0ink! » Guaranteed to contain absolutely zero ink!

I hope you have had a good year and may the following year be even better!

Happy New Year!

I haven’t posted anything in a long while, so I thought I’d just keep you updated. Right now I have a couple of major projects going which is leaving little time to think about anything else.

I still work on my plugins when I do have any spare time. I am in the process of adding new features to KQD (RSS feed plugin for the WP Dashbaord) to make it so much…sexier. I keep meaning to release it, but on the verge of release I think of another indispensable feature to add. So hold tight - not long to go now.

In the mean time - it’s the World Cup! Japan are out of the way and now we are up against Brazil this coming Monday (June 19 from 1.30am until 5am). It will be a tough match, but I think the time has come for Australia to make an impression on World Soccer. It will be a great match! Go Aussies!

You might have noticed the site has been down the last couple of days. That’s because my host has just upgraded our server. The site would have been up sooner, but I did not realise there was a name change for the MySQL server as well. Well, after a minor re-configuration, 0ink is back!

Note: There still is a problem with mod_rewrite, so parts of this site is inaccessible at the moment. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

Update: All has been fixed! Thanks to the team from Bur.st Networking!

I gave the site a bit of a face-lift today, giving it an industrial-tech feel. The header image of the dawn / dusk sky makes for a nice contrast to the grey concrete background, while the angular features gives the page that clean, sharp look…well at least I think so anyway. I like it.

The latest upgrade for Wordpress fixes a few security and bug issues. There have also been enhancements made to the plugin API which will aid in future plugin development.

Updated files include:

/

• wp-commentsrss2.php
• wp-settings.php
• xmlrpc.php

/wp-admin

• categories.php
• edit-page-form.php
• post.php
• upload.php
• users.php

/wp-includes

• comment-functions.php
• functions-post.php
• pluggable-functions.php
• template-functions-category.php
• version.php

This update will be the final release in the 1.5.x series before the 1.6 major release in a couple of months. The Wordpress 1.5.x series of releases, in my opinion, have been the most stable to date.

It’s been hard to leave comments lately because there was an error in one of the files that dealt with comments. Essentially, no one could leave comments due to this error. It’s been fixed.

I’ve also changed the CAPTCHA system to a plugin that I’ve just written. Hopefully, now the CAPTCHA code is a little easier to read for humans and just that little harder for OCR programs. Frankly, even I found the old CAPTCHA code a headache to read.

The Gravatar site has been down, so it was an opportunity to fix the broken image icon, and replace it with something a little more aesthetically pleasing to the eye. So, now instead of a broken image icon there is some whitespace. Maybe I’ll think of something better later.

This site now uses UTF-8 character encoding for it’s pages and feeds. You can find out about what UTF-8 is all about here.

I’ve also managed to set up a WAMP server at home, which makes development and testing so much easier. And on that note, I’m looking forward to releasing a plugin or two soon. Really.

Files changed in this upgrade include:

• /wp-admin/post.php
• /wp-includes/functions-post.php
• /wp-includes/version.php
• /readme.html
• /login.php
• /xmlrpc.php

I’ve also been busy working on my plugins and javascript scriplets for KCA, as well as KFC and to a lesser extent KLP. I don’t know if they are all that useful, but it was fun coding them.

You can see the effects of the tooltips just by hovering the mouse over a link - or over anything that has a title attribute attached to it (which of course you can’t see unless you examine the page source - but trust me, that’s how it works).

If you are so curious as to look at the source, you’ll notice there’s no hardcoded event triggers. It’s amazing what you can do with the DOM.

Apart from the tooltips, I’ve also worked on a live preview for the comments section, that includes current time, updated gravar, links and of course the actual comment itself.

I’ve also added an admin interface to the plugins to make them easier to manage. As always, to me if they aren’t just drop-in plugins, then to me they are just hacks. I’ve made sure that everything is configurable through the options page.

I know it’s been a while since I’ve released any code, but that’s only because I’ll only release something if I think it’s ready. Well, it’s nearly ready.

It’s amazing how much comment spam is directed at my site, although I’m sure the amount of spam directed at my site is modest compared to others.

I don’t know why the spammers keep it up, since I don’t even notice it until I check the site stats and find out where all the hits originate. So, unless there’s another reason for them to attempt to spam my site, apart from taking up bandwidth, I don’t see why they would want to continue.

I’m not sure if there is a law against this, if not, there should be, just as there has recently been a law passed outlawing email spam (not that it made much difference) to my spam folder.

I suppose in the end it’s the people who aren’t tech savvy that will cop the flood of unsolicited ads directed at no one in particular.

In other words, spammers are the equivalent of the trawl line fishing - everyone gets spammed, young and old alike. No one is spared from ads for online casinos, wrist watches, various assortments of pills, all kinds of get-rich-quick offers etc…

But, going by the logic of the spammers, there’s one born every minute, so someone out there is bound to respond. Which must be true, otherwise the spam would have dried up ages ago. (With comment spam it’s to improve the rankings in the search engines.)

Anyway, apart from all the moral issues, I wonder how much network traffic is used up by spam? I mean for every legitimate person that visits my site, I’m pretty sure one or more spam bot(s) have hit my site hundreds of times. Because of this unwanted traffic, hosts would have to upgrade their systems to account for the extra network load.

At the end of the day someone’s got to foot the bill.

A minor site upgrade (to Wordpress 1.5.1.2 from 1.5.1.1) was needed to address a security issue. Files updated were:

• /wp-admin/post.php
• /wp-admin/quicktags.js
• /wp-content/themes/default/header.php
• /wp-includes/functions.php
• /wp-includes/functions-post.php
• /wp-includes/pluggable-functions.php
• /wp-includes/template-functions-category.php
• /wp-includes/template-functions-general.php
• /wp-includes/template-functions-links.php
• /wp-includes/template-functions-posts.php
• /wp-includes/version.php
• /wp-includes/wp-db.php
• /wp-blog-header.php
• /xmlrpc.php

I think the new header design looks pretty cool. The Star Wars poster gave me the inspiration. Lucky for me the colours of the original photo are perfect, since they blend in with the current theme colours.

Worked out well I think.

I just need to tinker a little more with the navigation tab colours, but am happy with the rest of it…for now.

The original photo I used for the new header image is by Stewart Butterfield (Sunset from the plane).