Amazing lunch at Mahaneyuda, exploring the Old City and Jerusalem in general with Barry.

A few snaps from WordCamp Jerusalem, drinks at Inbal, more drinks at Mamilla, and dinner at Zuni, and some break dancers and soldiers in front of the wall to the Old City.

So, you’ve got WordPress, Akismet, and more spam comments than you can keep track of. Wouldn’t you like to know which posts are drawing the most spam attention? Well, Ozh has the perfect script for you!

Simply upload the script to your WordPress root directory and enjoy a listing of your most prominent spam magnets, complete with “a pretty interactive pie chart.” Use the script to track down and close off your spam magnets, research the keywords catching the spammers’ attention, or just do it for fun.

When I ran this script on my blog, I found two spam magnets that shouldn’t have had open comments in the first place, and all of my posts mentioning the WordPress Support Forums were drawing the most attention from spammers.

Here are the results from Weblog Tools Collection (spam comments are deleted on a regular basis, so this only includes the most recent spam comments):

• 404 - Should You Remove Post Dates from Your WordPress Blog
• 161 - WordPress Support Forum All-stars
• 114 - WordPress and the Fatal Memory Error
• 110 - Lorelle’s Mind Blowing WordPress Plugins
• 101 - WordPress Mobile Apps for Android and BlackBerry Updated
• 100 - WordPress Theme Releases for 08/26
• 82 - WordPress Theme Releases for 08/30
• 69 - 300,000 Biggest Websites, Visualized With Their Icons
• 66 - WordPress Plugin Releases for 09/05
• 61 - WordPress Plugin Releases for 08/28

What did you find?

One of the things that has bugged me about the WP Super Cache settings page was how it was laid out. Well, the next version of the plugin will display a simplified settings page to new users. If you’re upgrading, you’ll get the same old page as ever, don’t worry.

This version also adds a new method of serving cache files. It uses PHP, but serves supercache files. So, it’s a halfway house between using mod_rewrite (difficult to install for some users), and the legacy caching of WP Cache. That caching will be what is activated for users who use the simplified settings page.

There are lots of other bug fixes. The cache tester works if WordPress is installed in a sub directory, the admin page is separated out into tabs now to make it easier to find things. Error messages show up as “update messages” at the top of the browser now, making it easier for new users to figure out when mod_rewrite rules need updating and when other house keeping tasks need doing.

The code is red hot, liable to bend and break and may cause problems but it works fine here and on a test multi site install but I need testers to hammer on it and do things I don’t expect. If you’re brave, grab the development version off the download page. Thanks!

Related Posts

• WP Super Cache 0.8.4, the garbage collector
• WP Super Cache 0.8.7
• WP Super Cache 0.9.9

WordPress for BlackBerry version 1.4.3 has been released to BlackBerry App World.

Depending on your region or country, you might not see the latest version in the BlackBerry App World, but on your device the latest version 1.4.3 should be available starting now.

• Improvements to the post GeoTagging feature.  The app allows you to choose a location from a list of predefined options:  GPS,  contact entry in the address book,  manually inserting an address,  recently selected, clicking on a point in a map.
• Preview Improvements.
• Bug fixing.

Do you have questions or feedback that would enhance the app ? Please visit the WordPress for BlackBerry forums.

The Mill is a simple, yet elegant, two-column WordPress theme.

Misty Morn is a grey-based WordPress 3.0 child theme for Purple Pastels with custom image and attachment templates, thickbox enabled image attachment pages, and additional page templates for pages without comments and pages without the sidebar.

My Valentine is a pink-based WordPress 3.0 child theme for Purple Pastels with custom image and attachment templates, thickbox enabled image attachment pages, and additional page templates for pages without comments and pages without the sidebar.

Steampunk is a steam punk inspired theme built under the Themeatic Theme Framework environment with clean and SEO friendly HTML/CSS code.

Sun City is a darker WordPress 3.0 theme that makes use of orange, green, blue and other primary colours to provide a visually rich display.

ZenLite Black Mandarin is a darker child theme for the single column ZenLite theme.

I had a pretty interesting experience going through security at Ben Gurion airport — I almost didn’t make it through. I had heard the airport security in Israel was different but I had no idea. They spent about an hour asking questions, turning on (and taking apart) every piece of the 20+ electronic items I travel with, with particular attention and questions around my iPad. They took it out of the Apple case, turned it on, scanned it, took it away for 10 minutes to scan somewhere else, asked if anyone else in Israel had used it, when I last used it, asked when I got it, and ultimately said that their “technology team” had not cleared it for carry-on and they would need to pack it in a special box, wrap it, tape it, and check it directly with Continental (I couldn’t touch it or the box except to put some WP stickers on so I could identify it later). Wowza! My Sony PC, though, is safe to fly with. No wonder I saw so few Apple products at WordCamp.

If you run a social network or any kind of online publishing service, you will be hit by spam, if you haven’t been hit already, and Akismet wants to help.

When most people hear about Akismet, they often think about WordPress, but Akismet is actually available for over twenty additional systems and platforms, including Movable Type, Drupal, phpBB, PunBB, and libraries for PHP, Python, and .NET.

If you’re running, or planning to run, a social network or online publishing service, the Akismet team wants you to know that they can not only protect you from direct spam, but from parasite spam as well, as long as you can give them a way to contact you.

Akismet’s pattern and volume monitoring abilities make direct spam easy to filter, but ever since the dawn of forums, spammers have opened accounts for the sole purpose hosting their spam on your site. Thanks to Akismet’s pattern monitoring, the Akismet team can easily track the source of these parasite spammers and notify the site’s owner, but there’s little they can do if they can’t get in touch with you. Since contact forms can break without warning, the Akismet team recommends that you provide a traditional abuse@yourdomain email address. If you don’t want to make this email address public, at least contact Akismet and have it placed on file.

Are you using Akismet on your social network or online publishing service? With so many options available, why not try it today? Parasite spam can hit almost any site driven by user content, so don’t forget to offer your contact information to the Akismet team.

If you know of someone, or are yourself a blogger on Vox, you should know already that Six Apart has announced plans for closing the service. Users have until the 30th of September to get their data our of Vox and into other blogging and/or CMS platforms if they so choose.

Mark Jaquith has a great suggestion on how to Import a Vox blog into WordPress or almost anything else. In short, he suggests that you import your Vox blog into a vanilla WordPress.com blog and then export it out as a WordPress export file. Then you actually have a bunch of choices of what to do with your blog. PS: Be sure to mark your WordPress.com blog as private before importing if you do not intend to make that your final destination.

List Yo’ Files adds the ability to list files by file name for a given folder with hyperlinks to each file making it downloadable.

Readable Names forces commenters to write their names in the language that your blog uses.

WP-comment-master enhances your comments with AJAX posting and pagination.

WP-WikiBox allows you to get a Wikipedia article summary for a keyword in any language, inline with your posts and pages, with a simple shortcode.

IE6 Upgrade Option displays a warning message, simply and politely informing the IE6 user that their browser is out of date, and provides links to download newer browsers.

Vimeo Quicktag enables the user to embed a customized Vimeo video into the blog content.

WP-Stats-Dashboard displays your blog’s stats graph plus your blog traffic, social engagement and social influence directly in your dashboard.

The WordPress development team had a very successful meeting last Thursday, where they solidified their plans for WordPress 3.1.

The finalized goals for WordPress 3.1 are “to have a very short dev cycle, a decent amount of testing time, and a release in mid-December. Low on new features, heavy on ui and code cleanup, and avoidance of schema changes. Save the big ideas for 3.2 where we’ll have the liberty to implement those ideas in PHP5. No schema changes and no big new APIs.”

Besides bug fixes and code cleanup, users can look forward to a new wordpress.com inspired admin bar and theme browser, as well as post templates and styles, and a separate network dashboard.

The team plans to halt new feature submissions on October 15th, followed by a primary code freeze on November 1st, and a string freeze on December 1st. The beta period will begin November 15th until the estimated final release date of December 15th.

Keep in mind that this will be the last major release to support PHP and MySQL 4. If your hosting provider has not yet switched to PHP 5.2 or higher and MySQL 5.0.15 or higher, it’s time to start bugging them.

Personally, I’m really looking forward to seeing what will come of the development team’s focus on bug fixes and code cleanup with this release. What are you looking forward to in WordPress 3.1?

If you’re planning to launch a social network or online publishing service, it’s important that you have a plan in place for dealing with spam. At some point the bad guys will find a way to take advantage of your hospitality, and you need to be ready to deal with them before they take over.

I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating. If you’re launching a web site that allows users to publish content, you will very quickly be invaded by spammers. There are two basic types of spam that you need to be aware of:

1. Direct spam. Spammers will try to use your service to communicate directly with your users. They’ll send large volumes of comments, forum replies, direct messages, friend requests, contact forms, and generally abuse whatever messaging services are available.

This kind of spam is relatively easy to detect, because it involves making large volumes of form posts or api calls. You can catch it by monitoring for unusual patterns or volumes of submissions (and indeed Akismet can do this for you – ask us how). Contrast this with the second type, which is:

2. Parasite hosting. Spammers will use your service as an unwitting web host for their advertisements. They’ll create a handful of blog posts, forum threads, user profiles or wiki pages with images or links to their network of spam web sites. Spammers call these “buffer pages” or buffer sites. Importantly, they won’t spam your users with links to those buffer pages. They’ll be very careful not to do anything to draw your attention to them – often they’ll do their best to disguise them as harmless content. Instead, they’ll go elsewhere and send direct spam to the users of other services with links to the buffer pages on your site.

In other words, users on (say) Facebook and Twitter will be bombarded with spam messages containing links to pages on your web site. (Conversely, users on your site will be bombarded with spam containing links to buffer pages hosted elsewhere).

At Akismet we’re all too aware that few social sites are prepared for handling both types of spam. In fact some almost seem to go out of their way to make it difficult to report spam. Since Akismet monitors spam on millions of web sites, we’re able to detect both direct spam and parasite hosting. Sadly, even when we go out of our way to try to alert webmasters to spammers abusing their services as parasite hosts for porn and malware, many fail to respond.

Which brings me to the single best piece of advice I can give anyone who is planning on launching (or already runs) a social network or interactive web site:

Make sure you publish a working email address for abuse reports!

Don’t rely on a web contact form (when they break, failures often go un-noticed). Don’t rely on a flagging system that’s available only to your users (reports about parasite spam won’t come from your users). Don’t use a special form or button that only supports reporting a certain type of content or a single page at a time (spammers will hide in places you don’t expect them, and an important spam report might include hundreds or thousands of URLs). Use a good old-fashioned email address – abuse@yourdomain is best – and above all, make sure it’s monitored by people who are in a position to act quickly.

If you do run a social network, and you do have an email address for abuse reports (kudos!) then feel free to contact Akismet and tell us your address. If we do discover spammers hiding on your network we may be able to alert you, and of course we’re happy to provide advice for fighting the bad guys.

Six Apart is closing the doors on Vox, a blogging service they launched three and a half years ago. You have until September 30th to export your content from Vox, or you’ll lose access to it. Yikes!

They helpfully included a link to WordPress.com’s importer help page. WordPress.com has a Vox importer. What isn’t immediately obvious is that you can use WordPress.com as an intermediary on your way to a final destination. That is, you can import your Vox blog to a temporary WordPress.com blog, and then do an export from WordPress.com. Now you’ll have gold: a WordPress export file. You can take this file and import it into a standalone WordPress site, or a plethora of other blogging tools or services.

I recommend that everyone who has Vox content they want to save do this. Mark your WordPress.com blog as private if you don’t want that to be its final destination — just do it (and soon!) so that you have a copy of your site in a useful and portable format.

BlogTimes is an old school Newspaper style WordPress Theme, based on a three column fluid layout, enabled with cufon fonts with beautiful typography for the headlines, options panel, and a custom front page slider.

Dark Tuts is a very clean WordPress theme that has been designed with blogs in mind. This theme has an HTML5 doctype, clean and valid code, 3 color schemes (blue, green, red), 3 different ways to add post thumbnails, the ability to change thumbnail sizes via the theme panel, 1 advertisement spot and tons more features.

Quick-Vid is a simple blogging theme with slick design elements.

Semanu is powered by the 960.gs css framework with multiple widgets and a 3 column layout.

Syailendra is an adsense (advertising) ready theme with multiple widget positions, threaded comments, theme options, drop-down menus, and custom menus.

WP Perfect is a two column SEO optimized WordPress 3.0 ready theme. The theme has a jQuery-based options page that lets you change basic settings easily.

Oh yes.

This is why I love going to WordCamps. Silly stuff like this that you can laugh about later.

Last night around 10:15 decided to head out for dinner, and somewhat randomly picked the Cuban restaurant Guantanamera because it was nearby. Sat down in a booth near the bar, facing the band, and ordered some mojitos. Over the din of the other diners I thought “hey this house band isn’t half bad.”

Within a few minutes of listening it became very apparent that beyond “not half bad” they were actually really remarkable. What a treat! Ordered a steak and sank in, letting the music (and mojito) flow over me. A half hour later a lady from one of the front tables got up to sing with the band — which isn’t always a good thing. They started on The Man I Love and it was sublime. The song started out as a ballad but then they kicked it up to a fast afro-Cuban beat, and the singer scatted over the beats for a good 4-5 minutes. It turns out it was Janis Siegel of the Manhattan Transfer! I felt particularly fortunate as I had been bummed to miss the Manhattan Transfer show at the Montréal Jazz Festival in June, but here, of all the most random places, was one of my favorite members performing at a small family joint in Midtown West.

Janis sat down after one song but a string of similarly talented musicians came in and out of the band until the restaurant started to close down. I didn’t recognize any of them but the music was so good.

There was a recording device above the band that was collected by a fellow who I caught up with outside the restaurant as he was hailing a taxi. His name was Paul Siegel and he’s the co-president of Hudson Music which is a music education group (with a website powered by WordPress). I learned the percussionist leader of the house band was Pedro Martínez and Paul follows and records him several times a week at different venues. Apparently Guantanamera is a long-time musician hang-out where even folks like Eric Clapton sat in with the band.

Only in New York.

On the new Chic & Geek website (no relation to Chic Meets Geek events) I was invited to do a “Questionnaire de Proust” style interview which has just been published in French. Lots of little tidbits that I’ve never talked about before. (Translation here.)

I overhauled my Tweet Tweet plugin for WordPress yesterday so it would work with the new Twitter OAuth mechanism. This morning I made it possible to download your older tweets, up to the max limit of 3,200 tweets that Twitter allows.

It’s still a work in progress but I want to get a new release out as soon as I can for current users who are using the basic auth that doesn’t work any more. If you’re feeling adventurous give the development version on the download page a go and tell me what you think!

99% of the OAuth code was ripped from Alex King’s Twitter Tools which in turn uses Abraham Williams’ twitteroauth.php library and OAuth.php from oauth.net. Thank you all for doing the heavy lifting required!

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