John Hesch

Here is my latest list of blacklisted words that I maintain on my WordPress blog. Download the file (Right-click and save or click, copy and paste) and add the list of words into your Comment Blacklist located under Options and Discussion. I receive over 500 spam comments a day and very, very few get through. If they do, I add the keywords to this list.

Here is my latest list of blacklisted words that I maintain on my WordPress blog. Download the file, unzip it, and copy and paste the list of words into your Comment Blacklist located under Options and Discussion.

Once again I am offering my list of blacklisted words that I maintain on my WordPress blog. Download the file, unzip it, and copy and paste the list of words into your Comment Blacklist located under Options and Discussion.

Update: WordPress has released version 1.5.2 which fixes the below problem and addresses some other issues. Upgrade as soon as you can.

WordPress has issued a security alert instructing all WordPress 1.5.1.3 users to upgrade their wp-settings.php file if their server has register globals = ON. The alert instructs you on how to test if your server has register globals = on and then provides the updated wp-settings.php file.

All WordPress users are encouraged to first make sure they are using version 1.5.1.3 and then to follow the instructions in the security alert.

It looks like Blogging Pro hasn’t had much activity lately and there have been a bunch of really cool plugins for WordPress released. Here are some of my favorites.

Auto Links Plugin for WordPress: Automatically turns keywords into links. If you write Google the plugin will linkify it for you. The cool thing is if I write Google again, it will not linkify it. Only the first time the keyword is mentioned.

The only complaint I have with this plugin is the list of keywords is listed in the plugin itself, making adding and deleting words a pain in the butt. What would be nice is having an options page in the admin section of WordPress where I can edit the words.

Oh, I almost forgot. Did you notice the image next to the first mention of WordPress and Google? This plugin will automatically add an icon next to all external links. This can be turned on or off, your choice.

iTunesSpy: is another cool plugin which inserts and displays the recently played tracks in iTunes on your blog. You first have to install the ituneswatcher 2 application (version 2.0.0.2 or higher). iTunesSpy took me a little while to figure out but once I got it setup it was simple to use. You can see it in action to the right of this page.

One of the problems I’m having is the link to Amazon does not include my Amazon Associate ID which I entered into the options page. I wrote the author to inquire about this but have not heard back. The other problem I am having is when trying to display the time the song played, I’m not getting the correct gmt_offset. The best I can tell is the plugin should pull my WordPress settings for time offset but it’s not doing that.

If you want to display your iTunes music, this is still the way to go.

Transpose Email Plugin: This WordPress plugin encrypts your email address if you decide to add it to your blog. I prefer to use a contact form but it’s easier for the user to just click a mailto: link and communicate through their email program.

I released the WordPress 1.5+ theme called Pink Winter today. I also reorganized my Projects page, which now includes my current and past projects as well as my WordPress themes.

I’ve had a new WordPress Theme sitting on my desktop for about six months now. I have been meaning to package it up for distribution but haven’t had the time. I worked on it this evening and I think it’s ready to release. I need to look it over once more, which I’ll do sometime on Friday.

In the meantime, here is a peak at the new theme. Pink Winter is an open source web design which I converted to a WordPress 1.5 theme.

It seems I had a problem with my Spam Protection which was causing my comments to bork. I think I have fixed the problem. I tried a test comment and it worked fine.

I also have a problem with my RSS feed. It appears to only capture posts prior to the 2nd of February. I’m checking into that.

I added the Subscribe To Comments plugin. I don’t receive a lot of comments but I know it was used on my KZION blog so I thought I should add it here too.

This plugin provides a check box on the comment page allowing the commenter to subscribe to any comments that may come in after their they’ve written their comment. I noticed a new addition to the plugin and that is adding text next to the commenter name if they are subscribed to the posts comments. Great idea!

Another precaution that I added to my WordPress installation is Auto-Close Comments. This is a Plugin that closes comments to posts that are older then xx number of days, leaving comment spammers with less posts to try to spam.

Update: Removed plugin as it caused too many Headers already sent errors. I was able to overcome all of them but the RSS feeds.
Another update: Found the problem. There is an extra space at the end of the plugin code. It may of gotten there by my copy and pasting the code to my text editor. I reinstalled the plugin and don’t see the previous errors.

Tonight I received a comment to one of my posts and it was placed in moderation probably because it was just a few words and a link. WordPress thought is was Spam. One of the problems with WordPress is that the commenter is not notified if their comment is held in moderation for one reason or another.

I found a hack that creates a JavaScript popup if the comment goes into moderation, alerting the commenter that their comment needs to wait for approval.

It's a pretty simple hack. Replace some code in wp-comments-post.php and add some JavaScript to index.php. At first it didn't work for me because the instruction indicate that the JavaScript needs to be added into the head section of index.php. In my install, WordPress 1.3, the JavaScript needed to be added after

and within the head section of index.php.

I'm testing a WordPress-1.2 plugin for syntax hiliting of my code. It hilites ActionScript, ASP, C, C++, CSS, HTML, JAVA, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, SQL, Visual Basic, XML codes.

Pretty cool, eh?

I don't want to have my links listed on the index page as WordPress defaults to. The only way I could figure out how to do this was to create a WordPress page and then add the code, get_links_list(); but of course this will not execute by default.

I located a plugin that allows PHP code to be executed within a WordPress page. So I just added the above link code and set the page to execute any PHP code within the text.

Now I have a nice Links page that is separate from my index page. The styling of the display needs some work but I'll get to that later.

As you can see I have my WordPress installation completed. I am using the latest nightly build of version WordPress 1.3. Its been very stable for me so far. The 1.3 version gives the option to create static pages which I will use to create my Resume page and other pages I decide to add.

The first order of business was to install the new WordPress Plugin Manager. This provides a one-click install of many of the popular and common plugins. Directly from the Plugin Manager I installed Spam Karma so I can head off the vultures before they attack.

I also installed a cool little plugin that adds an administration bar along the top of my pages so I have easy one-click access to many of the admin features of WordPress. Of course you can't see it because it will only display to level 10 users. The plugin came packaged to display to level 1 users but I prefer it to be set to level 10.