Mollom anti-spam

I’ve enabled Mollom-based anti-spam to this blog - please let me know if this causes any unexpected difficulty or errors.

Mollom will ask “suspicious” commenters to solve a CAPTCHA before allowing their comments to post.

If this proves too onerous I will go back to just using Askimet but I wanted to try it out.

Thanks to Dries, Benjamin, et al for running Mollom and to Matthias Vandermaesen for maintaining the WP-Mollom plugin.

David Cancel’s Web Beacon Finder

(Via David’s blog)
David Cancel’s written a Greasemonkey script which alerts you to the various web beacons / tracking bugs used on the websites you visit.

Go here to get it.

Not sure I can surf with this enabled all the time, given the number of sites using these various services - but it is certainly interesting to try it out for a while and see how common they are.

BarCamp Boston 3 Presentation (WordPress to Facebook and Back)

I presented yesterday at BarCamp Boston 3 on the topic of WPBook, the WordPress plugin for pulling blog posts into Facebook and letting people comment on them with their Facebook identities.

Here’s the presentation file: WordPress to Facebook and Back (Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license)

As always, you can get the latest code here, or see it in action on Facebook.

I found it was very difficult to do a 30 minute presentation here - 45 would have been better, and an hour would have been perfect. I should have spent more time focused on three key aspects: the core WordPress plugin API, the Facebook API, and the bigger picture of how they relate to each other.

That way I could have shown, for example, the WordPress loop and how that works, and some of the Facebook PHP client, and how a user’s request goes through Facebook to your WordPress blog and back to their browser.

I’ll try to set a bit more context in my Twitter talk later today, though 30 minutes will be a challenge there as well.

Wordpress Facebook Plugin wpbook 0.7 available

(Update 5/17 - 0.7.1 is now available - bug fix release).

I’ve spent some time over the past few nights revising the wp-book plugin, which lets you bring your WordPress (self-hosted) blog into Facebook as an application, and I’ve published a new 0.7 version.
(more…)

WP-Book progress

[Update: Minor bugs and tweaking to do - might want to hold off on download for now]

Made some progress on wp-book over the weekend; should be able to release an update this week. (I will post updated code on this site as well as upload to the wp-plugins directory). (If you don’t know what I’m talking about see this earlier blog post).

Still sometimes see an error in Internet Explorer at this point - seems to be a timing error with respect to the “resize to content” for the iFrame. I thought about moving the Facebook application back into FBML (Facebook markup language), but then I would lose the ability to have objects, embeds, and other things inside the iFrame.

If you’re reading this somewhere other than Facebook, and you are a Facebook user, please go check out http://apps.facebook.com/openparenthesis/ and leave a comment.

If you’re reading this *in facebook* please also leave a comment, and tell me what operating system / browser / version you’re using.

When you submit your comment, you will be redirected back to the application landing page - sometimes people get errors there as well, though in essence it is the same url on which they started.