Almasch

Now I have enabled a simple spam protection to make it bots harder to add comments to my blogs. The reason is in the last week the amount of spam dramatically increased and it was not possible anymore to handle this problem with a blacklist of common spam content.

I don’t like complicated computer generated pictures which are so difficult to read that even humans will become problems to decipher them. That why I am using  a WordPress Plugin called Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin from Michael Wöhrer. The user has to solve a simple math equation which is easy enough that nobody should need a calculator for it. For bots it is hopefully  a big obstacle to solve 4+2.

So far it works pretty well and no unwelcome comment found its way to the moderator queue or even the frontpage.

I found a very interessting article about software patents on http://webshop.ffii.de/index.en.html and I was surprised how many of  them are already granted.

I guess I will first call my lawyer(s) before writing any further line of code or think about a new feature I could add to any application I ever have written… 

Now big brother is watching me. And you. And everybody else, too.

I searched for some plugins for WordPress to improve it a little bit and I found Stats This plugin collects data about visitors and show what are the interesting parts for others on my blog. A friend gave me a hint that there is also Google Analytics which works in a similar way.

For both systems a small script has to be included on the website which triggers a countable event on a remote server. At this server are collected information about the number of visitors, from where they came, how long they stayed and which pages they viewed.

I have choosen Google Analytics to give it a try and see the results.

Instead of trying to dig information out of the apache logfiles a the java script from google does this job actively. One advantage of this active approach are more accurate results. One disadvantage is that information about your visitors are stored at a extern server.

The system rely on java script. So if you do not want to be tracked there is a effective way to be invisible for google. Disable java script! For firefox exists a very good extension called NoScript which let you easily disable and enable java script at your will.

While uploading files to WordPress I have had no problems until I tried the first file which was not a media file. I got the message that it is not possible because of security reasons. In the backend I didn’t find any configuration to select which files are allowed and which not.

After a short internet search I found two solutions.

One is a plugin from Peter Westwood which is integrated into the admin backend and allows comfortable editing of types which are allowed to be uploaded.

The second way to solve the problem is more straight forward. In the function wp_check_filetype() which is located in wp-includes/functions.php you can find an array with all types wich are allowed to uploaded. Just add the type you want to upload.

But be aware what you are doing! There is a good reason why types of files are checked before upload to server. Just thing a few minutes before changing the code and allow .php, .exe, .sh and so on…