A few changes – Gallery, Spam, etc.
Over the last few days, I’ve been making some changes to this site. I mentioned recently that I was getting a ridiculous amount of SPAM for a site that gets very few people reading it… so I decided that I was spending too much moderating comments. Off I went looking for an automatic moderation method to look after my comment queue and I found an inbuilt part of WordPress – Akismet. From the same person/team that started WordPress, it seems to be very good - 23 automatically binned comments so far. Happy Days.
So then I decided to look at my comments again and came across a web service called IntenseDebate which is a way of beefing up your comments. At first I liked it very much but now, after looking at it for a bit longer it seems to be a tiny bit over the top for my this place. I’ll be looking into it again. It also has built in Akismet support so I suppose I’m doubly protected… or its cancelling each other other out… or its now become so difficult to get a comment into my blog that no-ones going to do it anymore.
Then came a project that I’ve wanted to complete for a while – my Gallery. I always wanted to have a gallery on my site but didn’t want to host it here and elsewhere too(duplication of effort more than resources…). Then I came across the flickr API and more specifically – the tantan flickr plugin for WordPress. The plugin is good because it creates the gallery with a little flickr magic and was up and running pretty fast. I had to make a pretty huge amount of modification to getting working the way I wanted but I felt that it was worth it. I’ll also be writing some of my own queries so that I can do some of the smaller stuff that the plugin doesn’t do. I’m looking forward to that! I’m also trying to get jquery lightbox to work but can’t at the minute. I think it might have something to do with the image class stuff that’s built into the plugin, but I’ll have a bit of fun trying to figure it out. I have it kind of working but have it turned off at the minute until I have it the way I want it, hopefully that wont take me too long. And then – I will be basking in Gallery goodness and will eventually throw loads of my photo’s up there.
