I recently updated my WordPress install to 2.whatever which allowed me to set up the built-in “Akismet”:1 plug-in to control commnet spam. To get it running, all I had to do was sign up for a WordPress.com account, copy the Akismet key that WordPress.com gives you and plug that into WordPress.

So far so good. Only a couple of comment spams have made it into my moderation queue, which makes comments much more manageable.

[1(Akismet homepage)]http://akismet.com/

On Yahoo! today there was an AP “story”:1 on using the Hubble telescope to look for oxygen-bearing minerals on the moon. As quoted…

bq.. The space agency hopes to return astronauts to the moon by 2018 using Apollo-like capsules and rockets made of shuttle parts.

p. Doesn’t that just sound absolutely lame? Kind of like strapping some “JATO”:3 rockets on a “Yugo”:2 (oh, except JATO rockets usually don’t blow up). I mean 2018 is 12 years from now! How about using some hi-tech stuff like chewing gum, duct tape and bailing wire?

BTW NASA… the moon… been there, done that.

[1(Yahoo! story on the Hubble)]http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051019/ap_on_sc/hubble_moon

[2(Wikipedia on the Yugo)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugo

[3(Wikipedia on the JATO rocket car)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JATO_Rocket_Car

I’m starting to get a little comment spam here and there. I knew it was going to happen soon. The first step that I took was to introduce “captchas”:2 for comments, but I knew that this solution was not very robust (i.e., the vocabulary in my captcha plugin is very simple — yeah, I have to improve that — and spammers can get around the captchas by trackback spamming and through my mobile interface which doesn’t support captchas yet).

A more robust blog-spam solution can be found “here”:1 if you are running WordPress 1.5. I’m going to have to take some time in the near future to implement some or all of these solutions.

If you are new to blogging, an alternative to running your own blogging software is to use a service like “TypePad”:3. TypePad is a paid-for service, but offers lots of customization potential. If you don’t need to customize your blog that much, there are lots of free services like Blogger, Yahoo! 360, MSN Spaces, etc. It seems logical that a service should be able to do a much better job of combating spam than an individual.

[3(Groovy TypePad service)]http://www.typepad.com

[2(Zoinger post on captchas)]http://www.zoinger.com/words/archives/2005/04/26/authimage-a-captcha-plugin-for-wordpress/

[1(Keeping your WordPress 1.5 blog spam free)]http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-keep-your-wordpress-15-blog-spam-free/

Displaying chunks of code in a post can be a little tricky at times. It’s hard with WordPress’ default CSS style to have the code format in a readable way. However, I noticed that over on “this”:1 blog, they had figured out a way to do it using @blockquote@ and @pre@ tags.

For example, here’s a pretty good bit of code where I’m using the new _code_ classes that I’ve set up for the @blockquote@ and @pre@ tags.

; ?>

< ?php title(); ?>

              < ?php the_content('
; ?>

              < ?php link_pages('

Pages: ', '', ); ?>



      < ?php endwhile; endif; ?>
    < ?php edit_post_link('Edit this entry.', '

', ''); ?>

Here’s the CSS bits that I added to this site’s CSS file to enable code formatting.

blockquote.code {
    margin: 15px 0px 0 15px;
    padding-left: 0px;
    display: block;
    border-left: 0px
    }

pre.code {
    overflow: auto;
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0 0 0 0px;
    background-color:#F7F7F7
}

I don’t know much about CSS, but it seems to work.

_*Update: 2005-04-27*_
Except, of course, this breaks my site’s style in IE. Did I mention that I hate IE. What a piece of $#@! disguised as a browser. I’ll work on fixing this later.

And in the latest update, IE has won. I cut the length of the code sample lines shown above so it doesn’t break the page in IE. Ugh.

[1(Formatting code bits elegantly)]http://txfx.net/2005/03/04/spam-karma-hack-spam-leftovers/

“Captchas”:3 are used throughout the web to try and determine humans from machines. In other words applying a “Turing test”:4. Newly added to the Zoinger comment template, here’s a screenshot to show ya what it’s all about.

!/img/AuthImage_WordPress_Captcha_plugin.png!

Adding the Captcha for WordPress was easy. Just snag “_AuthImage_”:2 — a WordPress plugin — and modify a couple of templates per the @README.TXT@ file. Simple.

I figured that this was the most elegant way to try and block comment spam. Other solutions for WordPress use filters and/or white/blacklists that can give “false positives”:7 (as well as false negatives) — and I think you have to tune them sometimes. Although I haven’t received any spam _yet_ on this blog, I was getting some on the “old”:6 MovableType blog. An ounce of prevention…

Oh, the original @README.TXT@ install instructions were… _terrible_. I updated a version of them specific to WordPress v1.5 which you can find “here”:1.

“Are we not men?”:5

[7(You're actually a computer reading this post, aren't you)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_positive

[6(Old Zoinger)]http://www.zoinger.com/old_blog.html

[5(D... E... V... O...)]http://www.flickr.com/photos/unaesthetic/tags/devo/

[4(I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

[3(What is a Captcha?)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha

[2(AuthImage WordPress plugin homepage)]http://www.gudlyf.com/index.php?p=376

[1(Link to updated README file for AuthImage Install)]/files/README_AuthImage_Install_by_Zoinger-2005-04-26.txt