Spontaneous Monotony

Ken Clarke has been eliminated from the Tory leadership contest. How relevant is that bearing in mind that on the two previous occassions the Tory members have chosen incapable leaders who closely resemble gnomes, rather than vote for him! So long as it’s not Davis, because I couldn’t stand the next General Election being yet another foregone conclusion!

As well as the ones I mentioned earlier, there are some extra features that I’ve set up with the help of a few plugins:

• Post tags – eventually I will have all of the posts properly tagged, and there will also be a Flickr/Technorati-style ‘cosmos’ page to show you how popular each tag is. At the moment there aren’t any links to Technorati itself but I might hack that in at some point
• Category livemarks – Firefox and Opera users will be familiar with the auto-detection of RSS feeds that those browsers offer. Now when you click on the icon it will also offer you the individual category feeds to save you navigating to the pages themselves. I’m aware that IE does not offer such functionality, so I’ll try to add them as ordinary text links in the next few days
• Nofollow (enabled by default in Wordpress) is disabled for comments and trackbacks.

Yes, although it has long been suspected one site has finally come up with proof (and a list of IPs) that Windows Media Player 10 ‘phones home’ – sending the identity of every single file you open to the following IPs:

1) Napster (63.241.55.113)
2) Intel Corporation, spider (147.208.188.228)
3) MUSIC MATCH (63.236.14.35)
4) Digital Telemedia, INC (209.73.26.183)
5) ezgov.com CERFnet AP2P (12.129.72.200) (12.129.72.145)

Of course the privacy threat can be eliminated simply by adding the offending IPs to the ‘restricted’ list/zone in your firewall of choice.

The switchover to Wordpress 1.5.1.2 has been completed. Since, thanks to the Spam Karma 2 plugin, Wordpress is actually quite resistant to comment spam, the automatic moderation is no longer in place – however if it thinks that your comment might be spam then it could ask you to complete a captcha. Although there are accessibility issues with captcha, morally and legally (Disability Discrimination Act 1995) SK2’s version is fine because the worst that could happen is that I have to manually moderate your comment (which is what would happen if there was no captcha at all) – so disabled users are not treated any worse as a result

Try as I might, I just can’t put up with Movable Type. Sure, it’s just as functional as Wordpress, but for a number of reasons it is driving me insane:

• Rebuilding. Sure, it’s fine for people running a small site, or with too much time on their hands (but I am neither) and it takes an unbearable amount of time to rebuild just when I change one template tag
• Lack of any decent theme – Kubrick (the default Wordpress theme) is better than anything I have come across for MT
• Plugins (lack of)
• The template tags, and the templates themselves, are damn near impossible to understand, let alone modify

As a result, I’ll be switching to Wordpress over the next day or two, so there might be an outage or two during that time.