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.

For popular demand (that is, if you agree to call a request by someone like Liz popular) here’s a really tiny plugin for Mephisto that allows you to have a full archive page.

By “full archive” simply a list of all your blog posts is meant, most probably just titles grouped by month. This is supported by quite some big blogging engines.

To learn how to install and use this plugin just head over to my project page: Mephisto Plugin: Full Archives (tricky edition)

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 :)

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!

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?

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.

image credits

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.

image credits

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.

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.

Mephisto is backed by Akismet when it comes to comment-spam-protection and this duo works pretty well. But like any such system it’s not 100% foolproof and therefor Rick has build it that way that comments are put aside, not completely deleted when Akismet thinks that it’s spam. You’re supposed to log into the admin interface, go to “Moderate comments” and then review them. You can approve or delete the comments separately or delete them all at once.

That’s all pretty reasonable and handy. But when I scrolled through my 900 spam comments yesterday I found myself really wanting to filter the list by keywords like “cialis” or “toyota” (what the heck is so cool about Toyota newly?). This way I could reduce the list by the largest portions in some steps and then only have to review the rest of it.

I looked at the source code and found that it’s pretty super simple to patch in support for this kind of feature. So, here you go.

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.

I’ve been asked for instructions on how to use the Mephisto pagination plugin that I’ve published last week. Well, that makes sense :-) So there you go.

The plugin allows you to add very basic pagination functionality to your article section pages (that is, pages like your blog homepage, sub-section pages etc.). Right now, there are only means to add a “older posts” and “newer posts” links to access the previous and next paginated articles list’s pages - you can see this at the bottom of my blog’s homepage.

When I switched to Mephisto last month I could not believe my eyes that there’s no post pagination on any of the section pages that list blog posts besides the archives.

Since, I wondered if that’s probably just a bit too closeminded to consider this a usability breakdown or something like this … might just be a matter of taste, too. But then I happened to run in this very issue twice the other day.

I consider this functionality crucial because it’s a well-known usability pattern all across the web these days. Millions of blogging engines do it this way (don’t they?), so it should be default in Mephisto, too, IMO … but actually it isn’t. So I decided to follow Rick’s suggestion and write a plugin to implement this.

In case that you’re interested in the Globalize plugin but you haven’t subscribed to the right blogs ;-) … let me link up some interesting articles for you.

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.