WordPress has announced another release candidate. Usually I think they do too many updates, and I ignore most of them, but this time I think it could be worthwhile.

They don’t say they’re going to do anything different with the reader’s side, but the backend screenshots look like they’ve improved a lot of the admin-side. First, it appears that they’ve stopped using the Dashboard as their personal free ad space! And they’ve de-uglified it, too! Yay!! (Whoever thought that grid of ugly gray squares was a good idea for the last version’s dashboard had better not go into the decorating business…)

The new write screen only displays the information that you’ll use most often. (…) Additional options are hidden away…

The quoted aspect is one of those “MAYBE it’s good, but it COULD really suck” kinds of things. What one person considers “simplified,” another will consider “they hid all the stuff I use all the time, and made it into a real PITA!” So–time will tell whether I think it’s simpler, or if I end up finding that what *I* use has been buried under 10,000 “more–>” screens.

The one thing I know just from the screenshots is that they’ve switched to wussy, pastel colors. Blargh!! Fortunately, they say the old color scheme is also selectable.

Check out their announcement of the WordPress v 2.5 Release Candidate at their blog, and if you’re the beta-ing type, download it and give it a test before the release to the general public!

I’m going to put a cool Christmas theme up for this blog. So if you see any: glitchage, missing sidebars, oddballized tag cloud, etc… just imagine me on the other side, cussing and pulling on my hair…

Once it’s up and running right, you should see a nice holly and ribbon design, and all the nav should be somewhere or other, but still present.

And knowing how I dislike doing updates? It’ll be Christmas here til around Valentine’s Day

Current Mood: Meh

As explained in the previous post, I noticed a halting of spam after putting up the visible Akismet counter on 2 of 3 blogs, and was testing the third.

For the first day, spams continued to pour into Blog #3 like a waterfall (only to be blocked by Akismet). I woke up yesterday to 101 new spams there waiting for me to hit “delete” on.

But today, I woke up to 14 spams. Quite a substantial dropoff! Now, a lot of spammers run their bots at night, and it’s also possible that it’s a normal dip in activity. But it’s an encouraging development.

On the other hand, I came across the blog of the guy who founded Wordpress: www.photomatt.net. And his Akismet blocker label shows it’s blocked 1,242,000 spams on his blog alone!

So I guess some spammers are persistant no matter what…

Current Mood: Surprised

Until yesterday or the day before, this blog had been getting loads of spam comments and trackbacks.

Then, I set it up so that the Akismet stats would show in the top left. Since then, NO SPAMS at all!!

On another blog I run, I just reactivated and redesigned, I’ve noticed the same thing. No spams after I put the widget up, even though it’s not nearly so prominent (it’s near the bottom right). Prior to that, I was literally getting about 100/day! Now it’s only showing 2, and those 2 were actually post-attempted before I put the widget on.

My 3rd blog, though, doesn’t have the widget. I’ve got Akismet running, but it’d be a slight pain to change the layout, so I haven’t gotten around to displaying that stat. And it’s barraged with spam attempts!

Perhaps the spambots are programmed to not bother with blogs that are showing that widget?

I’ll soon find out. Today or tomorrow, I’m going to go ahead and get that widget showing on Blog #3. I’ll soon see if the spams stop coming. One time could be a fluke, two a longshot, but 3 times I would consider a pretty certain correlation.