Priyadi’s Place

That’s why I love Google. They came up with pagerank algorithm which has been proven to be good. And then when people tries to abuse it, they come up first with the solution. They worked with community and even their competitors to solve this annoying problem.

This is from an entry from their Googleblog.

If you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like “Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.” This is called comment spam, we don’t like it either, and we’ve been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

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For the last few days I’ve been busy wasting my morning time deleting comment spam from moderation queue, sometimes it even reaches one hundred! Deleting them is tiresome and easily ruins my mood for the rest of the day. This morning I even changed the default from ‘Do Nothing’ to ‘Delete’ in moderation.php, so that I would be able to click “Approve” on comments which I want to make appear, instead of clicking on “Delete” on a bunch of comment spam (which coincidentally occupies almost all of my moderation queue). To do so, edit wp-admin/moderation.php, and around line 160, move checked=”checked” from ‘later’ radio button to ‘delete’ one.

I think a better approach would be ‘Spam’ button in addition to ‘Approve’, ‘Delete’ and ‘Do Nothing’ button. By marking a comment as ‘Spam’, it would register any URL in the comment spam to blacklist database. Any further attempt to submit comment consisting of those URLs will put the corresponding comment inside spam queue, which is separated from the regular moderation queue. The concept is simple, but it would require some significant efforts to implement them. Somehow I don’t think it is doable from within plugins.

I spent a few minutes to implement some server side browser sniffing in order to promote Firefox. It works by detecting whether the visitor uses Microsoft Internet Explorer or not. If it finds the user are still using Internet Explorer, then it will display a warning paragraph above the usual content. To see it in action just open this page in Internet Explorer, or set your browser identification to something resembling Internet Explorer.

And by the way, WordPress’ handling of PHP code is broken, or maybe it is strange interaction between Markdown and WordPress. But either way, I can’t make a post of the code here, and I’m too lazy to fix that .

My previous blog post about blogging software marketshare spurred many comments from veteran bloggers. As I stated before, long time bloggers prefer MovableType to other blogging software.

Thomas has told the world why he still uses MovableType. Avianto also posted the entry titled Why MovableType?. And what are my reasons switching to WordPress?

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Salah satu pelopor blogging di Indonesia, Mdamt, melakukan migrasi ke WordPress. Ini sudah yang kesekian kalinya para pemblog Indonesia melakukan migrasi ke WordPress. Berhubung yang pakai WordPress sudah sedemikian banyak, bagaimana kalau para pengguna WordPress melakukan meetup?

Update: Ronny ternyata juga ikutan nge-WordPress.

The WordPress development team has released an important release. Anyone with older version should upgrade to version 1.2.1 immediately as this release addresses a few minor security problem with version 1.2.0. If you (WordPress users) haven’t upgraded yet, please do as soon as possible, it took me only five minutes to do this upgrade.

With my Internet connection unstable for almost the whole night, I spent my time doing makeover to this web site. It’s about time, my web site already have this many posts and has withstood some hammerring with the recent Ahira Gate fiasco. But with me lacking time and will, this web site has been using stock design until now.

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Kemarin Jay melakukan migrasi blog-nya dari pMachine ke WordPress. Saya pun pindah dari MovableType ke WordPress, walaupun saya bukan migrasi, tapi mulai kembali dari nol. Apa yang menyebabkan orang-orang migrasi ke WordPress? Menurut saya ada beberapa alasan:

• Lisensi MovableType yang makin restrictive setelah versi 3
• WordPress adalah free software di bawah GPL
• Proses instalasi yang cenderung lebih mudah dibandingkan software serupa
• Kemudahan migrasi dari beberapa software lain yang serupa
• Komunitas yang sangat aktif, mungkin cuma MovableType yang dapat menandingi aktivitas komunitas WordPress