarg! Oh well, at least nothing significant is broken!)

Death Cab for Cutie - The New Year (Live in Chicago 7-24-05)

Has there ever been more exciting news?

I’ve finally taken the time to smack (nearly) all the old posts (look to the “Pages” links on the sidebar!), that were lost from this site over a year ago, onto a page. Sure, I could have converted them to actual posts instead of just putting them in a giant, ugly page, but that takes effort (and actually seems ridiculous and useless, dispite my joy of ridiculousness piled atop uselessness).

Soon after the top-most post on this page, due to a catastrophic, world-ending event (the server ran out of disk space due to my needless image uploading page.. that ironically had outlived this non-content until now), the follow posts were lost to the past.

Luckily, I’m stupid, so it didn’t occur to me until a few weeks ago that there would be a google cache of the archive page. So, um, here it is, badly formatted with broken links and images for your viewing pleasure!

As ridiculous as it may seem, there are those who were devotees of gonad.org then and still are now. I appreciate that they keep coming back, although sporatically (and with next to no content to give!!!@!@)!

Oh yeah, and luckily the link for 9 Naked Men still works! Phew…

The Murder Mystery…

I love giving my posts titles that have no relation to what I’m writing.. especailly song titles or quotes.. some of you may have noticed. Who can name the artist? Anyway!

I’m writing this using the Blog Post functionality in Flock. What’s Flock? We’ll, I had no idea either until I read about it on Wang’s blog a few moments ago. It’s a fairly new, free browser, that focuses on letting you integrate things like blogging, sharing photos and the lot into your browsing experience. I’ve only had a chance to try this blogging feature so far, but it deifnately seem to be pretty slick already. Flock is open source, and based on the Mozilla code base. Check out Flock’s developer page for the latest preview release.

As for the blog integration.. it recognized my WordPress install as Moveable Type while I was setting it up to post, but that seems to have worked alright, thus far. It automatically detects your type of blog, prompts for the login information, and that’s about it. Though, I have yet to click the “Publish” button, so time will tell

Why I was intially writing this post was to mention some minor updates I had made to the site:

WordPress is now up to date with version 1.5.2. Bad Behavior as well, with version 1.2.3.

For anyone upgrading from WordPress 1.5.1 to 1.5.2, be sure to take note of the special (and quicker) instructions on the upgrade, noted in the WordPress Codex.

Now, to see if Flock can really post this..

rofl.. Ok it couldn’t. Good thing I saved it elsewhere. I’ll try to get it working with WordPress tomorrow

I tried again, and it worked.. I think something broke when I tried to save my post as a draft and then post it.. and it made a weird post without displaying it on the front page.. that lead to a 404.. Oh well, whatever! I’m still happy

Bwarr

The file linked here is a program I made a few years ago, using some complex code that simulated the interaction of bodies in a galaxy. I made it better.. with some flying triangles.

The real reason I’m posting this is to try out yet another new WordPress plugin I’ve installed called LMB^Box FilePress. It’s supposed to make the uploading and posting of images and files in posts much easier. So far, it works pretty well, especially for being in beta.

I’ve also installed LMB^Box Comment Quicktags, which adds quicktags above the textarea, when you’re commenting on an article. This one works great, and is quite easilly customizable. 19 thumbs up.

Egads, the transparency on that image makes it look like rotting ballsacks.

I fixed it in the lamest way possible, phew..

Cripes..

First of all, I didn’t stick to my stance on not capitalizing, I’ve noticed. Oh well.

I’ve been getting quite a bit of spam in my shoutbox, which uses Wordspew from Jalenack. I was going to write a comment on Jalenack about it, to see if there was a good solution, but to my surprise, my question was already answered! Yes, exciting.

So, anyway.. Bad Behavior is a plugin for WordPress (and a number of other content management whateveryouwanttocallthems) that does some kind of voodoo magic, and blocks spam!

Bad Behavior was designed and built by watching actual spambots which harvested email addresses, posted comment spam, and used fake referrers. By logging their entire HTTP requests and comparing them to HTTP requests of legitimate users, it is possible to detect most spambots. Bad Behavior blocks spambots with a 412 error. It also has three configurable User-Agent lists for spambots and other malicious bots which actually identify themselves. Bad Behavior can use string matching or regular expression matching against a User-Agent.

Bad Behavior also will target bots which fail to obey robots.txt. At this time some of these bots are banned by User-Agent, though in the future Bad Behavior will detect them automatically.

Sounds pretty promising, so I’ve installed it here. From briefly reading their website, they still have a number of features in the works, planned for future releases.

Hopefully Bad Behavior along with Spam Poison will keep all those nasty spambots away from the black hole of negative content that is gonad.org.

I’ve made a slightly useful plugin for WordPress!

I get really annoyed with a long line of text with no breaks (spaces, carriage returns etc) gets all up in my koolaid… er. When long lines don’t wrap it sucks. They’ll go all nutty and flop outside of your nicely dsigned CSS containers and such. If you don’t know what I mean, you arn’t quite anal-retentive enough yet. I shall demonstrate.

This_is_an_example_of_a_really_long_and_annoying_link_text_which_would_normally_not_wrap_correctly_and_mess_something_up_but_don’t_take_my_word_for_it_god_I_love_LeVar_Burton_Mmmm

Normally, such a long link would hopefully not find its way onto your site or blog or whatever, but if it did… I don’t know what might happen. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats… living together… mass hysteria!

I’ve been using methods similar to this plugin for fixing this problem for a few years, but always using some clunky regular expressions I never quite got right. This time, however, I found a neatly written PHP function called htmlwrap() v1.3 by Brian Huisman.

So.. yep. I wrote a solid 5 or 6 lines of code and his function does the rest.

I couldn’t find any plugins like this for WordPress (which makes me think I wasn’t searching hard enough), so enjoy.

Break Lines v1.0 - Download

10-12-05 — Ugh, this thing has some kind of bug I haven’t taken time to figure out yet. It seems to cause certain posts to not be displayed. Use at your own risk for the moment!

Hmm..

“A page optimized for 800×600 should have a maximum width of about 760 pixels. ” as one website says.

Well, I don’t think they accounted for quote-spewing Stimpy in the background of the page, did they? He’s barely viewable at 1024×768 This makes me sad.

I have to remember that I only know 3 or 4 other people that actually run 1600×1200, the next time I get ambitious. If there is a next time!

Anywho.. answer my resolution poll on the right please.

Speaking of my poll, I got the plugins for both the poll and shoutbox from Jalenack’s Blog. They are both done in AJAX and are pretty friggin’ amazing. I’ve been hearing more and more about AJAX but this is my first hands-on experience seeing it in action. Wired has an interesting article about such things.

PS: I think I’m enjoying WordPress far too much.

Not that anyone has probably even accidentally visited this site since the last post, but..

I’ve added a few pages of old content into the mix, in case someone has entire too much time on their hands and/or needs something to commit suicide to.

Look to the right under the “Pages” header.