Author: chris

More spam

Posted on by chris

As a follow-up to my last post about spam, here’s an email I just got:

Hi my darling, dear friend.
How are you?
Writes to you beautiful, blond, brought up. Decent and very lovely girl.
My name is – Yuliya. To me of 29 years.
I from Russia. I want to find the present and unique love.
I already burned about love. I hope it won’t repeat any more.
I want to get acquainted with you more close.
To learn you, to learn your interests and preferences.
I hope you not against it? It only dialogue.
I will necessarily send you my photo
In the following letter. I hope to you it will be pleasant.
I with impatience will wait for your answer

To this address: [email address removed]

In expectation of your answer, whole, Yuliya.

So then, Yuliya. You hope your burning experience won’t repeat any more, eh? My answer, whole, is to see to doctor.

Spam

Posted on by chris

For some reason I get a lot of spam comments on this blog. I suppose it’s the (relative) high profile of my silly pictures. Ho hum. Most of it gets deleted automatically (yay Akismet!) but occasionally stuff gets through. Here’s an extract from a recent spam comment:

I {|actually|definitely|just|really|simply|truly} wanted to {compose|construct|develop|jot down|make|post|send|type|write|write down} a {|brief|quick|simple|small} {comment|message|note|remark|word} {in order to|so as to|to|to be able to} {appreciate…

Is that how they do it? By “it” I mean ridiculously bad English, of course. Goodness me.

I did, for a second, think that I could write a better spam creation system than that. Just for a split second.

Not all old plugins are bad plugins

Posted on by chris

Last week WPMU.org published an article entitled “What Lurks in the WordPress Plugin Repository” which waves a rather sensationalist flag about plugins which haven’t been updated in a while. Let me make one thing clear: in an ideal world all plugins would be updated regularly and would have full compatibility reports with all recent versions of WordPress. But this isn’t an ideal world.

There are plugins (in which I include my Check Email plugin) which are so simple that, barring bug-fixes, they don’t need to be updated. Some plugins touch such a small part of the WordPress system that compatibility will in all probability never be a problem. Especially if those plugins use the official APIs which – by their very definition – should very rarely change. Should we force plugin developers to bump version numbers, or even just update the version compatibility? I don’t think so.

In case anyone thinks I’m advocating allowing out-of-date plugins to continue to be used, I’m not saying that at all. However I do think that there are many plugins for which updates would be an unnecessary task for the developer to have to undertake. Remember; most plugin developers (including me) write WordPress plugins in their own time, with no financial reward. Placing extra demands on them means they will be less likely to want to continue working within the Word-o-sphere, even if those extra demands have the aim of generaring better quality plugins.

Just write

Posted on by chris

As I tweeted earlier today, I’m now running on WordPress 3.2. It is, as many people have said, gorgeous. And the full-screen mode is amazing, especially (as I believe Matt suggested) you hit F11 to get rid of the browser chrome. Just you and your words, you need nothing more.

This weekend I had the opportunity to put in a few hours on VoucherPress, my voucher/coupon plugin for WordPress. I’ve completely overhauled the code, and while (at the moment) there aren’t many new features, this overhaul will make it much easier for several thing to happen:

  1. It will make it easier to diagnose, and hopefully fix, bugs
  2. It will make it easier to add new features
  3. And it will make it easier for other people who want to get involved to understand how it all work

But I do intend to add some new features for the upcoming version 1.4 release. Most notably is a way for individual users, not just site administrators, to create and manage their vouchers. As part of that I’ll also be making it possible to put the voucher form on the front end of your site. I’m not quite sure how I’ll do that yet, but that’s the idea.

The second major feature I’ll be adding is something I’m asked about on a regular basis. At the moment the vouchers/coupons are a fixed size (about 1/3 of A4). I want to make a voucher be produced at (almost) any size. So if you want tiny PDFs for mini-vouchers, you will be able to do that. And if you want A3 sized PDF posters, you’ll be able to do that too.

This requires a re-think of the way that the templates (templates are basically just images which appear as the background of the PDF) are stored and handled. I still intend to offer a range of templates for a set of standard sizes, but if you want completely custom sizes you’ll have to produce your own template.

My idea to overcome the much larger number of standard templates is to store them in the WordPress Subversion repository to be downloaded when required by the plugin. So you’ll install the plugin with no templates, and when you choose to create a voucher and select the size you want, the thumbnails of each template will be copied to your WordPress installation so you can choose one and create your voucher. When you save your new voucher the full-resolution version of that template will be copied to your WordPress installation ready for PDF creation.

I’m not aware of any other plugins that use the WordPress Subversion repository in this way, and it amounts to free hosting for the templates. But seeing as the kind WordPress folks offer free hosting for plugins (here’s mine) I can’t imagine it will be a problem.

So, that’s the idea. When I will get chance to do all this (and overhaul my other plugins that need it) is unknown.

Jetpack, and what this means for Wibstats

Posted on by chris

The WordPress guys have recently announced their latest project, Jetpack. It’s basically a set of plugins that run on the WordPress cloud, so you get infinitely-scalable resources to back you up. One of those plugins is stats.

Now, anyone that knows me knows one of my plugins is a statistics system called Wibstats. I’m part-way through a new version with a handful of new features.

But seeing as the WordPress stats system can now be easily installed on any blog anywhere (and indeed will come as standard with WordPress installations from most of the big hosting companies), should I bother to finish and release it? Yes, yes I should.

You see, there have always been other statistics plugins, so that hasn’t changed. They have all been easy to install (gotta love the WordPress plugin architecture) and that hasn’t changed. So even though WordPress themselves are now backing a set of plugins, including statistics, there will always be people who want something different from their stats package- maybe the something different is exactly what Wibstats does.

So, in the true spirit of Open Source, I’m going to finish Wibstats and “compete” against WordPress’ Jetpack. At the very least, Wibstats is cool to me.

Finding time to finish it will be the tricky bit.