When I first installed SK2 I was getting a large number of false positives from the RBL and Trackback referrer plugins. At the time I tracked it down to weird DNS issues and disabled them as I was at work and didn’t have time to look into it.

Since then I have investigated, discovered and fixed the problem.
(Read on …)

I have been running Spam Karma 2 Alpha on this site for the past few days and it seems much better at catching spam than the original Spam Karma including catching all the trackback spam that had been slipping through.
I was however missing the digest emails that Spam Karma generated so I wrote a little plug-in for Spam Karma 2 this evening “sk2_pjw_daily_digest_plugin“. This sends a digest email every n hours with a report on the recently caught spam (since last mail basically) much the same as you can see through the Spam Karma 2 plug-in options page.
(Read on …)

A lot of buzz has been generated recently by this essay by Jesse James Garrett about what he calls Ajax:

Ajax isn’t a technology. It’s really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways. Ajax incorporates:

• standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
• dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
• data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
• asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
• and JavaScript binding everything together.

None of this is new technology, but rather the application of existing technology to provide a much better user experience to the user of a web application. Web applications are often see as poor second cousins to desktop applications in terms of user experience because of the continual slow round tripping to the web server to progress to the next step. “Ajax” as used by sites like Google’s gmail removes this poor user experience as the data for the next page is downloaded in the background while the user reads the current page.
(Read on …)