Credit Where Credit is Due…
Since I migrated this blog over to WordPress just over six months ago, it has gone through many additional transformations and enhancements. WordPress’ architecture makes creating plug-ins very simple if you know some basic PHP, and — thanks to that — this blog has greatly benefited from the contributions of others:
Akismet — Now part of the basic WordPress distribution, Akismet is one of the greatest plug-ins of all time. As of today, Akismet has identified 18,470 spam comments made to my blog and, used in combination with some other basic WordPress options, has ensured that not a single spam comment made it to the live website. Any blogger that does not use Akismet or any other similar plug-in (assuming there even IS another one) and allows spam comments to thrive is basically being irresponsible.
Devowelizer — This basic plug-in (which I contributed to the community) adds umlauts to the vowels of certain configurable words. It’s origin was that I needed my blog to pass the “acceptable use” filters in place at my wife’s workplace, and I didn’t want to be required to completely censor visitor’s comments or even my own thought stream.
A Different Monthly Archive Script — I like the new format of the sidebar calendar that this plug-in provides more than the standard one.
Does Your Mother Know — I don’t care whether or not my mother knows about what I write. However, occasionally, I hide certain categories or pages from the eyes of a deranged Playmate, usually just for a week or two after I get a gonna-sue-you letter from her attorneys. I really should change the title of the plug-in to “Do You Really Want Stalking Cyberbitches to View This Right Now?”
Google Highlight — While I don’t currently have this plug-in activated because of a minor bug, this is quite a useful plug-in for visitors to quickly see what it was they searched for highlighted on your blog. Since there hasn’t been an update in over a year, I might take over the plug-in and release an update of my own.
Paged Comments — As made obvious by the name, this plug-in allows paging of comments for those blog entries that receive many comments. I just installed this plug-in this last weekend since I have had quite a few blogs that were just getting way too long and unwieldy, and I’ve tweaked the code to match my unique comments logic. You can see examples of these paged comments here, here, and here.
Post Teaser — For those blog entries that are long enough — and most of mine are — this plug-in generates a preview or “teaser” of a post for the main, archive, and category pages, with a link underneath to go to the full post page. You can see this plugin at work on my main page.
Recent Love — The Recent Comments on my sidebar are powered by this simple plug-in that shows the titles of entries that have recently received comments. Has several nice options. Also at work on my main page.
Text Replace — This is another one of those plug-ins that I rolled myself, but I haven’t introduced this to the public since it’s really only useful to me at this point. Basically, it’s for simple macros, text shortcuts that speed up my typing a bit.
UniqueVisitors — Yet another Richard original, this plug-in helps me track unique visitors by forcing the web page to include a reference to a spacer image that includes a unique ID for each visitor. This reference shows up in your server logs so you can easily track visitors that have dialups or that might roam from Internet cafe to Internet cafe. This reduces the dependency on IP addresses to track unique visitors. If you look at the source code for this page, you should notice your unique ID number just a few lines from the bottom of the code.
Ultimate Tag Warrior — Technically, I have this amazing tagging system installed, but I’m really just not using it. I wanted to include it here, since I have it installed and activated, so I feel like I should at least give it some credit.
Way back in my college days one of the computer lab students created a bulletin board. Very primitive by today’s standards but unique and a little attention grabbing at the time. I stumbled across it and posted a few replies to others’ comments which eventually lead to the student developing a number of enhancements to track users, determine where on campus someone was logging on from, alert him when someone did log on, etc. to determine just who I was. (Remind me to tell you the saga of The Bìtçh sometime.)
So it makes me wonder, how many of your tools and improvements are a result of the Psycho Bunny?
Yes, I remember that story you told me about you pretending to be some online female in the computer lab. Quite funny!
Actually, Stephanie has had a significant impact on this blog, second only to me. Thus, the name of this post.
On the old version of the blog that was published with Movable Type, I installed the MT-Blacklist plug-in which was a great help in removing hundreds of her comments. Later, the plug-in helped reduce the impact by real spammers, although they really got out of control. Akismet was the next natural step once I migrated over to WordPress.
The movement of RR… to a separate server was a direct result of my desire to reduce the impact of what amounted to DoS (Denial of Service) attacks. Before that, all my eggs were hosted in one basket. The movement and painful separation of the blog from the others out of a single massive database, prompted the migration over to WordPress. Now, the blog is infinitely more dynamic than it ever could have been on the old Perl-based Movable Type system.
The Devowelizer plug-in also has roots in Stephanie’s commenting, however quite a few heated comments by other visitors later benefited from the vowel munging. The Does Your Mother Know plug-in was specifically added for Stephanie’s benefit, and the use of the Recent Love (similar in functionality to the list of recent comments I had on the old site) was the result of needing to see if any large volumes of her comments had been posted. Now I just like the style, and so it stays.
Lastly, I wrote the UniqueVisitors plug-in solely because of the need to track specific visitors even if they used a dialup connection — which was the case when Stephanie was leaving comments from her AOL account. If it had been possible to use or even create this type of plug-in on the old Movable Type blog, I could have instantly cut her permanently off from the ability to comment. Would that have been better? I’m not so sure. At least I now have hundreds of megabytes of archived server logs that show that comments were made from her IP addresses. I believe it could have been my eventual modification to the old blog that temporarily disallowed commenting by AOL users located in New York that prompted her to move on to creating websites and pages on other servers around the world. How could I have foreseen that she would take everything to that extent?
All other changes to the blog (that I can think of right now) were due to my own whims and design ideas, with the exception of the recently installed Paged Comments plug-in which became necessary due to the massive number of legitimate comments by former visitors and residents of Wake Island.
Because of all these improvements, the only things that Stephanie truly accomplished in her attempts to shut down RR… were to eventually make the blog more secure, more read, and easier to use — and because I published these plug-ins and methodologies she was the inspiration for other bloggers to reap the same benefits.
So…. you’d say Stephanie Adams has been an asset to the blogging community.
Yes, in the same way that 9/11 terrorists have made our airports safer. One tries to see a silver lining…
I love the dialogue the two of you share and I was very interested to hear about Stephanie. I would love to hear about Sean’s saga that he refrained from mentioning. Maybe a little to personal for Richard’s Ramblings……..
Ah, NOW I get it — Margo wants to hear about your college masquerade…
Too personal for Richard’s Ramblings? Home of the PsychoBunny and pictures of nude wimmen on horseback? Hardly.
Re: The Bìtçh. Not that big a story but a lot of fun while it lasted. In brief:
Waaayy back in college I sat down to use a terminal and found the previous person hadn’t logged off. Apparently the last thing they had done was post to a bulletin board. A new thing at the time. Most of the postings were signed with fanciful names (Manage, Dr. Who, Math God, etc) and in typical sophomoric fashion I created a new logon and posted replies to several of the people. For whatever reason I made my replies vaguely suggestive (“Dr Who, just how long is your… scarf?”) and signed them “The Bìtçh”.
And the first pebble started down the hill.
A few days later I remembered the board and checked in to find a significant number of messages posted in reply to my 3-4 original postings. So, naturally, I replied back.
And the pebble hit a rock loose, which hit another, which hit two more, which…
The folks on the board (most of which were guys, of course) started getting very interested in finding out just who The Bìtçh was. I kept my replies never more than vaguely suggestive and as strictly honest as possible. When asked my bra size, for example, I replied that I don’t wear a bra. (Ooohhh! Drool!) For me, the fun was seeing what a tizzy everyone would get whipped up into despite my never really saying anything.
Word spread, membership in the board rose from 15-20 people to over 100. To find out just who I was Manage, the student who crafted and managed the board, added a host of additional features that allowed him to track just when someone had logged on, to find out just which terminal on campus they were using and, eventually, to alert him when someone logged in as well as several others. All designed to hunt down little ol’ me. It got to the point that I had to grab messages and go. There was one time when I logged in, printed out the messages and left the building only to pass a Manage and a couple of his friends racing in the door. The night I said I’d be on at a particular time (and logged in via a fraternity brother’s modem so I couldn’t be located) there were so many on at once the system almost died.
For a while they’d decided that The Bìtçh was my girlfriend (quite attractive (although, as it eventually turned out, far more of a “B” than I ever was, but that’s yet another tale…)), so I had to log on while she was in a class also attended by Manage and that theory got dropped. It all went on for several weeks. Mostly I was amused by the reactions I could get from some actually very innocuous statements. And by the number of clumsy attempts by people to find out who I really was by sending me “I know who you really are and if you don’t meet with me I’ll tell everyone” messages. Not a one of which ever replied to my “OK, tell me who I am and I’ll meet you” calling of their bluffs.
Eventually folks did start to find out. First it was one of the junior faculty from the computer lab who noticed The Bìtçh being online and looked into the terminal room to see who was there. I figured he was onto me when he called someone on the room’s phone, spoke quietly to them and kept glancing at me with a smile on his face. I looked at him, nodded, and we both started laughing. He and the other prof were very amused and actually kept the secret from their student (Manage) for several days. They were impressed with how much it had lead Manage and others to learn about the system, although didn’t think it was something they could really turn into a regular teaching tool.
I did get the expected “You must be a fág” type notes from some who’d had their egos bruised, I suppose. But I had that girlfriend, and most people took it with good humor and a “OK, you got me” grin.