Spontaneous Monotony

Forgot to mention yesterday, but one of the new plugins I installed yesterday allows you to subscribe to email notifications of new comments. Of course in most cases RSS is better, but if for some reason you are unable to use RSS (e.g. you are using the standard Windows infliction of Internet Explorer and Lookout Distress, neither of which have an RSS capability) email is alright (I say alright because afaik you don’t actually get sent the comment, you get sent a link to the post which you have to open).

Thanks to Michael Hampton’s comment, I now know that the Gravatar plugin I installed is working (I had to wait because I don’t actually have a gravatar).

A Gravatar is a ‘globally recognised avatar’ – you upload an 80×80 image to their site, give it a rating (using the American G, R, NC-17 etc.) and then any site which supports gravatars will display that image next to your name when you submit a comment. To comply with the general rating of the content on this site (and the ICRA label) I’ve restricted this to G-rated gravatars only (no R or NC-17, sorry).

As you might notice if you view a single post, as well as tags you now get the [probably minimal] benefit of quick links to add the post to various social bookmarking services – such as digg, furl etc. del.icio.us is conspicuous by its absence – this is deliberate due to del.icio.us being owned by Yahoo.

I just noticed on its website (I was checking for an update) that Spam Karma 2 is actually under an ‘all rights reserved’ license – which in theory could make it a violation of the GPL (Wordpress’ license). So I’ve given it the royal Deletion and replaced it with Bad Behaviour and Bad Behaviour Blackhole (a DNSBL plugin by the same guy). I really like SK2, it was one of the best things about Wordpress, but the possibility of it being a GPL violation means I have to count it out.

Correction: I re-read the GPL and discovered that I made a mistake – the GPL does NOT forbid using non-GPL plugins with GPL-licensed software, it only mandates that if you re-distribute a modified version of GPL software, your re-distribution/derivative work must be licensed under the GPL (to prevent a company from taking a GPL project and re-releasing it with a proprietary license). Since Spam Karma does not involve distributing a non-GPL version of Wordpress, it doesn’t violate this. For more information see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

Perhaps you’ll remember Bush’s propaganda speeches before and during the invasion of Iraq – along the lines of ‘we want to bring democracy to the Middle East’. Now that Palestine’s first democratic election this century has taken place, it seems that Dubya isn’t all that keen on the idea any more – democracy works both ways Mr Bush!