As anyone who has a blog knows, there’s a whole lot of spammers out there trying to promote their crap stuff via comments on other people’s blogs. Naturally, tools like Akismet have been developed to automatically identify likely spam and generally make life harder for the spammers.

Akismet is very good at what it does. Any comments it suspects are spam end up in a queue in WordPress for later review. That review usually consists on quickly skimming the list of comments and then hitting the “Empty Spam” button because Akismet rarely makes a mistake.

Lately, one persistent spammer trying to push vitamin C serum has been consistently hitting a post I wrote about graffiti and posting one single comment. And every time I see the notification on the backend “There’s 1 comment in your spam queue right now”, I check out the queue and  hit the “Empty Spam” button.

A little while later, the “There’s 1 comment in your spam queue right now” is back and sure enough, another vitamin C spam. It’s getting kind of monotonous. The least they could do is change it up a bit so I have something new to read before I delete it.

Oh look: “There’s 1 comment in your spam queue right now”. Again. (Seriously.)

I upgraded to WordPress 3.5.2 a couple of days ago when it appeared on the dashboard and then went back to whatever I was doing. Yesterday, I tried to connect to the admin dashboard and was unsuccessful. No login box, just an eventual timeout. I had similar results when I tried using the WordPress app on both my iPhone and my iPad.

Hmm.

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I’ve been using the Sociable plugin for quite a while to offer readers a quick and easy way to share what I’ve written on different social networks. It’s fairly configurable, allowing you to select where you want to make it easy for people to share things with. I have about half a dozen little icons at the bottom of each post that you can click to share the entry with your friends on Twitter, Facebook, or by email, or add it to your favourites, share it in Google Reader or post it to Digg or Reddit. There are other social networks that I could choose, like MySpace (does anyone still use MySpace?), but I don’t want to clutter things up with a zillion little icons.

There was a major upgrade that appeared in my WordPress control panel today bringing it up to version 4.0.3, from 3.whatever. Usually WordPress plugin updates are fairly painless, so clicking on it didn’t really concern me, so I upgraded and then watched as all my icons disappeared.

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I mentioned the WordPress app on my list of essential iPad apps recently. In my write-up I noted that the editor was very basic without any formatting controls. This morning I checked the AppStore and found that an update for the WordPress app has been released. And lo and behold, they’ve added some formatting controls to the editor to make it easier to markup text.

Now, instead of having to manually enter HTML tags to bold something, for example, I can highlight the text and poke a markup button. This is long overdue and makes the app much more useful. There are still some tweaks they need to make, such as allowing you to specify whether a link opens in the same window or new one, but this is a good start.

The author of the YOURLS WordPress to Twitter Plugin has released an update. Presumably, version 1.4.9 will address the brokenness I wrote about a couple of days ago that happened when WordPress 3.1 was released.

If you implemented the solution I wrote about, you should probably upgrade to version 1.4.9.

I upgraded to WordPress 3.1 at the end of February. Usually, there’s very little breakage, but this time the YOURLS WordPress to Twitter plugin (version 1.4.8) I’ve been using to automatically post a tweet with a shortlink using my dew.is short URL service broke, which was very annoying. I was able to turn turn on the Tweetly Updater plugin as a stop-gap measure, but it uses bit.ly and I really wanted to use my own dew.is.

Browsing through the comments on the author’s website, I came across one from someone else who had managed to track down what appears to be the offending code, so I thought I’d try it out.

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@DaniGirl retweeted a link to an article about the pitfalls of installing free WordPress themes that you find by searching for them on Google. In a nutshell, the author of the article, Siobhan, found that all but one of the first ten links Google returned pointed at themes that were incredibly dodgey. Most of them used obfuscated code in the theme to insert links and ads that the owner of the blog had no control over.

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