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Everything Else

Word Press and Akismet —“ help needed

I use Word Press as my blogging tool and Akismet to fight back against comment spam. Both work great and I do love them – for their effectiveness, ease of use, and for the fact that they do what they say they will do.

I was just reading Lorelle VanFossen’s post: I’m Winning the Battle Against Comment Spam.

Blogs by nature are tools of social interaction. Social interaction, commenting, and discussion are the modus operandi behind blogging. Lorelle’s post is a good intro into how to keep it that way, without going overboard in shutting off the ability to interact because of some bad apples.

Well, following his her guidelines have helped me win the battle (thus far) and to engage new friends from a lot of different places. However, I do have an issue and I can’t seem to find the answer.

I use the Yahoo! installation of Word Press and their modified version of Akismet. Every few days my spam count gets reset to zero. I’ve searched and searched for an answer and I cannot seem to find anyone who’s experienced the same.

I’m running WP 2.0.2 with the following active plugins:

Audio player 1.2.3
Akismet for Yahoo! 1.12-Yahoo
Creative Commons Configurator 0.2
Digital Fingerprint Beta 0.2
Dagon Design Form Mailer 4.2
Flickr Widget 0.1
SimpleTagsPlus 1.0
wp-cache 2.0.17
WordPress Database Backup 1.7
Sidebar Widgets 1.0.20060711

Any ideas on how to overcome this behavior?

Everything Else

1 in 57 million

From the BBC: Blogosphere sees healthy growth

The web’s love affair with blogging shows no signs of abating according to the latest report from blog tracking firm Technorati.

Every day 100,000 new blogs are created and 1.3 million posts are made, it found during its quarterly survey.

…

“It indicates that blogging continues to play a critical role in debates about the important issues of our time” said David Sifry, the founder of Technorati.

…

Technorati is now tracking more than 57 million blogs, of which it believes around 55% are ‘active’ – updated at least every three months.

…

“Some of these are fully-fledged professional enterprises that post many, many times per day and behave increasingly like our friends in the mainstream media. The impact of these bloggers on our cultures and democracies is increasingly dramatic,” said Mr Sifry.

As the Young Fogey and others have often pointed out, our impact is the reason we are both an asset and a threat.

Christian Witness

Bringing along new faith bloggers

The Social Media Club, a project of the non-profit BrainJams organization has a very interesting site and some admirable projects in the hopper.

The Social Media Club states that they are:

…organized for the purpose of sharing best practices, establishing ethics and standards, and promoting media literacy around the emerging area of Social Media.

I am particularly interested in their Adopt A Blogger project. In regard to the project they state:

The idea came from our discussions with BrainJams in New Orleans – to formalize some practices in which many bloggers are already engaged – to help people who don’t know about blogging to learn how and make the most of the tools.

This is particularly important for those of us who are among the leaders in representing underrepresented Churches in the social media sphere.

You can easily count the number of Orthodox (Eastern, Western, and Oriental) as well as PNCC social media sites on the web.

It is my feeling; a feeling echoed by others, that we need to bring along faith bloggers, most especially the young who are strong witnesses to orthodox faith. We need to teach them about responsible communication (versus polemics, sophistry, or demogogary), good web design, good web ethics, and proper standards.

It looks like a great project, one I would love to lead, at least in our Church. Faith, witness, ethics, apologetics, and technology for all. That’s at the core of responsible Christian social networking. Web 2.2 here we come…

Current Events

Firefox 2.0 arrives early

Julio Ojeda-Zapata reports on the early release (tomorrow) of Firefox 2.0 in The browser race is speeding up. An excerpt follows:

I love technology, but I’m fanatical about only a few things high-tech. Firefox is one of them.

The Web browser has always been an underdog to Microsoft’s market-dominant Internet Explorer, but Firefox is vastly superior in features and usability. That’s why it’s my fave browser.

So I am excited this week because Firefox creator Mozilla Corp. is releasing version 2.0. (It’s due to be available on Tuesday afternoon.) Its improvements aren’t revolutionary, but I’m rooting for the increasingly popular program to maintain its momentum in a suddenly intensified browser race.

That’s right: Dozing giant Microsoft recently awoke after neglecting its browser for years and also is offering a revamped version. It was released in final form Wednesday. While this new Internet Explorer isn’t revolutionary, either, and won’t make me ditch Firefox, it’s just useful and powerful enough to keep Microsoft in the browser game.

I test-drove near-final versions of Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7 on a Windows XP computer. There’s also a Macintosh version of Firefox, which I put on a new Intel-based Mac mini as well as an older, pre-Intel iMac machine…

The article goes on to evaluate Firefox 2.0 and IE 7.0. Check it out.

Perspective

I like WordPress because…

Lorelle VanFossen writes on Blogging Gear: Start With a Good Blogging Program. He points to several articles and reviews on blogging programs (well worth a read if you’re serious about what you do). In the post he asks:

So where is your list of things you love about WordPress, huh?

Here’s mine:

  1. WordPress is self contained. I don’t need a separate text editor, uploading software, FrontPage, ColdFusion, Dreamweaver, nothin’ else.
  2. WordPress is community software 1. It has a rock solid foundation based on what people need to get the job done.
  3. WordPress is community software 2. Members of the WordPress community extend and amplify its functionality with plugins and themes that make a great tool spectacular.
  4. The WordPress ‘motto’ Code is Poetry. As a religion blogger I tend to look at the deeper metaphysical meaning of things. When you connect with your Creator you connect with His theme —“ which is the beauty of that which He created. WordPress connects.
  5. WordPress does widgets. As a person with an accounting degree I’ve heard about widgets in all my coursework and I use the word regularly to define concepts. Widgets represent something —“ ‘Hey look, I’ve produced 1,000 widgets today.’ Well, WordPress (via Automattic) brought widgets to life. Widgets let you add all that neat stuff to your sidebars without a Herculean coding effort. A nice touch —“ making software useful and easy.
  6. WordPress means dressed-for-success. Words, and their use in expressing thoughts, feelings, and concepts, are part of the picture. To get you message across you need a medium. WordPress is the cathedral that gives some gravitas to the words the preacher preaches. The medium might not be the message, but it helps to have a medium that acknowledges the fact that people’s thoughts carry a part of their innate human dignity.
  7. WordPress plus Akismet. Stopping evil —“ hey, gotta like that.
  8. WordPress lets you play. You can hack, play, modify, break, and rebuild to your hearts content. Change this, modify that. It is software that allows you to be in charge of your art, to the extent you wish.

There’s more of course, but that’s the highlights for me.

Christian Witness

9rules submission round coming soon

9rules is holding another submission round (yeah!)

Here are the articles on the round and the rules.

Tyme White has an excellent series of articles at 9rules on producing outstanding blog/website content. They are well worth a read and a follow-through. In addition, I recommend a read of his article: Bloggers need management skills from his personal blog Ping Six.

The 9rules Religion Community is recommended for your perusal. You can see some amazing design, design that helps to get the message out, and may just suit your (our) niche.

Everything Else

Readers and their browsers

I use Google Analytics to get insight into what my readers like to read. Also, having a background and degree in Accounting (kind of fitting with being a deacon —“ the managers of charitable donations in the early Church), and a love for analysis, makes me one of those people who likes to look at numbers and trends.

I was looking at the Content Optimization stats for my blog. Under Browser Versions I noticed that 60% of my readers use Firefox (hurray) and 3.2% of those people are using one or another of the Firefox 2.0 browser release candidates.

The next highest group of users (37.35%) use Internet Explorer, and of those, only a little over 1% are using the IE 7.0 Release Candidate.

Knowing what your readers use is good in that it helps you with laying out your site, especially if it’s not a blog site.

As to blogging, WordPress is pretty indestructible across browsers, but there are fluky differences like the way bullet points are laid out or the way the WordPress Dashboard’s layout looks.

I rarely use IE anymore. I’ve just gotten away from using stuff that appears (at least to me) to be bloated and demanding. That’s why I like Firfox. It lets me take control of how I browse. I’m looking forward to Firefox 2.0.

If you blog, do you know what your readers use? Do you think blog readers are early adopters or testers of the latest and greatest? Do you still use IE?

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