From my childhood readings I remember this particular chapter off Jules Verne’s visionary masterpiece From the Earth to the Moon.

The first volume would go over the fabrication of a humongous cannon being built to send a few adventurers on the Moon (yea, this is 19th century science-fiction all right, but not as far off as one would think) and included an historical background of both the main character: Impey Barbicane, founder of shots during the Civil war, and his personal nemesis-turned-ally: Captain Nichols, founder of armored plates. That one chapter described extensively the armament race that opposed the two men through their new inventions on the battlefield.

Every time the cannon grew bigger, the armor became thicker, and vice-versa.

Anyway, spam strongly reminds me of that. Just when everybody started enjoying a deceivingly quiet reprieve in the Spam Wars, the filthy baboons come back and hit again, harder, and nastier. This time using a different angle.

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Having spent a sizable share of the past few weeks writing and supporting an anti-spam plugin for Wordpress, I have been extensively reading and cogitating on the issue.

While I am ashamed to say that I have not come up with any magic answer to the problem (and don’t think anybody ever will), I nonetheless have lots of remarks and ideas I’d love to share. And given the appallingly low level of certain discussions on spam I have read lately, I figure it couldn’t hurt.

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Update: Please note that this was originally written for Spam Karma v.1 and therefore some elements (licensing especially) no longer apply to SK2. Same spirit overall though.

OK, so before I go any further, let me make things as clear as I can:

Spam Karma is and will always be absolutely free. Free as in beer, free as in love.

So free, actually, that you could practically take it, change twenty lines and start selling it as yours. Except your own karma would probably shrivel as a result.

Anyway, the gist of it is that you are under no obligation, legal or moral, to pay anything for its use. In fact, you are entirely welcome and encouraged to use it for free. Though a supportive e-mail or comment is always nice too.

Now that we got that part out of the way:

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First thing: there is now a static page entirely dedicated to Spam Karma. Among other things, it will always contain the current version number as well as links to other relevant piece of information.

Now that we pretty much got Spam Karma 1.x nice and stable, it’s time to get ready for 2.0!

Below is what I have more or less already planned for it, please feel free to add your own wishes, desires and suggestions in the comments.

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UPDATED: 12/09/2004 15:46 JST From now on, please check the central Spam Karma page to get the latest updates and news on this plugin.

Yet another techy update for my fellow bloggers using Wordpress.

Now that it’s reached version 1.4 and that most (all?) major bugs have been ironed out, I feel it’s time to introduce the latest member in the ever-expanding Wordpress plugin family…

Spam Karma is a mean critter that truly enjoys killing

In fact it is so mean that we had to keep it in a special military-grade containment unit on this server.

Genetically engineered in the dark recess of our Secret Spam Research Labs and trained through months of reflex conditioning and shock therapy, this thing, once unleashed on your comments, will only let go of its death grip after the last spam has been shredded to pieces.

We haven’t fed it for a week now, and it could smell spam miles away in its sleep.

But while a fierce and merciless spam killer, this plugin is also a perfect companion for your kids and friend’s comments. Only the unmistakable foul stench of spam will trigger its ire… while questionable, yet potentially legit, comments will always be given a chance to clear themselves before being irremediably disposed of.

If you are using WP Plugin Mgr, install is as easy as a click on the “Check Updates” button and a click on the “One-Click Install”… Yep, that’s all.
For those still stuck in the last century, a manual install archive is available here. Please, please, RTFM: it’s short, sweet and contains essential details.

Once installed, make sure you check at least once the Option screen (in wp-admin, click on Options >> Spam Karma).

I strongly recommend you check for updates (if you are using WPPM it will do it automatically for you) at least once a week so as to make sure you benefit from the latest bug fixes I might make.

Spam Karma v. 1.4 is now compatible with WordPress 1.2: however due to the lack of certain functions in WP 1.2 Plugin API, some of the features are missing (Option Page integration etc). It is fully enabled for use with any fairly recent release of WP alpha 1.3.

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Update:: latest WPPM news are here (doesn’t affect wp-plugins.net)

A new version of WP Plugins Manager with many, many new features…

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Last Update: The Wordpress Plugin manager is no longer available for download and support has been discontinued. More info here.
10/20/04 Update: Check out the new version…

If you are a Wordpress user, go check out the shiny new Wordpress Plugin Database!

If you have written plugins for Wordpress, go add them already!

If you do not use Wordpress, then, well… you should.

But I’ll still talk to you if you don’t…

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Will I come out as an insensitive cold-hearted bastard if I publicly lament here the fact that all things interesting and exciting only happen in Japan when I’m not there, stuck six thousands miles away, in a city where major earthquakes, flood and other cool natural disasters are about as likely as a shred of human soul mistakenly finding its way into Dick Cheney’s corpse…

On that count, Paris is quite boring.

I am told the floods of yore, when the as-of-then-undomesticated Seine river expanded its bank to all surrounding neighbourhoods, were a vision of surrealistic awe. What with the people, bank clerks and congressmen alike, having to swim their way back from work, French baguette in one hand, cigarette in the other and beret on top.

OK, perhaps the congressmen didn’t have to go freestyle swimming, but surely there couldn’t be enough boats for everybody…

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Finally got around to writing some kind of doc for my mail posting script for WordPress. And I can therefore finally release it for the world to use and enjoy.

Please welcome a new member in the WP plugin & hack family: wp-keitaimail v. 1.0b!

Actually, it is not technically a plugin, nor a hack, rather a standalone script that interfaces with WP to let you post entries to your blog via Email.
The name ‘keitai’ simply means ‘cell phone’ in Japanese… This script might as well have been called wp-cellphone-mail, I just liked the sound of ‘keitai’.

You can see a working demo on the right-hand side of this blog where it powers the “keitai log”. I have been using it for nearly a month now and it should be really stable albeit a tad complicated to set up (see below).

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Just installed the awesome language picker plugin for WordPress.

At long last, Dr Dave’s Logs is joining the truly multilingual blogging crowds !

Do not expect real full-on translations for any of my posts. I have neither the time nor the slightest motivation to post redundant content. However, I will probably post from time to time a full entry or an extended discussion in the language relevant to certain items of a particular country/culture, without fear of boring my beloved ignorant American English-speaking-only readership.

Japanese is a special case though: half for my own practice, half to spare my poor Japanese friends the pain and suffering of reading my already convoluted English through Babelfish, I’ll try as much as possible to post a small sum-up of every entries somewhat relevant to my life in Japan and/or my friends here. If you are a student of the Japanese language trying to improve your practice, I strongly sugest you stay the hell away from these, as they certainly won’t do you any good. I do not assume any responsibility for the permanent damage to your practice you might incur by exposing yourself to my crappy grammar and overall appalling level of written Japanese.

If you are really bored with yourself and have a better master of the language than me (basically: if you speak any Japanese), feel free to mock my errors and even possibly point them out to me. I yearn to learn.

Note: if you are reading this blog through RSS, you won’t be able to see alternate language content or links. You need to use the website version. I’ll work on fixing this later.

In my ongoing quest to bring flawless multi-language (multi-encoding to be more accurate) support to WordPress, I just had a blindingly simple, yet highly efficient, idea for an improvement.

If your blog is accustomed to receiving trackbacks or comments containing non-standard characters (accents, kanjis etc.), then you have probably noticed that a fair share end up getting mangled in the process. WP is not really at fault here, since this is caused by some browsers’ failure to respect the encoding set in a page when sending form content (e.g. submitting a comment). No need to tell you which poor excuse for a browser so shamelessly ignore proper web standards. This is of little comfort anyway, since in the end, all that matters is that WordPress is getting toh-mah-toh when it is expecting toh-may-toh, and pretty much ends up displaying poh-tah-to to everybody else.

The fix, as I was saying is ridiculously easy. And to the best of my knowledge it won’t break anything in your current WP install. Worst that could happen is that it won’t fix your problem, but it won’t break your blog.

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UPDATED 07/24/04 18:02 JST
Super Geeky entry on Blog migrations… you can safely skip if you do not have any idea what the names “WordPress” and “Movable Type” stand for. [I also added 100% WP stuff down there]

A temporary entry on the work in progress that is my move from Movable Type to WordPress.

I ported a bunch of scripts and plugins I was previously using with my MT installation. Also hacked happily through WP’s PHP sources…

Not completely done, but here are already a few usable hacks (I would not quite call them “plugins” given the amount of tweaking required to use them):

1. mt2wp: Redirecting old MT entries to WP entries

   This script will not only redirect your old Movable Type archives (both categories and monthly), it will also redirect direct entry permalinks (e.g. “000123.html#000123″).
   To do the latter, you will need to have your old ‘mt_entries’ table in the same database as your current WP tables (you do not need the full MT install, just this table), but you can still have archive redirection by date and category even if you have thrown out your MT tables.

   Please read the instructions for more details on how to install and use.

   Overall, don’t forget to:

   1. Edit the script (mt2wp.php) with your blog archive’s URL
   2. Upload the script to your WP directory
   3. Edit your index.php template file
   4. Edit your .htaccess file
   5. Optionally edit your css file (usually wp-layout.css)

   Sources - Zip File

2. Picture Glue: Image Posting Plugin

   A port of the small plugin I had written for MT. By far not the most advanced picture import plugin for WP: there are better and nicer plugins out there doing roughly the same. But I needed backward compatibility and after all, it’s a convenient lightweight plugin to seamlessly upload and insert pictures in an entry.

   Picture Glue automatically looks in a predefined location for folders containing pictures (presumably uploaded through FTP), generates thumbnails and insert HTML code (with css tags) at the top of appropriate postings. Each picture folder must contain the ID of the post it is to be inserted into and must be writable by anybody (for thumbnail generation). This plugin updates the entry content in the DB once and for all, instead of dynamically filtering, thus creating less runtime overhead.

   To use, upload the php file in your plugin folder (located in WP wp-content directory). Read the plugin instruction for details.

   Sources - Zip File

3. Updated! wp-Filterz: Dynamic meta-filtering of your main content

   This plugin lets you define a bunch of meta-filters controlled by checkboxes. Checking/Unchecking boxes will show/hide entries dynamically. You can try it by going to the left bar of this site and playing with the boxes under the “Filterz” section.

   Now supports both IE and Mozilla-like browsers.

   To use it:

   • drop the plugin file into your plugin folder (located in WP wp-content directory)
   • edit the sample preferences with your own categories (you will need to know the ID of the categories you want to filter by)
   • upload the pref file to the wp-content directory (*not* the plugin directory)
   • edit your index.php file to include <?=filterz_class()?> inside the class declaration of your entry divs. Your template should look something like this: <div class="storycontent<?=filterz_class()?>">
   • use <?=$filterz_html_code?> in your template to output wp-filterz’ checkbox list
   • BTW: make sure you activate the plugin in WP’s admin tools.

   Plugin Source - Prefs file sample - Zip File

4. wp-Mood-Quote: Random quote matching your mood (codeveloped with Masquerade)

   This plugin lets you define a list of quotes/taglines/sentences to be displayed randomly when people load your page… with a small extra feature over the countless other random quote generator: this one will let you assign a “mood” to each quote and will then try to match the random quote with the current mood of your blog (using the last “mood” tag you set in one of your post). See docs for more details. (docs wiped out from Masquerade’s server, following some infortunate adventures in shell scripting involving the use of ‘rm -f *’ and no backup whatsoever).

   Zip File - Tar Gz File

5. New! Getting the “updated links” feature to work

   Not a hack. Just a little bit of help to those who might be confused on how to get that sort-by-last-updated feature to work in WP.

   Supposedly, WP lets you sort links. But simply following the instructions and calling get_links() with the proper parameters won’t suffice to enable that feature. To enable it, you must also:

   1. include (before calling any link output function) the file links-update-xml.php as such: include_once(ABSPATH.WPINC.'/links-update-xml.php');
   2. if you have upgraded (and still possibly if you have not), you must make sure you have a file named links-update-cache.xml in your wp-content folder and that it is writable by the server (chmod 666). caveat: it looks like previous versions of WP used a slightly different file name (link-update-cache.xml: mind the missing ’s’), make sure you have the correct filename.

   Of course, you must also set the parameters in your function call correctly, as well as the options in WP-admin option panel.
   As an example, here is the code I use to output the bookmarks section on this site (it uses a list of IDs for the groups of links I want to display there). Feel free to adapt to your needs and reuse:
   
<?php
include_once(ABSPATH.WPINC.'/links-update-xml.php');
foreach (array(2,3,5,9,7,8) as $this_cat)
{
echo "<li>", get_linkcatname($this_cat), "<ul>";
get_links($this_cat, '<li>', '</li>', '<br>', false, '_updated', false, false, -1, 1);
echo "</ul></li>";
}
?>


6. More will be coming… including:

   • a patch for MooKitty’s show_category plugin to generate a side blog from a specific category (the patch adds date synchronization between the main entries being displayed and the sideblog). it’s already being used on this very blog, I just need to clean it up and write a blurb for it.
   • small snippets that display smart navigational bars at top and bottom of the page… need to put these in a plugin and will release.
   • a patch on wp-mail plugin (allows posting of pictures through email) to use my Picture Glue plugin and generates thumbnails automatically (doesn’t do it at the moment). Actually, I made a whole plugin to do that (and more), it’s there: Keitai Mail Plugin
   • probably other stuff as I come across it…

I am currently carrying over a double move involving both my hosting solution and blog engine (switching from MT to Wordpress, more on this later).
In the meantime, please excuse the many visual glitches, spare body parts scattered on the ground and blood stain on the walls. I’ll be working hard this week on making everything the way it used to be, when all was green and happy in drDaveLand…