Why don’t you understand that this:

Actually i am not an active serfer, but this this site is really great, i will spread it through my friends.

is comment spam. I’ve recieved at least a dozen of these same comments, and you ask me to moderate them because you’re not sure if they are really spam. I can tell that they’re spam with a simple glance—i don’t even have to read them.

For that matter, if i get more than one comment with identical text, it’s almost certainly spam. Especially if the emails and URIs are all different.

I think you’re cool and all, Akismet, but you really need to step your game up.

Now for the behind-the-scenes portion. I’m using Mark Jaquith’s Subscribe To Comments 2.0 plugin for WordPress. Installation was too easy, just dropped the new files and activated. All i changed was the “from” email address for the email notifications. Let me know if you have any problems.

The 7 minutes x-men trailers did show Wolverine move. It is cool. cannot wait until it coming out

x-men will be a good movie. cannot wait until it coming out. Do you guys think there will be another x-men?

I starred it in Gmail as something to come back to as it was a little fishy, but i didn’t have time to look into it then. So tonight i cleared out my moderation queue, and went ahead and approved the comment. I was even about to reply comment, but paused for a second. The email address appeared to be real, and the linked site looked legit, “human”—real, fresh content. But it somehow lacked personality. And of course there was the illiterate writing in the comment, and the fact that x-men was linked twice to the same post about the movie on that site.

So Googling the comment text brought up many hits of the exact same comment on other sites with posts about the X-Men movie. Some even with short “hand-written” additions for that personal touch. I also found similar mass-comments linking to other posts on that site.

Look, steve, even if you posted all those comments by hand, you didn’t have the sincerity to write original thoughts—actual comments—about those posts. Copy-pasting links to your site ain’t gonna fly around here. If it smells like spam, it probably tastes like spam. And i’m not biting.

I noticed that Natalie Jost is feeding a sidebar on her homepage with some Ma.gnolia links—i assume from their Linkroll feature. And i just realized that the “Links for YYYY-MM-DD” you see everywhere are from del.icio.us’ daily link post feature.

Some thoughts on posting links:
• Markku’s Inline Links Dilemma. He brings up questions about the relevance of links to the regular posts and overall blog content, as well as their affect on the usability of his site.
• Dougal turned off auto link posting. He cited the primary negative of link posts is they aren’t as interesting as originally written content.
• Matt’s Asides catch “everything else.” They were created for all the little stuff that wasn’t quite big-post material.

Markku’s Recent Links plugin for WordPress makes monthly archivable link lists that are separate from the regular post flow. The Asides technique uses specially formatted normal posts that remain in the normal chronology. Both Markku and Matt cited Kottke’s remaindered links as inspiration. Daily posting tools from social bookmarking services are nice and automatic—if you bookmark a link, it’ll end up on your blog—but can get cluttery. They solve the simplicity problem i run into. But i loves me some metadata, and having timestamps and comments and stuff.

This makes me wonder, if you’re just bouncing folks to other sites, wouldn’t it be easier to just send them to your del.icio.us page?

It’s still way too difficult to make posts how i want them to be, keeping in mind semantic markup with proper linkage and all that. Concepts like the Flock browser sound great towards making that better, but in practice aren’t quite there yet—for me, at least. For example to make that link to the Flock page in the previous sentence, i opened a new tab, went to the Flock home page, copied the link, then came back to WordPress and pasted it. Sure, i could have just typed it in by hand since i knew the URL, but in most cases it’s longer and my way is quicker. I use the MakeLink extension for Firefox to copy HTML-formatted <a href=""> link code complete with title="" attributes.

Maybe i’m focusing too much on the wrong aspects.

If you’re expecting to see the LCD page, it has moved to miahz.com/projects/lcd/.

Now the WordPress-powered blog which used to live at the undiscoverable URL http://miahz.com/index.php is at the root, which should make things flow much better around here. I’m wondering if and hoping that it will boost the ratings of my blog posts, as they didn’t seem to be doing well with the hidden home page. It definitely was not SEO’d.

I used WordPress’ Pages feature for the new LCD project pages. They had been static HTML pages sitting in the root directory, and i wanted to try to move everything into one interface and database—managed by WordPress. I had never really done much with WP’s Pages or Templating before so wasn’t exactly sure how to do it. A little poking around at the Codex gave me a push in the right direction. I wanted to keep the exact same page design and layout for now, just changing the location.

I created a couple of new Pages: first, “Projects” with the slug of “projects”, then “LCD for Firefox” with the slug of “lcd-firefox” as a child of the Projects page. Now i had two empty Pages. At first i just copied and pasted the the source of the HTML file into the content box of the Edit Page screen. But that resulted in mangled content in a busted Kubrick layout. The problem is that the layout of Pages is determined by the Page Template they are set to use. So i needed to build a new template using the design of my HTML file. But bump that.

I quickly realized that i could just paste the HTML into the page template and link an empty Page to it. The content isn’t actually living in the database this way; i was essentially pointing to the same static HTML files via WordPress. Nevertheless it achieved the exact effect i was after—quickly. Repeat for the Screenshots Page which i set up as a child of the LCD Page. Just make sure to add the PHP comment that defines the template to the top of the file, and make a unique template name for each “static” page.

In this case the Title of the Page just determines what is listed in the blog sidebar – the page title displayed in the browser window is already in the HTML i pasted into the template. The Slug, however, is more important, as it defines where in the site structure the Page lives. With that in mind, i wanted to make sure these would be as permanent as possible. I wasn’t crazy about ‘projects/lcd-firefox’ being the address to this page. So i ended up shortening it to ‘projects/lcd’, and moved the Flock variation to a subpage at ‘projects/lcd/for-flock’.

Oh yeah, the only other thing i had to do was correct the links to CSS and image files in the Pages templates, as they now lived deep in the bowels of WordPress. And i think that’s all there was to it.

Next: adding some furnishings. Then maybe some redecorating.

technorati tags: WordPress, WordPress 2.0, upgrade, blogging

• My most-used extension is DictionarySearch, hands down. Because i spell only as well as the closest dictionary. And because i have it linked to Answers.com which pulls info from a bunch of great reference sources. And because it works from within textareas so you can check stuff you’re writing. It’s one of those things that’s so useful, yet so terribly simple that it should come installed from the factory.
  Install DictionarySearch.
• I also end up using MakeLink a lot when citing site links for blog posts. I have it set to copy both the URL and site title and format it into a proper HTML link with a title attribute.
  Install MakeLink 2.0.3.
• TripleSelect is an extension that i’ve grown really fond of. It makes Firefox replicate the standard Microsoft behavior of selecting the entire paragraph on a triple-click. Firefox normally only selects the line. The beautiful thing about it is that you can still only select the line by doing 2.5 clicks (double+hold down).
  Install TripleSelect 1.7.
• I’m glad to see that miniT (drag+indicator) is now built-in functionality in Firefox 1.5. (I’ve had the drag indicator themed in LCD for a while now.)
• SessionSaver is a life saver. It just works. Ironically, i haven’t experienced many crashes lately, but i don’t miss a beat if i do.
  Install SessionSaver.
• Couldn’t do without Adblock Plus. Almost literally. Flash ads bring my aged machine to its knees. Coupled with Filterset.G, you’ll never have to look at another ad again. (The filter rules can be a bit agressive sometimes—blocking actual content, but they’re constantly being refined.)
  Install AdBlock Plus 0.5.11.2.
  Install Filterset.G Updater 0.2.9.
• I read that Link Toolbar for 1.5 would require a separate extension to place it on the status bar. But i just realized that i pretty much only use it for navigating up through directories in a URL, so i’m gonna try going back to Digger, which i haven’t used since the Firebird era.
  Install Digger 1.0
• I use IE View occassionaly to peep sites from the other side of the fence, or if some page doesn’t work in Firefox.
  Install IE View.
• You used to be able to drag any bit of text (non-linked URLs, domain names, etc.) to the tab bar and Firefox would try to open it in a new tab. Somewhere along the way after 1.0 that stopped working. Right-Click-Link fills that void.
  Install Right-Click-Link 1.1.1
  Dragging text to the tabbar seems to be fixed in 1.5, so i don’t need this extension anymore.
• I’ve used ScreenGrab a little, but i’m not thrilled that it uses Java. Too slow on my machine. Not sure if i’m going to reinstall it in 1.5.

I had a few others installed, but never used them. Out with the old.

technorati tags: Firefox, extensions, Firefox extensions, Firefox 1.5