Author: westi

New theme

On By westiIn General, WordPress

Well as you can probably see, the site has a new theme as of today. This has been in development for a while and it’s not completely finished but I think it’s much nicer than the previous hacked version of the classic theme that I was using.

I have also implemented my own version of asides which I will be putting into use soon.

The header image will likely rotate when I’ve had time to dig through my photos and create a few more, and the right hand side is missing the photoblog which will show the most recent photos I’ve taken hopefully. I also need to add some colour to the page as it is quite bland at the moment.

Spam Karma 2 :: Simple Digest plugin

On By westiIn Development, WordPress2 Comments

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.
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Ajax – A new aproach to web appliations?

On By westiIn Development, Security, Web dev

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.
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