Blogging

During the last days, I was heavily suffering from comment spam. And Spam Karma for some reason wasn't able to handle it.

Actually, I decided to no longer trust in anti-spam plugins but rely on security through obscurity. This is: I wrote my own simple but hopefully effective captcha. I decided to rely on simple questions rather than distorted images, since they bring up accessibility problems - it is impossible to read that image if you are blind.

This gave me a good laugh: Google Content Blocker (via Yasblog).

Thanks to Richard my menu bar is transparent in IE and Safari, too - and not only in Mozilla.

Nuclear Moose is calling for input on how the WordPress forums, wiki, and documentation can be improved. Take your chance.

Literal Barrage offers some tipps for new or upgraded WordPress users (via BloggingPro). Nice overview.

I'm in grief and despair: Bloglines lost all my subscriptions. My feed list is empty. They are gone. Vanished. Disappeared. Suddenly.

WordPress 1.5 was announced for February 15th. However, I won't update, because I suspect WordPress 1.5. to be rather buggy. Read my arguments.

A while ago I was moaning about why I switched off FeedBurner's browser-friendly service, since I don't want people to subscribe to the FeddBurner feed directly. Now they made it possible to subscribe to the original feed, so there's no reason to cut out this great feature. And I also like the new subscriber-friendly look, which is more focused on the user.

Brad Wilson aka The .Net Guy saved my day today. I wrote some application for one of our Turkish customers, and while everything runs fine over here, it fails right at the beginning over there. It all came down to a problem with ToUpper() covered in Brad's article Beware Of ToUpper(), published a week ago. Thanks, Brad!

Christopher Baus points out a problem with using the FeedBurner feeds in a comment: What if you decide you don't want this feed any more?