WordPress

Akismet now has stats!

Akismet is a plugin for WordPress (and a few other platforms) which helps combat the problem of comment spam. That when ne’erdowells come on your blog and post nonsense comments in the hope pick click the links in them to buy some viagra, or invest in a Nigerian lottery winning syndicate.

Dealing with this stuff can be a pain.

(I have often wondered how people who run blogs or forums about the uses of bedroom-performance enhancing drugs, or genuine Nigerian investments, manage their spam. How do you decide what is and isn’t?)

Akismet makes it easy by checking your comments against a central database, which records what everyone who uses the system has marked as spam, and then removes it from view. So, no alerts telling you that you need to deal with a new comment – if Akismet thinks it’s spam, you don’t need to know about it.

You can still check the quarantined list for false-positives though, if you want. Sometimes the service works a little too well.

Anyhow, I upgraded the Akismet plugin today here on WordPress, and was surprised to see a new tab on my admin panel for ‘Akismet Stats’:

akismet stats

And once you click it, it makes pretty interesting reading! There are graphs and tables of data. Well worth the upgrade just to see what causes spikes in your comment spam.

PollDaddyPress & Automattic reliance

Matt Mullenweg, the irritatingly youthful founder of WordPress, has announced that his company, Automattic, have purchased the internet polling service PollDaddy, and immediately integrated in into WordPress.com and made a plugin available for self-hosted WordPressers.

I took a secret trip to Sligo and put back a few pints with the team and we decided to make things work. They went to bed every night and woke up every morning thinking about polls and surveys, and were iterating at a great pace. By plugging into Automattic’s experience at creating internet-scale services and the distribution of WordPress.com, I knew we could take Polldaddy to an entirely new level in a relatively short amount of time.

It’s certainly interesting that Automattic are acquiring stuff at the moment in what are testing times for any company, let alone relatively young web startups. Especially when the whole WordPress platform is potentially reliant on this company to keep it on the right tracks, and to keep the development moving forward.

WordPress the platform is open source, which means that the code is available to anyone to use, modify and sell on for themselves – as long as they published their version under the same terms. However, much of the organising of the project, and the hosting of the websites, forums, bug trackers etc is done by Automattic, a company whose main motive, one must assume, is profit. Many other open source projects work in similar ways: much of the development of Linux has been done with the help of big companies like IBM and others, for example. But where a platform is so reliant, as I believe WordPress is, on one company to provide direction, does that company have an obligation to the people that use that code?

Now, I doubt very much that the amount of money that PollDaddy will have cost Automattic will have been that big a deal, and I am sure that Matt, Toni and the other Automattic guys would do anything deliberately to jeapordise their company. I’m just thinking hypothetically – do companies involved in open source have to be more risk-averse, because their failure could potentially damage a far wider group of people that just specific clients.

Or for those using open source, is it a case of downloaders beware?

UK Parliament Launches Blog

The team behind the UK Parliament‘s website – which also includes accounts on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and others – have launched a WordPress blog. The Purpose of the blog seems to be focusing on the development of the Parliament website, including the development of a number of social web services.

I’m subscribed to the feed, and have added it to Public Sector Bloggers too.

Sticky posts in WordPress

Recently it was announced over at WordPress.com that a new feature had arrived – the ability to have ‘sticky’ posts on your blog homepage.

Regular updates are what blogging’s all about, but sometimes you want to keep hot topics or other static info at the top of your posts. This feature has existed as Sticky Topics in the forums, but hasn’t been available on blogs. Until now.

These are posts that exist outside the normal chronology of your blogging, and stay at the top no matter what.

There are a number of uses this feature could be put to – from introducing your blog to new readers, to highlighting important information to your readers.

However, people who manage their own WordPress installs needn’t be dismayed as there is a plugin which provides this functionality to self hosted blogs, which you can find here, courtesy of Lester Chan.

Re-order posts in WordPress

One of the features of a blog is that the posts appear in reverse-chronological order – that is to say, with the latest content first. But there are times when that might not always be appropriate. Let me give you an example.

I’m planning a series of blog posts on a certain topic. Current subscribers and regular readers will spot them as they come in, but what about comers to the party? One way of grouping all the posts would of course be to stick them all in the same category. But all the posts will be displayed in traditional reverse-chronological order, meaning folk have to work their way from the end to the beginning, or dig around for the first post in the set.

There is a way around this though, which can be achieved by fiddling around with the URLs you use. Let’s take the posts on DavePress within the blogging category as an example. The traditional view of the posts can be found at http://davepress.net/category/blogging/ which has the latest at the top. Compare that with the results of http://davepress.net/category/blogging/?order=asc (note the ?order=asc at the end). This view of the posts put them in chronological order, starting at the beginning.

You can apply this to any view of your posts, including the home page, and tag and author views. There are other options too, including sorting posts or pages alphabetically. If you really wanted to, you could also incorporate it into your theme, making such presentation an integrated part of your blog.

I’ll be using it to help promote the blog series I’m planning. By circulating the URL including the extra bit to reverse the post order, people will be able to find themselves at the beginning and work their way through without excessive scrolling just to get started.

Am sure there are other uses this could be put to – any thoughts?

Load more posts!