WP 1.5 stuff

Warning: geeky stuff to follow

OK, I have the template looking more or less the way I want it to now.

I’ve managed to make the necessary alteration to the wishlist thing to get it working with 1.5, so if you actually come to the blog (as opposed to reading the RSS feed) you will see a little box with something I think I want on the right hand side.

While the power was out last night, I got seriously spammed. None of the spam made it onto the visible portions of the site, since it all got held in the moderation queue, but there was a lot of it, and it wastes bandwidth. So I’ve put the captcha thing back in place.

Here’s the scoop on how I am fighting spam:

1) If you use the Register & Login links at the right to create an account for yourself, you can always post, but the first time you do, the post will wait in a moderation queue until I approve it. Then you are golden.

2) If you don’t create an account, you can still post comments (and the cookie will remember the name, email, web page, etc. that you entered). You do have to supply a name and email. Again, the first time your post will be moderated, but after that you can post with no delay. In this scenario you will have to enter a code with each comment to prove you are a human. Registered users who are logged in do not have to do the code thing.

3) I dropped AuthImage as my captcha plugin, since my stupid ISP can’t seem to provide me with a build of PHP that doesn’t seg fault whenever I call ImageTTFText, and the whole phonetic thing was too cheesy. Instead I have written a custom captcha routine, based on the Trencaspammers plugin by Gabriel Ortega, but modified to deal with the fact that my stupid ISP also has a very old version of the image libraries (i.e. I am using bitmapped fonts and instead of calling things like “filled ellipse” I am drawing arcs and filling things in myself). What this means is that the security code is now a pretty picture for you to read the code from, which makes me happier.