Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

Disclaimer: Don’t use this plugin if you don’t use a caching product. It won’t work well for you, because you don’t care about performance on this fine grain. Using this plugin will hurt your page load time, because it does a large mess of string processing to spit optimized css and javascript into the page itself–processing usually defered to the browser.

WP-CSS-JS-Inline does exactly what the graphic says–takes all the javascript and css styles and merges them into your page, producing a single document. External references in the CSS–say a url(…) element–are resolved automatically to absolute paths if they are not already. It also compresses and tidies CSS.

If you’d like to try it out, just download wp-css-js-inline.zip, unzip, and place into your wp-plugins directory. You can then activate it on your admin page, and watch it work its magic on your posts and home page.

This is an untested beta release and may render your wordpress install completely unusable. Proceed with caution, and leave comments on this post if you find any bugs!

As you know Akismet is a server-side spam filtering solution for Wordpress (WP) blogs. It works probably by wrapping a REST interface around an open source product like spam-assassin, which does bayesian classification of comments to try and figure out which are spam and which are real. Since it has a wide userbase, the statistical sample size is large enough for it to infer patterns that protect most of its users from most spam.

We can do better.

There are two prime problems with the way Akismet deals with recognized spam. First, it provides a centralized solution. If Akismet goes down, you will get a torrential amount of spam. The solution to partially ameloriate this problem is to add a quick DNS blacklist check on the incoming IP address. Why should you bother hitting the Akismet server without even doing a basic dns check? The second problem is that Akismet lets particular spammers keep on happily spamming your blog. Adding spam comments to the internal blacklist solves that problem.

There’s a also a potential problem with the way Akismet accesses the database. When it deletes all the old comments–which is does constantly–there’s a 20% chance for it to optimize the database. Instead, we want to try to delete all the really old spam, and optimize the table, every few hundred spams we get. In the new version, we delete old spam at a 0.2% rate.

You can download the new version of Akismet here: akismet.zip. Simply unzip and put into your wp-plugins folder as usual.

I had the chance to see some roses at Swarthmore, and got this stunning photograph:

Unfortunately I cannot convey the beauty of the garden, the aroma of the roses and plants, nor the delicate flavour of the person who showed it to me…

There was a Victoria’s Secret model even in NYC that I dropped by a few days ago, where the models signed glossies for all their fans. I don’t feel particularly well-connected to that sphere of life and interest, but I found Selita Ebanks to be very personable. Interestingly, a couple of them were chatting each other up in Italian…