Archive for October, 2005

Akismet saved my blog!

October 26th, 2005 by Sarah King

I took a rare look at the dashboard of my WordPress blog and saw that Matt Mullenweg was looking for beta testers for a new spam blocking tool. I was getting hammered by spammers and they were driving me mad so I emailed him and found myself accepted.

Akismet is the end result of that beta testing – and it’s awesome. I’m actually getting less spam as a result at the spammers can see that their efforts are going nowhere! Phew. Read the rest of this entry »

Related Posts for WordPress

October 22nd, 2005 by Sarah King

I’ve just discovered a swag of hacks for WordPress by Denis de Bernardy. They’re pretty impressive and highlight for me, in the few lines of code that represent each hack, how little I understand the internal workings of WordPress. Aaah, one day.

The only part I’m using right now is the related posts list at the bottom of the page. It should just be when you see a single post but I’ll get to that later. Before I commit much time to it I need to work out how to make the related posts a bit more relevant. In the meantime it all helps my internal navigation I guess.

Link Vault for Mambo / Joomla

October 13th, 2005 by Sarah King

I’ve been using Link Vault on this blog and another site for while and the system seems to work well. I hadn’t put it on my hobby site because I hadn’t taken the time to create a module to place it on the site. However the site has a stack of pages so lots of opportunity to increase my vaultage.

I’ve just completed a small module I’ve written for Mambo 4.5.3 and Joomla 1 which will make it easy for users to add Link Vault to their sites. The module replaces Step 2 of the installation instructions… Read the rest of this entry »

Adsense Module for Mambo / Joomla

October 12th, 2005 by Sarah King

I decided it was about time I added Adsense to the BMX site. I’d written a custom module for my kiwi blogs site and just had to change the script. I decided this could lead to a maintenance headache for me so I’ve turned it into a “proper” module.

In this version you add Google’s script as a parameter, set the alignment (ie center, left, right) and the number of pixels above and below – this is top stop crowding and accidental clicks, et voila!

This module could be used to put any text into the modules section, not just Adsense.

Download mod_g_ads.zip

AJAX – finally!

October 11th, 2005 by Sarah King

I’ve been wanting to have a play with AJAX for ages and had book marked Rasmus’ 30 second AJAX Tutorial so tonight I took 30 seconds, which turned into 30 minutes and had a play.

I’ve extended his example slightly – to include a javascript fix and to make it a bit more browser safe – because I have Opera 7 as my test browser and it doesn’t work, but does for Opera 8 (apparantly). Read the rest of this entry »

Mambo / Joomla deal breaker

October 9th, 2005 by Sarah King

I haven’t got involved in the politics behind the Mambo / Joomla split and personally I’d like to see them rejoin. I’ve no idea how likely that is. Right now I’m left sitting on the fence, not sure which way to go.

Looking at the minor irritations I have with the current system the deal breaker for me would be the issue of coding standards. Read the rest of this entry »

Inserts and Updates

October 9th, 2005 by Sarah King

I’m collaborating on a set of components for the Mambo 4.5.3 site over at PropertyTalk. The first draft was written by the site owner and I’ve gone in an Mambo-ised them. Read the rest of this entry »