ace's blog » Blogging

SPAM…seriously, WTF!

petewood — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 18:54:03 +0000

I’ve been getting a lot of spam comments here lately, a LOT.

Akismet has been catching them all so there isn’t much effort involved in deleting them but damn…what the hell?!

Here are some images from today, marked up with aviary.com’s new Chrome extension, which I first read about on Techcrunch.

The plugin I use for my commenting system here is from Intense Debate. I have noticed that it uses it’s own sort of “math” to figure out how many comments I really have. The number it comes up with is less than double of what I really have received.

How to embed facebook video on your self-hosted wordpress blog

petewood — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 02:34:24 +0000

I just had to finagle the “embed” code that Facebook provides when you select the option for it. Here is the code that Facebook provided when I selected the “embed video” link on one of my videos:

When I previewed my post, I noticed that the video didn’t show up. Since I had success in the past with embedding a video in a blog post, I reviewed the source of that post. What I noticed was that some of the parameters were moved around. When I moved the parameters into the what I’ll call the correct order, my video automagically™ appeared! Here is the “correct” code to embed a Facebook video into your self-hosted wordpress blog post.

Is it really that bad?

petewood — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 01:57:32 +0000

WINDOWS VISTA
Yeah, this was my reaction too….

(Ron Livingston, David Herman and Ajay Naidu)

Posted via web from acedanger’s posterous

Testing the bit.ly Windows Live Writer plugin

petewood — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:56:21 +0000

I saw this plugin mentioned on Sarah Perez’s blog . It is the bit.ly Windows Live Writer plugin .

embedding a Google Wave wavelet (test)

petewood — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 02:49:53 +0000

this may or may not work. I’m attempting to embed a wavelet into this post. I found a plugin named “wavr” that will allow me to do that.

Edit: here is how you figure out the wave id

[wave id="googlewave.com!w+5Nz5HFI2B" server="https://wave.google.com/wave/" bgcolor="#FFF"]

On crackberry.com blog – well sorta

petewood — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 19:14:49 +0000

I was reading crackberry.com and noticed two little words there, “thanks acedanger” that linked to the request/feedback category on the WordPress for Blackberry forum.

If you read here at all, you may remember that I posted something about the app where, pointing out that you couldn’t paste a URL in the dialog box that appeared. Ranaan found my post and created a topic about the issue.

The paste URL issue was added to the last beta version of the software, version 0.9.0.134.

Contact form spam – wtf?

petewood — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 02:49:17 +0000

Since I had to reinstall my blog from scratch, I downloaded and installed a new contact form, Contact Form 7. Tonight, I’ve been getting spammed like crazy from it! I really like the simplicity of setting it up. It also provides a lot of flexibility. Due to tonights spam, I finally had to install a captcha system, Really Simple CAPTCHA.

I hope it stops this crap because it’s annoying as hell. My blackberry was going nuts!!

Installing Wibiya

petewood — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 09:21:02 +0000

I signed up for Wibiya a while ago, when I read about it on a tech blog (of which I can’t remember at the moment). I quickly got an invite and it sat…for a very long time. Busy with life and in the “neglect the blog” phase I suppose.

I’m finally getting around to installing it on my blog but I can’t – I’m having issues at the final step. The problem I’m having is that the only link that I can click on the finalization step is the blogger image. This blog is a self-hosted wordpress install. I went to getsatisfaction.com and submitted a question about it. I twittered about it and mentioned @wibiya. I’m hoping that I hear something back soon.

I did a few google searches for this issue and didn’t find anything, so I think I’m missing a step somewhere.

…and before I can click “Publish”, I got a response from @wibiya on twitter letting me know that they are looking into it. That was fast…yet another reason that I’m loving twitter more and more.

Update: It’s fixed! That was awesomely fast! Thanks @wibiya, thanks twitter!!

Updated the Vox-Crossposter

petewood — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:59:53 +0000

Holy sheep shit! I just fixed a known (to me) bug in the vox-crossposter WP plugin I wrote a LONG time ago.

All I changed was the character encoding from

$email_headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1'."\r\n";

$email_headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8'."\r\n";

If you look at the second “known bugs” list at http://www.acedanger.com/vox-crossposter, you will see exactly what I changed. Now I need to get home so I can update the download link and the download from the WordPress Plugin site.

Edit: I updated the source that the download link points to.

Showing shared items from Google Reader in the sidebar

petewood — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 14:18:28 +0000

I’ve been trying to make use of the Shared Items in Google Reader and show them on my blog. I’ve tried a couple of different RSS widgets without success, until this morning.

I found a widget that will display the feed correctly. It is called Google Reader widget and was written by James Wilson.

The problem with using the pre-installed RSS feed widget from WordPress was that the URL linked is malformed and if clicked, would take the user to a page that did not exist, resulting in an error page. For example, one of my shared items is a post that I wrote when we found out the gender of our new baby (which is a boy ). From the pre-installed RSS widget, the following URL is linked: “http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/acedanger/~3/173558267/http://www.acedanger.com”; from the new widget, the URL linked is “http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/acedanger/~3/173558267/”.

The reason for the malformed URL is because of the formatting of the XML produced. The pre-installed widget is expecting the XML to be formatted according to the RSS 2.0 standard but the XML produced by the Google Reader Shared Items feed is in the Atom standard.

That’s about as technical as I get. I know there is a difference but don’t care to be bothered with the details (not right now anyway).

Tags: googlereader, widget, wordpress plugin