The PHP screwiness (which caused any 500 errors you might have been getting earlier) now seems to have been fixed by my domain host – I still don’t have any word on what caused it in the first place, but it’ll be tomorrow before I have all the plugins, CC license metadata etc. reinstated
For a while now I’ve been tied into M$ Outlook because it is the only program M$ ActiveSync is willing to synchronise with (for my Windows Mobile 2003 PocketPC). Now I have FinchSync, which synchronises with the appropriate Mozilla programs (Thunderbird Address Book, Calendar Tasks and Appointments).
It works in the exact same way as ActiveSync – a program on your computer, a matching program on your PocketPC, which then talk to each other via a USB cable. It requires a bit of configuration, but nothing too difficult, it’s just a question of actually doing it. After that, you just make sure you have FinchSync.jar running on your computer (did I mention, it’s a Java program), and then run the FinchSync PocketPC app and click ‘Sync’. And that, as they say, is that.
A new spam fighting plugin has emerged – WordVerify makes the user enter a ‘code word’ before a comment is accepted: in the author’s own words:
WordVerify provides a simpler alternative to this method, by just requiring the entry of a single word. This provides a healthy compromise for smaller blogs that don’t necessarily need the security of a dynamic image. The chances of any comment spammer bothering to screen-scrape my blog just to comment-spam it, much less OCR an image, are pretty low. For smaller blogs, the simple addition of a codeword is probably more than enough.
I remember seeing this on at least one site before, but this is the first Wordpress plugin I’m aware of that implements it. There are a couple of other things that make it different from a captcha:
I don’t think anything happened on the user side, but my admin panel has been going crazy today, refusing to accept my password among other things. I’ve given it a thorough seeing to and I now seem to have it under control – but put it this was I had Drupal unzipped on my desktop at one point. Hopefully nothing else will go wrong.
I’ve got a new spam filter installed (Norton AntiSpam just wasn’t catching enough of it) – well when I say new I really mean ‘new to my current computer’ – when I used Outlook 2000 before, I used POPFile with that. I’ve now reinstalled it, and it’s already getting to work. Thanks to Outlook’s ability to display a webpage in the folder view (in this case, localhost:8080, POPFile’s configuration page) you can do everything you need from within Outlook itself, and it doesn’t just do spam, you can use it to organise all your email (it works by way of multiple ‘boxes’ rather than a simple spam/ham decision). It works with any email client (it works as a POP3 proxy in a similar way to antivirus scanners), and after about a week or so it will be 90%-plus accurate. I’m going to set it to record (anonymous) statistics, which I will post at a later date to show its effectiveness to any doubters