A software blog

At my hebrew blog I use Akismet as my anti-spam utility. Akismet works very well in identifying spam, and has a low ratio of false positives. The problem with Akismet is that because of the false positives you have to check all the comments marked as spam by it. In bad spam days there can be many comments to inspect which is annoying by itself.

I have made some research into other anti-spam technologies, starting with renaming the php file which handles commenting and ending with the spamkarma2 plugin which is supposed to end all spam. Somewere in the research process I had realized a very basic fact of spam. All of the spam is in english. Since my blog is in hebrew and all the comments to the blog are in hebrew as well, it was only the logical thing to do to develope a plugin which blocks comments which are written entirely in english.

The plugin inspects the commited comment, and if the comment do not contain at least one non english character, it is assumed to be spam and is entirely ignored, and a message is returned to the user (in the rare case it is not a spam bot) which says that there has to be at least one non english character at the comment.

I have no idea if this logic can be applied to other Latin languages which have a common character set with english.

There is a newer version 2.0 right over here.

This is probably one of the most useless plugins ever written, but I had an itch I needed to scratch.

The aim of the plugin is to control the amount of text send in the rss feed, and the amount of text displayed on pages which display multiple posts.

RSS: By default if you do not specify an excerpt to be used, and you do not insert the “more” tag into your post, wordpress will send exactly 55 words in the feed, which usually cause a fragment of a paragraph to be send. Not a very user friendly feature.

The plugin sends in the rss full paragraph. You can configure the amount of words to be used as a guideline to the number of paragraphs to send. If the guidline breaks a paragraph before its middle point, the paragraph is not sent; otherwise the full paragraph is sent.
Multiple posts: Much like the RSS feed, there is no way to control the excerpt used by wordpress themes which show excerpt of posts on multi posts pages. And much like the in the RSS feed the plugin gives you control on the amount of text displayed as the excerpt.

Sounds interesting? give it a try. Save it from here, put it into your plugins directory, and activate it.

This plugin was strongly inspired by the following great code.

The aim of the extension is to provide a way to extend the windows snmp agent by a scripting language instead of using the winsnmp c/c++ api.

TCL was chosen because I worked for the last year for a company which developed  a TCL based product which gave me the opportunity to hack the language, write extensions for it, and generally appreciate that its really a nice, easy to learn language.

While tcl is not very popular at this time and age, its syntax is not too different from php and it should be easy to learn for any experienced programmer.

As any 1.0 software version this software is kind of a beta version, at least until there is a positive feedback from users.

Get the full information and download the extension from the tcl extension page.