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?

DFID starts blogging

DFID have launched a new blogging platform, with various members of the department who are based abroad telling their stories through a group blog.

The site looks beautiful, which is perhaps to be expected when you consider that it was put together by arch government wordpresser Simon Dickson. Simon writes about the site:

I can’t say how pleased I am with the results. I’ve been collaborating with a couple of new contacts – my near-neighbour Tony Parsons on the design side, and Simon Wheatley (who I met at WordCamp) on the technical stuff that was beyond me. Both have been truly brilliant. And I have to say, the DFID guys have been fabulous too – giving me all the freedom I could ask for. It’s been a perfect combination, and I think it shows in the site.

It’s not just about the tech side though. Shane McCracken has been working with DFID to provide training to the bloggers, in collaboration with Griff Wigley. I helped out too, taking a bit of time out to show the DIFD web team in London how the WordPress administration interface works. This combination of training and support, should mean the quality of the content will match that of the site. Top marks to DFID for identifying and committing resource to this side of things.

Shane writes:

We’re very lucky in that our blogging volunteers are superb writers with extremely interesting lives and situations with enormous scope for great photography. They are going to provide a fine insight into the work that DFID do and the effect they have on the people of the countries in which and with which they work.

The coaching programme has had its challenges. As you can imagine the budget to fly us to Tanzania was not made available, so coaching is happening online is the same manner as we did with CivicSurf. The DFID bloggers are in full-time positions working seven days a week and in time zones and work patterns that don’t necessarily coincide with our 9 – 5 UK life. Thankfully Griff, who has been leading the coaching, works flexible hours.

Finally, Owen Barder, who used to work at DFID, notes approvingly:

DfID has a very good reputation abroad, but hardly anybody in the UK knows anything about it, or appreciates how much DfID contributes to positive perceptions of Britain. I hope this blog will help tell the story in a very direct and personal way.

Good work, all.

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