pixelbomb

It appears as though someone is trying to create a Google bomb for the spam.com website with the anchor text “LOOK AT THIS LINK”. This is being done by exploiting the trackback feature in Wordpress powered blogs. Since trackbacks are not moderated by default, there is no way to easily prevent spam via a trackback generated by a spambot. That’s where Marco van Hylckama Vlieg’s WP Hardened Trackback plugin comes into play. Hopefully this will be the end of the annoying trackback spam.

For the curious, I’ve included sample “LOOK AT THIS LINK” spam trackbacks after the jump.
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I’ve recently installed Ultimate Tag Warrior, a tagging plugin for WordPress. It, among a LOT of other things, allows tagging of posts with keywords and supports searching posts using those keywords, combinations of keywords, or related keywords (think Flickr, del.icio.us, and Technorati). It is a feature rich plugin and a definite must-have.

Unfortunately, I partially corrupted my database the other day so I spent most of the last couple of days fixing it. But now that it’s all in order again (at least I hope), I can focus on fine tuning UTW2. Look out!

I hate email spam, but now something else is starting to annoy me — automated comment posting, or blog spam. Moderating the comments has thus far allowed me to be block all of them from being posted, but I still had to read them — which was not acceptable. So I’ve implemented the SecureImage plugin (with a couple personal modifications). It is a self-contained WordPress plugin which dynamically generates a text-key over .png backgrounds and requires the person posting a comment to enter the key. Happy commenting.

I needed to find a way to better organize the images being included in these posts before it got too chaotic and impossible to manage. After doing a bit of digging I stumbled upon the WPG2 plugin, which allows you to embed Gallery2 content seemlessly into WordPress. How cool is that?!

Some of you may have already noticed, but thanks to this spiffy plugin a new “related entries” section now appears at the bottom of individual posts. Since I’m not using the keyword feature (at least not on old posts because I’m lazy and it would involve editting every single entry), it’s currently grabbing “related” posts based on the current post’s title. Due to this it’s not 100% accurate, but it’s pretty darn close — so get over it and enjoy.

I wanted the ability to post remotely, primarily by email via my blackberry. While WordPress offers an elegant solution, it didn’t quite fit what I had in mind.

So, after stripping down the script from WordPress, adding a few hacks, and setting up a new procmail recipe, I got what I wanted - a way to post by email without the need to create a new and separate POP3 email account, and without having to setup a cron job. In addition, a nice side feature is that the posts happen as the email is received.

I’m sure there are similar variations of this solution out there, but I was too lazy to look. The real question, though, is how often will I actually use this? Who knows!