Google Analytics plugin for Ruby on Rails released
posted: December 13th, 2007 · by: Sven
I’ve just released a first version of the Google Analytics plugin for Ruby on Rails that I’ve done in the course of the offer to build custom plugins for Mephisto users.
You can grab the plugin and read more about it here: Ruby on Rails Plugin: Google Analytics (blue egg edition)
Eran Ben Sabat was the first to contact me about this offer and suggested that I could write a Google Analytics plugin which he was interested in.
By now there’s another interesting request by Thilo Thamm who asked for a plugin for allowing users to add blog posts. This sounds like another great idea for a useful plugin and I plan to tackle this one next.
I was totally thrilled how much fun it was to work with both Liz and Eran Ben Sabat on their plugins. So my offer still stands. If you have an idea for a nice plugin, don’t hesitate to drop me a note.
Mephisto Inverse Captcha plugin updated
posted: November 19th, 2007 · by: Sven
Just a short note for those of you who are using my Mephisto Inverse Captcha plugin:
I’ve recieved some feedback that the way the plugin was implemented apperently caused problems in fcgi environments. I’ve simplified the plugin loading quite a bit and now it seems to work fine.
I’ve got it running here on my own blog, too, with Rails 2.0PR and Mephisto rev2983 and it continues to work like a charm :) Actually, I have no spam comments thanks to it.
If you further encounter any problems please let me know :)
A better Mephisto Tag Cloud Plugin
posted: October 14th, 2007 · by: Sven
I talked about why we need a better Mephisto tag cloud plugin recently and that it probably should use the Boldr plugin as a basis. Sadly nobody really seems to care about this at Boldr.net. Well, there’re more important things than building another tagcloud for Mephisto, right?
Thus I started to revamp a brand new tag cloud plugin for Mephisto which is now available in the Subversion Repository … and of course I really believe that it is the most sophisticated, customizable, standard-conform and overall awesome implementation of a tag cloud for Mephisto ;). Why, yes, obviously I’m a little biased, so judge for yourself!
Read the rest of this entryMephisto Pagination Plugin updated: what's new?
posted: October 11th, 2007 · by: Sven
Like I mentioned an updated version of the Mephisto Paged Article Lists plugin is available in the Subversion repository. You can grab this awesome stuff right here: http://svn.artweb-design.de/stuff/mephisto/mephisto_paged_article_list
Like with the Inverse Captcha Plugin some more information about the new version of this plugin are due, too. So, what’s new here?
Read the rest of this entryLooking for the perfect Mephisto TagCloud plugin
posted: September 27th, 2007 · by: Sven
I mean, really … aren’t there any more important things on earth than a tagcloud plugin for your favorite rockstar blogging engine? Most probably! But then again, on my blog I really love to use stuff that pays some attention to details. Somehow a piece of great code can save my day.
The Mephisto community has come up with at least four different tagcloud plugins yet and none of them seems to meet the usual, basic requirements. There’s one plugin though that - with just some additional love - could pretty much make its way to the perfect Mephisto TagCloud plugin.
Read the rest of this entryInverse Captcha Anti-Comment-Spam Technique: Now A Regular Mephisto Plugin
posted: September 25th, 2007 · by: Sven
After I had revamped my initial experimental approach to the “Inverse Captcha” anti-spam technique as a regular Mephisto Plugin lately I have promised to explain how you can use it to get rid of your blog comment spam.
This plugin is getting a bunch of additional attention these days, especially after it was linked to in Quarks’ Ruby on Rails Security Guide. So, some additional information is past due. There you go.
Read the rest of this entryUpgraded to Mephisto Edge: various plugin fixes and updates
posted: September 5th, 2007 · by: Sven
Ok. I’ve upgraded my blog to Mephisto Edge.
It’s been something like nine months since the last official 0.7.3 Noh-Varr release and in Rails time that’s a pretty long time. There’s a lot been happening in Rails Edge and it just made sense to catch up with these things a bit.
So I decided to invest the time to upgrade, do some fixes and cleanup and generally bring my blog setup in a better shape again. If you’re running Mephisto and consider an upgrade, some of the following observations and notes might be of interest for you.
Read the rest of this entryReport: 30 days with no blog spam on Mephisto!
posted: May 8th, 2007 · by: Sven
I promised to keep you posted with the results of my experimental ”outer spam floodgate” Mephisto extension. Tell you what. I’m super-happy with the results as I haven’t seen any blog spam this month! Yes, right. No spam.
Read the rest of this entryHow to add a floodgate to Mephisto's nearly perfect spam protection
posted: April 4th, 2007 · by: Sven
Mephisto comes with Akismet support baked right into its heart and it works like a charm. I’ve been totally pleased with it spotting nearly every spam comment and collecting them for later review and bulk deletion.
Now, 30 days later, I found it was time to clean up the spammy comments piles that Mephisto hunted down for me. Actually nearly 900 comments had piled up. Year, that’s 30 per day. I don’t think that’s that much compared to what others receive.
But to me 900 spam comments in 30 days is too much. I don’t want to spend the time to manually check 900 comments even if I’d have to do it only once a month. No way.
I thus revisited an idea that Damien Katz called “negative captcha”. I realized that I’ve actually had experiences with this type of “protection” and they’ve been pretty good.
Read the rest of this entrySwitched to Mephisto
posted: March 5th, 2007 · by: Sven
So I’ve switched, too. I’m feeling cheery to announce that I’ve spend the weekend to migrate my blog from Typo to the shiny Mephisto engine and … while I’ve been at it, largely redid the HTML/CSS underpinnings of the design.
You might see some noise in your feeds because of this. I apologize for the inconvenience.
Read the rest of this entryNo more trackbacks, right now. Sorry.
posted: August 1st, 2006 · by: Sven
I’ve just killed around 750 trackbacks – none of them hasn’t been spam.
Sigh. Ok, so I’ve deactivated trackbacks for all articles. UPDATE content SET allow_ping = 0.
Too bad.
Doable strategies against blog spam?
posted: May 20th, 2006 · by: Sven
My old Wordpress blog had the option to turn on “moderated comments”. That means that I’ve recieved an email notification about every comment asking me to “please moderate this comment”. The email contained a link to instantly approve and a link to reject the comment.
Sigh. My blog never has been linked to that extensively that I’d expected comment spam to become a problem in the first place. I’ve been wrong. Wordpress seems to allure blog spam like a light bulb flies on a midsummer evening. I recieved some hundred mail notifications per week, asking me to moderate cheap perfumes, pills and online bets (for the world cup, lately). Finally my email spam filter caught up and started to sort out the notifications from my own blog. Hum.
Having switched over to Typo I was curious about Typos anti-spam measurements and came up with some thoughts about possible “joint-forces” strategies against blog spam.
Read the rest of this entry