omino code blog

Pardon this post which is about technical trivia unrelated to API’s and Weird Blinking Lights. But I needed to jot it down somewhere. It’s a note about including contents out of WordPress in parts of a site which aren’t under the WordPress installation.

Now that WordPress includes revision management (as of 2.6) I intend to use it for the whole site, but I didn’t want to rejigger the install directories. Recipe below the cut.
++more

Now that I’ve got my subroutines in place, making certain kinds of helpful WordPress plugins is dangerously easy!

I’ve added plugin such that <w w="George Washington"/> becomes a tiny Wikipedia link, like this: .

Pretty cool, huh? Now when I talk about cabbages and kings I can quickly refer you to authoritative information on the subject.

At some point I needs must package up these plugins to make them easier to share; til then, it’s possible at least to hork them from the plugins directory of this blog.

In a detour to a detour to some longer term goal, I needed to do some minimal HTML/JavaScript coding. The regularly scheduled hardware and WBL tinkering — including soldering, LEDs, and wireless sensors — will resume shortly.

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For some reason I’m easily drawn into highly detailed activities which require short-lived arcane knowledge. (Perhaps “knowledge” is too generous a term for it.) But if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you have similar inclinations.

It was necessary to finally get a good grasp of cascading style sheets to create a wordpress theme which matched omino’s home page. I finally understand how the screenWidth = blockWidth + 2(padding + border + margin)! I wrote a dense interactive web page to help figure it out. You can try it here if you like.

I call it mimeo. One of the main goals of mimeo was to keep the readable narrow column from the “Kubrick” default, but allow lots of room for wide photos and code examples. Here’s the pre-tag in use (which is only relevant if the blog still uses mimeo by the time you read this):

SAMesh *createMesh(long *argbPixels,int width, int height, int pixelsPerRow,
                   float originX,float originY,float cellsizeX,float cellsizeY,
                   SAMeshEdgeBehavior edgeBehavior,float edgeConstant)
{
    SAMesh *result = 0;

    // we build the mesh with an extra half-sized border around the cells. 
    // Each point in the bitmap becomes a non-border vertex.
    int meshWidth = width + 2;
    int meshHeight = height + 2;
    int vertexCount = meshWidth * meshHeight;
    result = (SAMesh *)calloc(sizeof(SAMesh) + vertexCount * sizeof(SAMeshVertex),1);
    ...

If you’d like to use mimeo theme — it’s quite customizable for different colors and spacings — it’s available here.

mimeo is a simple two column wordpress theme with the sort of simple design elements i like. also, narrow column for prose, because I think it’s easiest to read that way and generous right-hand spill-room for wider images and inline code examples.

download mimeo 0.75

Problem
I don’t know about you, but I have been getting, lately, dozens of spam WordPress comments. It was enough that it overwhelmed the occasional real comment (hopefully I havent deleted yours).

Experimental Solution
I forget where I heard of this, probably someone linked from Dan Jalkut’s Red Sweater, but they mentioned adding a simple “type this” field to the comments form. So, I finally went ahead and implemented just that. For mine, I added a required field asking that you type “hormel”.

The diff below is against dreamhost’s servers’ time-based .snapshot directory, which is here used as an incredibly weak revision control system, but adequate, sort of, for now. I’ve added it to several blogs with different versions of WordPress; the line numbers vary but the text remains the same.

[polyomino@gage] ~/subservientastronaut.com/blog: diff \
	wp-content/themes/default/comments.php \
	wp-content/themes/default/.snapshot/weekly.0/comments.php

90,92d90
+ <!-- the "hormel" hack is always shown, even to logged-in users -->
+ <p><input type="text" name="sekrit" id="sekrit" value="" size="22" tabindex="4" />
+ <label for="sekrit"><small>The word hormel (required)</small></label></p>

[polyomino@gage] ~/subservientastronaut.com/blog: diff \
	wp-comments-post.php \
	.snapshot/weekly.0

29,32d28
+ $comment_sekrit       = trim($_POST['sekrit']);
+ 
+ if($comment_sekrit != "hormel")
+               die( __('Thank you for your hormel product, robot!') );

The result is that the comments field includes a box like so:

Experimental Results

Over four days, the number of spam-comments dropped from many many dozens to just one. How did that one get through? Are they on to this?? Arrgh! The problem with security like this is that it only works until lots of people use it, at which point it becomes noticeable enough that the robots evolve to their next stage.

Of course, this does nothing to address a far more profound and fundamental issue: I aspire to have a readership who don’t think I need Viagra!

Addendum
2006.12.15 disabled trackback.php, and spam seems to have dropped to nothing. If it returns, I’ll activate akismet…