Mozdev Filemanager: This is a very cool little tool for Mozilla family of browsers. The code is finally LGPL and can be used as part of a project. Inclusion of something like this in the admin of ANY blogging or CMS project would be fantastic.
A couple of key features which are incredibly useful.

• Browsing files and folders using tree and list controls
• Copying and moving files and folders using tradditional copy/cut/paste operations
• Built-in text editor

I have been using an ASP and ActiveX based upload download manager with lesser functions for a partial CMS that we are working on at my day job.
Some concerns I have about FileManager:

• Browser Security: Will there be glaring holes that might need to be patched? Since the code has been around for a while, this might be moot
• Server Security: How will the variety of host OSes deal with files created/uploaded by the package? I can see a potential support nightmare if every OS handles file security differently

Has anyone seen implementations for MT, WP, Drupal or any other CMS yet?

What Makes A Great Weblog? from UrbanMainframe.com: Peoples’ perceptions of what makes a good weblog are very interesting to read especially if you disagree with some of them. Here Jonathan claims that weblogs are not about Standards Compliance, Accessibility, Tables (or the lack thereof), design, posting frequency or features.

Contrary to his claims, I would say that all of the above are quite important though to a varying degree. His examples of simply designed, good blogs says to me that he is comparing simplicity of aesthetics with complication in a design. A design can be as simple as just text on a page, and still be a very elegant and semantic page that is well designed.

Tables are yucky unless their use is extremely well justified. Period.

Posting frequency is important. A stale blog, is a slow blog which creates a snowball effect. You post less, less people visit your site, you have less interest in writing more stuff in your blog and so on.

Accessibility and Standards compliance, in my opinion, do not need any explanation.

I agree with most of the “It is About…” section but have to say that his turnoffs are turning off. A blog is first and foremost a personal journal. If you want to write about your pet cat, your depression, your wishlist whoring etc, thats your call and since I have been flamed a couple of times and I am still here, I have to say that they are not all that bad either.

In addition, since he mentions baiting as one of his turn offs, I had to write a critique of his post! (All in good fun, please, no flame wars)

Can there be any such thing without the fear of poison and/or interception from spammers? I fear not but would like to at least take a look at the possibility.

A simple method of doing this would be to provide a feed of spam words from every blog. Provide a page inside your blogging tool that allows a user to add “Spam Word Sharing” sites and then update manually when needed. The recipient blog will grab the feed, check for time updated, and if new words are found, add them to its own list of words. The inherent problem of this distributed method is that spammers will be able to look at the list and then modify the information they use in their spams. The upside of this method is that spammers cannot POSSIBLY look at the spam words of each and every blog unless they write some sort of intelligent spammer tool (which is NOT beyond them by any means)

Another means is to have a few centralized sources for the spam words. This would reduce the number of places that people have to go to get the information. This would, however, bring up the age old problem of announcing the presence of other such sources for synchronization. There are hundreds of different ways thats these neighbors can be programmatically announced etc, but they are all very cumbersome to code and easy to break into. This method also makes it easier for spammers to get a hold of the list and poison it or go around it.

I have also thought of the bayesian concept since I did develop a Perceptron based Bayesian Spam filter for real email which worked pretty well (it was an educational venture). Traditionally, in weblog comment spam, we tend to concentrate on a large number of words, phrases, IPs etc (at least I have) without trying to store any intelligence about them. A simple example are the words texas and holdem. Seperately they are innocent, but together they are a surefire spam combination unless your site is about poker and in which case, you have a difficult spam problem anyways. So, if spam systems were developed which stored word intelligence that got modified with each spam comment, this intelligence would be smaller in size, easier to transport and much easier to share. The drawback of this schema is poison from spammers and rapid changes in content.

So, to summarize, we need a “spam information sharing scheme” that is selectively public, is relatively small in size and can easily to integerated into present infrastructures.

What do you think?

Flickr Gallery 0.4: Plugin for WordPress. This one should be really cool. From what I can tell from the plugin, you post to Flickr and the plugin will get the photographs from Flickr, cache them locally and then post them on your blog. REST is used to make the API calls to Flickr to get the information. The coolest part of this plugin is that it incorporates the “Notes” of Flickr. This code can be used outside of WordPress as well since it really does not use any of the WordPress code.
Thanks Ray!

Someone from somewhere posted a REAL and valuable comment with a bunch of spam words, ended up getting automatically blacklisted and my CSPAM plugin ended up blacklisting the WHOLE organization. CSPAM’s false positive was a biggie!

I apologize for the inconvenience and this episode has made me even more aware of the weaknesses of a completely automatic spam prevention system. But we shall press on.

If you have been using the CSPAM plugin in the Alpha stages and are happy with the performance and the protection, please feel free to tell other people about it and send them my way (have them email me).

There is a major overhaul of this plugin in the works which will increase throughput and performance. The problem at this moment is the sheer amount of information that I am collecting about spam and spammers. A lot of it seems redundant but if someone is interested in access to this information, please let me know.

I am sure that I am going to eat these words as soon as I write them, but I am not buying.

Literally, I am not buying an iPod so I can Podcast!

Sure I can make any such device work with enclosure supported weblog feeds and sure WordPress supports enclosures now. I know that I can add casts to this weblog using WordPress 1.3 and I can do a bunch of cool stuff with the Windows Podcasting application that I am writing. But do we really want to *listen* to one person rambling on?

What are your podcasting experiences? Do you like to listen to a single voice ramble on? I would think that a Podcast that you can download to your device and listen to (say in your car) would make you feel a closer bond with the person you are listening to.

While on the subject, how do you start a Podcast? Do you introduce yourself and your blog when you start recording? If everyone started putting out Podcasts and you downloaded all of the 10,000 megs to your player, how in the world would you know who is who? I would think Matt was Scoble and Dave would sound like Adam.

Even worse are the symptoms of forgetting podcast content. Say I hear Scoble say something really cool, or I want to refute something that Winer says one morning, I would kill myself trying to write it down while speeding down I-75!

I like talk radio. Does that make me a natural Podcaster/listener?

Thankfully, I sound like the average mid-westerner (go figure!), would heavily accented people be at a disadvantage at Podcasting?

What do you do if you get tongue tied and all kinds of lost in the middle of your podcast? Do you start all over again?

Was Podcasting designed for the A-List blogger and meant for the rest of us to listen to them? I really cannot see having hundreds of podcast feeds and gigabytes of information to be downloaded everyday to get my news fix.

Maybe my understanding of the process is completely out in left field.

Since there is not much going on in the blogosphere besides comment spam, I thought I would bring out an age old topic that always portends a lot of exciting discourse.

I have had the opportunity to name a few. The first was Mindful Musings. I did spend a lot of time thinking about that one. I wanted to express my frustrations, fears, anger, loathe, rant as well as my joy, pleasure and satisfaction in my blog. I wanted to be creative and artsy. I wanted people to remember the name long after they had left my blog. Since I did not have the money to buy a domain, I never did search to make sure it was available. I just made sure it sounded catchy to me.

For Weblogtoolscollection.com, I had wanted to start a blog about blogging tools and did some reasearch on the names available. At first glance the name seemed a little too long, but it grew on me and thats where it stands today.

How did you end up naming your blog? Were you in your pajamas, holding a beer and and shooting the cans in the backyard? Was your significant other nagging you to clean the bathroom when the name hit you? How much effect did the color of your socks have on the name of your blog? Was a cat involved? How much time did you spend in thinking up a good and catchy name for your site?

I need a lot more alpha testers. Please email me or leave a comment if interested. I do not want to release it for general download and thus the lack of a real release. Spread the word.

[EDIT] Come on, some more testers…please? If you are one of the plugin users…any comments?

I am sure this has been circulated over and over again in WordPress support circles, but I just came across it when I upgraded a test blog.

Basically, after upgrading to 1.2.1 if you try to login to your wp-admin interface, you might get a “Redirection limit Exceeded Error” which comes back with reboots and browser restarts. The error comes from the cookie that is setup on your browser from the old admin interface. Clear all cookies and you should be back to normal.

I have been working with the centralized comment spam prevention idea for some time and I have a service ready to be tested. It is in the alpha stages of development but the focus is on a simplified interface, incredibly simple installation and ZERO maintenance.

Now a lot of developers and blog gurus poo poo the centralized idea since any central system WILL be vulnerable. However, if centralization itself is distributed, that is, if a hundred people can provide spam protection for a hundred thousand, the vulnerability becomes less of a problem. In the present incarnation of this service, you install a WordPress (various other tools planned) plugin and enable it. Everything else is taken care of for you. The service learns from itself and the more spam you send its way, the better it gets.

Lots of features are planned and some are already implemented. What I am looking for are about a hundred alpha testers with the worst comment spam symptoms. During the testing period things might break horribly (well not really, just comments will be snafu’ed), and you might have to endure frequent updates, but you might very well be free of comment spam, and in the process help create something useful (and make me happy!).

So if Cialis and Viagra haunt you in your morning coffee or if you do not care for the texas-holdem person, (and are willing to be a blog guinea pig), leave a comment here with your blog name and email address (never visible) and I will send you the download link.

If you are a developer with a blog tool beside WordPress (or even a WP hack/dev) and would like to see the insides of the web service, let me know.

[EDIT]: There are no dangers really. If this plugin somehow stops responding and visitors cannot comment on your blog, you would have to manually turn off the plugin (and enable any other comment spam system you might have) Thats all.

UPDATE: Everything is now ready to go, the plugin works well with 1.2 and 1.3 installs of WP with one exception.  There has been some problem with WP 1.2.1 when running Kubrick 1.2.6.  I am looking into it now, but I thought it was not a deal breaker.  If you have any questions leave them for me here or on my site.

Hey everyone, just checking in with a little plugin update.  I am releasing a new plugin on Friday the 29th of October called Per Post Comment Text.

In a nutshell this plugin will allow you to specify the text that your link to your comments form holds.  Gone are the days of every link on every article being Comments (0), or What do you think? (0).  Now you will be able to have your post about motorcycles have this as your comment link: What kind of hog do you ride? (0); or your article about The Grudge have one that says: Did you piss on yourself in this movie? (0).

If you hit my site you can see the plugin in action.

Some months ago, Mark created the Sortable Nicer Archives for WP 1.2
In WP 1.3, the main page has been split into different sections, so the original file above didn’t look good - it worked of course, but the page layout was broken.
Using includes for the header and footer, along with a <div> correction, that is now sorted.
It can be seen working here: www.tamba2.org.uk/T2/narchives.php

The phps file is here: www.tamba2.org.uk/downloads/narchives2.phps

Note: this has not been tested against Themes.

Is there a difference? Is optimized code better than optimized markup? Which should programmers (for the web) be striving for? If there is a major difference, should mainstream programmers be re-learning the tricks of the trade when they start programming for the web?

I ran into this recently where I really needed to use the LIMIT qualifier in some SQL queries and found out that there really is no equivalent in MS SQL, which is irritating.

In thinking about it and searching through the web, I think I have come up with a workaround that would work well if you were not dealing with millions of records.

Try this instead:
SELECT TOP 20 * from table_blah
WHERE index NOT IN (SELECT TOP 10 index from table_blah ORDER BY index)
ORDER BY index

instead of the LIMIT 10,20

Let us try this again, with some fixes.

[EDIT] Comments seems to have been borked by an errant empty line in my common spam words. Please try posting your comments again if you were getting timed out. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Thank you, my reader, for all your patronage and I hope to continue to provide useful and insightful content in the future and will try my hardest to continue helping out with WordPress.

In the last year, this blog has grown to become a part of me. Weblogtoolscollection has been viewed more times than I am worth (which is not much, mind you), I have met many fine people who believe passionately in blogging and elect to spend hundreds of hours in helping people blog. I have come to be known as LaughingLizard (or LL in short) to many of my buddies. I have started serving ads to pay for some of the hosting. I have had to switch hosts three times since this date last year.

I love doing this. I cannot think of a better way to spend an afternoon at work.

Please come back and visit often.
Peace.

[EDIT] Question of the day: How long have you been reading weblogtoolscollection.com?

I have finally put together a small but functional project website for Pictorialis. There is an associate blog, a wiki (incomplete) and seperate download locations for all Pictorialis releases and support files. The support BBS is linked in and there is even a donate button.

Please refer to that site in the future for all Pictorialis related information and downloads. I will continue to announce releases on this blog. I will appreciate any links from my readers to this new project website.

An updated version of the Three Strikes Spam Plugin, now in version 1.1 Beta, is available for download.

I started to receive a few Spam comments yesterday and I realized that the built in WordPress “Common Spam Words” filter does not account for encoded information. In other words, if a spammer encodes the contents of the comment, URL etc, it does not get caught as spam (though some items will get caught). This new version of the plugin uses a function that acts like the Javascript unescape command (in PHP) and decodes encoded entities. The php function, and consequently, the Three Strikes plugin, will check for Unicode and ASCII characters, convert them to plain letters and characters (unencoded) and then run the spam checker on this information. I will be working on implementing this within Kitten’s Spam Words plugin as well.

Download the new plugin from here. Installation and upgrade are as simple as renaming this file as threestrikes.php, copying it to your wp-content/plugins directory and then enabling it within your admin interface. Please post bugs/suggestions.

[EDIT] The offer to share my personal “Common Spam Words” still stands. I have enough words in there to populate Google. Email me with requests if you want to use that.

[EDIT] If you want my list of spam words, please include a link to your blog with the request so I know that you are not a spammer.

Etomite Content Management System: A PHP based CMS that looks very promising. I have another project in the works (Pictorialis) that needs a full features CMS system and Etomite might be the ticket. I really like the interface, the Standards adherance, the file management ability and the “snippets", which are small pieces of PHP code that are stored in the database and executed when the corresponding template tags are seen.

I have not looked very closely at the insides of Etomite, nor have I actually installed the product, but it has some promise and I will be exploring it further. The example sites look just like any other static site with a common look and feel. If Tinderbox was available for Windows, I would not be looking at anything else. I am really convinced that Tinderbox is the product for me but I will have to wait till Mark is done with the Windows version (or I buy a Mac, whichever comes first)

First noticed at: RevJim

A new release of WPBlacklist with a few bug fixes is out. The latest release fixes a couple of problems with the installer and updates the documentation as well. More details here.

Flickr (beta) is a great service and is very quickly becoming the photoblogging tool of choice for many bloggers. Very cool features, very zippy application and ease of upload coupled with a relatively usable interface makes this product a winner. Photoblogging is a personal interest and I want to try and understand what makes this product so likeable as compared to, say, Gallery and the places where I think Flickr could improve upon itself.

Product features:

• Easy setup - It is very simple to setup a gallery for yourself, almost instantenous if you dont want to provide much information. I like that. If an online service requires your life’s story for account creation, users are lost.
• Mostly uncluttered homepage - Though that is quickly changing. The main items of use are clearly visible and easy to find within the thumbnails.
• Ease of upload and multiple photo upload - Downloadable applications for both Mac OS X and Windows make uploading multiple photos a cinch. Online forms are also available. A bookmarklet to automatically select images from a viewed webpage for upload to Flickr is incredibly useful. I am not so sure of the lisence implications of that feature, but very cool otherwise.
• The image editing interface - Is very nicely dont. Simple image editing (rotation), ability to highlight parts of a photo with comments and various sizes for download are also cool features.
• Blog directly from inside Flickr - Again, nicely done. Easy to use, not much setup, simple interface and fast response.
• Tags - You can add tags to your photographs. In my mind, tags are simple descriptive words for your pictures and photos can be classified using those tags. Much like the GMail Labels. More on that in a minute
• Lots of image security features - Well, a couple that come to mind are the ability to make a picture private and the ability to classify an image as “might be offensive". Useful for those not-so-nice pictures.
• Social Network Integeration - Only possible on a hosted service, but nicely done in Flickr (though could use some improvements). Assign groups, contacts, invite people to join etc.
• Full EXIF implementation - Get all your EXIF information translated and added to your photos
• Cameraphone/moblog ability - Send pictures to Flickr from your cameraphone. All your photoblogging under one roof.
• RSS and ATOM feeds - Much like most other modern blogging applications, Flickr provides ATOM and RSS feeds for each user.
• Last but not the least, a powerful FAQ - Most questions are answered here.

Where they could improve:

• No Albums?? - This is an opinion but Ive always missed having folders in GMail and I miss having albums in Flickr. I think tags are useful in their own right and are a very useful way of classifying pictures, but the ability to group pictures upon upload, especially if you upload a lot of pictures, is very important. If I plan to upload 300 pictures to Flickr every week, it would be impossible to keep them straight. I think Picasa does a good job with albums. Pictures can be grouped by name, date uploaded and the album in which they have been uploaded to. They can also be classified by “tags", but thats secondary to a higher order classification.
• More clutter? - I remember when Flickr was launched it had a pristine interface and I cannot help but think that the marketing/design departments (if they have one) have had their way with the evolving interface.
• “Your photos” interface - The page to view your own photos (and make modifications) needs a little more work in my opinion. Long names overlap, icons are non-descriptive and LJ - esque