Disqus - Latest Comments for Thaya Kareeson

Re: Comment Spam Warning Signs

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:15:20 -0000

I've never really been a good writer so, honestly, your rules make me nervous. I'm a new commenter and I'm going to take a stab at it here to see if I'm going to get banned or not.

It seems to me like your biggest problem is that you have ~100 comments to moderate each day. I do understand that moderating such a huge list of comments is a time-killer and you have to draw the line somewhere, but shouldn't you take it as a sign that your spam management software is dated?

A few questions I want to ask are:
1. How many of the ~100 comments you moderate are spams from bots?
2. How many are spams from people (i.e. people who leave dumb/irrelevant comments to earn a do-follow link)?
3. Are all new commenters always held for moderation? If so how many are real geniune comments?

Before I go on, let me first say that I do not work for "Project Honey Pot" or "StupidFilter" or know anybody that works for them.
I believe that you can block a lot of spams from bots by integrating something like Project Honey Pot into your site. In a similar fashion, you can integrate StupidFilter to get rid of stupid human comments (I'm axiously waiting for a non-beta release from these guys).
Do you think these methods would help reduce your moderation queue and give new commenters a fighting chance?

Re: Comment Spam Warning Signs

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:15:20 -0000

Re: Sunday..oops Link Love Series No 7

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 21:41:45 -0000

Navjot,

I like how you did the links for #5 "Read some of the reports about it" text. Very creative :). Also, thank you for linking my post!

Re: Are we just repeating ourselves?

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:50:55 -0000

I've been dry myself when it comes to writing WordPress tutorials lately. There isn't much that hasn't already been said. But then again, WordPress is continually evolving and people will always find new ways to use it. This leaves *some* room for new born tutorials. That said, I'm a bit glad that my blog focuses more on being a Web 2.0 webmaster than just WordPress itself.

Re: Fun with Sidebar Tabs

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:50:38 -0000

Hi Andrew,
I have more than one tabbed widget running on my sidebar. After upgrading from 0.4.2 to 0.5.1, the default CSS for all but the first tabbed widget gets screwy. Has anybody else seen this issue? Thank you!

Re: Going through the change and finding testers

Thaya Kareeson — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 15:14:41 -0000

Adrew,
I'm looking forward to the upcoming release of Fun with Sidebar Tabs. The rotate feature is a lovely idea that can help draw the reader's attention to click deeper into your blog. Please keep up the great work!

Re: Should you help someone if you don’t like their site?

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:34:41 -0000

I would not hesitate to help unless the site promotes something that can harm somebody else (i.e. if they have a spammer site, they promote hate). Usually when somebody contacts me for help, they are always regular nice people though.

Re: Fun with Sidebar Tabs

Thaya Kareeson — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 16:54:40 -0000

Hi Andrew, I previously commented that I had an issue with CSS styles going from version 0.4.2 -> 5.1.0 having multiple instances of "fun with sidebar tabs" active. You did not see my tabs messed up when you visited my site because I had reverted to 0.4.2 to keep it working.

After 2 version releases, I was still seeing the same issue so I finally found the time to debug it myself. I've finally figured out what was wrong with the plugin. The following line:

$num_val = ( $i == 1 ) ? '1.first' : '1';

needs to be changed to:

$num_val = ( $i == 1 ) ? '1.first' : $i;

If you do not change it, the CSS generated will never generate for plugin instances 2,3,4,etc. but will always keep override the first instance.

Re: Fun with Sidebar Tabs

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 13:37:41 -0000

Thank you for making the fix. I look forward to trying out your replacement plugin.

Re: What’s the point of community

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 17:30:23 -0000

Great analytical writeup Andrew. I enjoy your "Question five" section as I never thought about the WordPress community in this way before.

When I first started developing WordPress plugins out of my free time, I gave them away for free. As support requests increased, my free time got eaten up so quickly that I started losing sleep to support the plugins. By then I had to choice but to add donation options and backlinks to my site to feel properly compensated. Who knows what will happen if support becomes too heavy of a burden in the future? Maybe I need to start a members-only forum that lets me attend to paying users' needs before free users.

I guess what I'm saying is that, you're dead-on right about the definition of the community. I feel like I've been adhering to your guidelines naturally without even thinking about it. But as you said, in the real world, nothing stops people from just jumping to reap all the rewards (cost per download, support fees, back links, entry in repository) before they pay their dues.

Re: Went snowboarding at Northstar 1/6/2007

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 21:14:22 -0000

yeah... you're just mad because you have a star on your board.

Re: OMNINOGGIN has migrated to the ever stable FreeBSD 6.2 Platform!

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 05:31:39 -0000

;) Yup, been working with SuSE for so long that I'm not used to where everything is in BSD. I figured if I'm gonna do something hard, might as well make it annoyingly hard to get maximum pleasure.

Nice spot, thx... now let me see where to fix it.

Re: OMNINOGGIN has migrated to the ever stable FreeBSD 6.2 Platform!

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 02:21:19 -0000

The best things in life are FREE.

Re: OMNINOGGIN has migrated to the ever stable FreeBSD 6.2 Platform!

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 16:08:50 -0000

Okay I think I have everything configured the way I want now. I'll be posting tutorial soon!!!

Re: Setting up a FreeBSD 6.2 Web Server: Installing OS (Part 1)

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 23:27:55 -0000

Hi Joshua. First I would like to say welcome to my blog! You're in luck! I wrote a 7 step guide on setting up FreeBSD 6.2 as a web server (well, I do refer to other tutorials so I can't take all the credit).

I've recapped the 7 steps guide in the post, Recapping: Setting Up a FreeBSD 6.2 Web Server. Let me know if you have any problems with it. Good luck!

Re: Setting up a FreeBSD 6.2 Web Server: Apache, MySQL, etc (Part 2)

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 04:56:03 -0000

*Update* I've finally finished setting up my sendmail! Believe it or not it was one tough cookie. I will post a tutorial about this and link you to it when it's done.

Re: Recapping: Setting up a FreeBSD 6.2 Web Server

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 16:42:20 -0000

*Update* I've also set up WP-Cache Plugin to help out with Wordpress caching and reducing Apache CPU cycles. Will update this post when I have a good tutorial on WP-Cache.

Re: Recapping: Setting up a FreeBSD 6.2 Web Server

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 21:09:10 -0000

I've added "Optimizing Wordpress with WP-Cache" as #8.

Re: Keeping BSD Ports Up-to-date Effortlessly

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 02:37:47 -0000

Even Rustem knows that one. Actually someone taught me that in Davis years ago. I still like :wq better though.

Re: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 02:53:48 -0000

Ah you got me there. But if you leave out the city "Buffalo" and keep repeating the word "buffalo" you will get something like this:

Buffalo.
"Engage in bamboozlement."

Buffalo buffalo.
"American bison are characteristically given to engaging in bambloozlement."

Buffalo buffalo buffalo.
"American bison are characteristically given to bamboozling other members of their species."

Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.
"American bison habitually bamboozled by members of their own species (that is, buffalo whom other buffalo regularly buffalo) characteristically engage in bamboozlement."

Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.
"American bison habitually bamboozled by members of their own species (that is, buffalo whom other buffalo regularly buffalo) tend to return the compliment by bamboozling in turn yet other members of the species."

Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.
"American bison habitually bamboozled by members of their own species that have themselves been bamboozled by others of their ilk (that is, buffalo whom other buffalo who have themselves been buffaloed by buffalo regularly buffalo) tend to engage in bamboozlement."

Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.
...

So I think the shortened man style geek comment is correct "Buffalo [buffalo]."

Re: My Impressions of Clearlake

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 11:54:24 -0000

3 points is a lot :)

Re: My Impressions of Clearlake

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 22:11:54 -0000

I can't believe how I could hate MySpace even more, but those kids pushed me over the edge. I wish you were there in my place THEN you would know.

Re: Toyota World of Warcraft (WoW) Commercial!

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 15:57:38 -0000

yeah... I'm gonna equip myself with a little FOUR WHEELS OF FURY!!!

Re: Setting up a FreeBSD 6.2 Web Server: Installing OS (Part 1)

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 19:44:45 -0000

*Update* When updating the source and ports tree, "cvsup5.us.FreeBSD.org" did not work for me. Try using "cvsup9.FreeBSD.org" instead.

Re: Automatically Turn on WP-Cache During Traffic Storms

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 02:12:09 -0000

Sometimes I have the blog open just to make my eyes feel better.

Re: Setting up a FreeBSD 6.2 Web Server: Proxy Caching (Part 7)

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 02:17:10 -0000

Thanks Mek from zerverize.com for the rc.conf settings! This was the gap I've been trying to fill for ages!

Re: Setting up a FreeBSD 6.2 Web Server: Proxy Caching (Part 7)

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 04:09:10 -0000

Small correction, varnishd_enabled=”yes” should be varnishd_enable=”yes” (without the 'd').

Re: Kombucha Tea - The Miracle Drink?

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 19:42:43 -0000

That's not good, she should stop drinking.

Re: Kombucha Tea - The Miracle Drink?

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 13:58:56 -0000

She might be allergic to all the caffeine she puts in it! I put just 3 tablespoons of green tea leaves for a gallon and a half brew.

Re: Kombucha Tea - The Miracle Drink?

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 03:40:44 -0000

Actually, now that you've mentioned our family did start off gradually drinking bit-by-bit and increased the dosage after a week or so. We started with 4oz/day then increased to 8oz/day (and we are still sticking at 8oz per day). Thank you for the information, anonymous fella!

Re: Kombucha Tea - The Miracle Drink?

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 15:09:18 -0000

There's a guide here on how to make it:
http://www.happyherbalist.com/kombucha_brewing_...

It looks like the ratio of sugar to water is: 1 cup for every 3 quart (not including the starter tea).

It also says 5-6 tea bags for every 3 quart.

I have a 6 quart (1.5 gallon) setup at home (1 quart of it is starter tea), so I'm using: (6-1) * 1/3 = 1 and 2/3 cups of sugar.

I usually throw in 3 table spoons full of green tea (I think that's about right?).

Re: Kombucha Tea - The Miracle Drink?

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 16:01:04 -0000

My poop is always smelly, with or without the booch :P

Re: Setting up Sendmail on FreeBSD 6.2

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:15:17 -0000

There is no pity in not having sbcglobal. I'm sure your internet service provider has an outward facing email server that you can piggyback off of. What is your provider? Maybe it might help to search your provider's name with 'sendmail' in google.

Re: Setting up Sendmail on FreeBSD 6.2

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 02:20:20 -0000

You're welcome (although I didn't do much)! It seems like 5-6 hours is the common "bleeding my brain out" period for setting up sendmail. Please let me know if you ever create a tutorial about the problems you've encountered and how you solved those problems. It would be an interesting read and I wouldn't mind adding your link as a reference on this article.

Re: Setting up Sendmail on FreeBSD 6.2

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 02:25:14 -0000

Thanks for the link! I didn't know that you can use gmail as an email proxy. It's a great alternative for non-SBC folks.

The "me" problem sounds like a gmail issue.

If you are sending an email from yourself@gmail.com to yourself@gmail.com, gmail will automatically replace the "from" field with "me". Are you sending the email to the same address as your email proxy account?

What could also be happening internally is you might be sending the email to yourself and then gmail forwards that email to your recipient.

Unfortunately, I do not know how to fix this problem since I do not use gmail as my mail proxy.

Please let me know when/how you've resolved it.

Re: Quit Smoking the Easy Way

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 12:16:59 -0000

Thank you for the support! I've been free of cigarettes since a month before I wrote this article. Life has never been better! I will never go back.

Re: Nowthen Photo Display WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 18:49:52 -0000

I will definitely add some references to NowThen at the bottom of the widget on the next release. There will most likely be an option to disable displaying the link also. Will keep you posted.

Re: Developing CiCi’s Cafe Website

Thaya Kareeson — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 01:59:12 -0000

Thank you! I had to get *some* bang for the buck :D. Every time I look at the site, I get pancake cravings. ::: stomach growls :::

Re: Make Your WordPress 10X faster During Traffic Storms

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 14:18:07 -0000

*Update* I'm thinking about turning this along with automatically turning on WP-Cache/WP-Super-Cache on demand into a WordPress plugin. I'm still trying to figure out how to implement it, but I'm pretty sure the plugin is going to ROCK!

Re: Nowthen Photo Display WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 17:35:28 -0000

*Updated* Just release 0.2 with the following changes:
- Cleaned up some hard-coded values.
- Added NowThen tagline at the bottom of the widget.
- Also added option to enable/disable this new tagline.

Re: Nowthen Photo Display WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 03:56:33 -0000

*Update* Just released 0.2.5 with the following changes:
- WordPress 2.5 compatibility fix.

Re: Make Popularity Contest Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 14:23:12 -0000

Just found out that this post is being Stumbled Upon courtesy of Donncha O Caoimh's submission to stumbleupon.com! Thank you!

For those of you who end up trying out my modded Popularity Contest. Please please please log any bugs, questions, comments, and ideas on this comment thread.

Re: Nowthen Photo Display WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 18:08:32 -0000

*Update* Just released 0.3 with the following changes:
- Added gallery feature.
- Moved picture caption to bottom of image.

Re: Nowthen Photo Display WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 03:08:41 -0000

*Update* Just released 0.3.1 with the following changes:
- Made gallery and sidebar widget display the thumbnail version of the
photos to improve page load time.

Re: Make Popularity Contest Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 20:09:55 -0000

@JTPratt
I might be able to do that. I will look into it. I'll keep you posted.

Re: Make Popularity Contest Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 16:14:02 -0000

@JTPratt
Fresh out of the oven: Make WP-PostViews Work with WP-Super-Cache. Let me know how it works out for you. Please remember to write about it if you like it! :)

Re: Keeping BSD Ports Up-to-date Effortlessly

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 03:20:08 -0000

@QuinnR,

That's actually the only reason I like using cvsup, because I use it to sync my OS source code also. portsnap does operate with compression so you will probably save bandwidth that way. If you are just updating your ports tree, then portsnap is the way to go :).

Re: Make Your WordPress 10X faster During Traffic Storms

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 14:18:55 -0000

*Update* I have cleaned up this article by wrapping authentication into a script (step 2). Please let me know if you like it!

Re: Make WP-PostViews Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:36:34 -0000

@Rosyidi
You're welcome! Please feel free to send me any questions or comments about this modification. And if you really like it, please write about it :-).

Re: Make WP-PostViews Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 01 May 2008 00:42:37 -0000

@Rosyidi

You can find information about what symbolic links are at Wikipedia. Symbolic links are only available on a Unix/Linux environment. If you are hosting from a Windows machine, you can just move wp-postviews-js.php directly under your wp-content/ directory to achieve the same effect. Hope this helps.

Re: Make WP-PostViews Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Sat, 03 May 2008 13:51:23 -0000

@JTPratt

What is your main site? I'm not sure why it's not working on your main site, but I believe the reason could be that the Javascript in this mod clashes with one of your other plugins' Javascript. The mod I did here is supposed to work with any other cache plugin, but WP-Super-Cache is supposed to have a hook called "add_cacheaction" that can be used to add a count action. I'll look into it to see if this method would work (and probably write a post about it if it does).

@justfrank

Thank you for visiting! I'm glad that the mod worked out for you.

Re: Make WP-PostViews Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Sat, 03 May 2008 13:54:16 -0000

@JTPratt

I forgot to answer the second part of your question. I'm pretty sure the WP-Stats plugin will not record hits if WP-Super-Cache is enabled. That said, I think it can also benefit from the method of using WP-Super-Cache's add_cacheaction hook. I'll explore this further and keep you posted on my findings.

Re: Block Unwanted Spam Bots Using Varnish VCL

Thaya Kareeson — Sun, 04 May 2008 15:04:22 -0000

That does make sense :). Doh! This post only targeted 1% of my audience.

Re: Make WP-PostViews Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Sun, 04 May 2008 15:06:21 -0000

@JTPratt

Interesting, I will have to look into WP-Stats to see how it works. Thank you.

Re: Make WP-PostViews Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 06 May 2008 16:51:33 -0000

@sylv3rblade

Sorry I do not have a list of compatible/conflicting plugins. Please stay tuned, I will be releasing a non-javascript version soon (within the next day or two). Sorry for the delay!

Re: Make WP-PostViews Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 06 May 2008 16:55:59 -0000

@sylv3rblade

It depends on your shared host. I recommend just moving wp-postviews-js.php directly under your wp-content/ directory if your hosting does not support symbolic links.

Re: Make WP-PostViews Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 08 May 2008 00:55:40 -0000

@sylv3rblade

I'm glad it works out for you.

@hendra

I'm glad it works out for you too, and thank you for your advice.

Re: Make WP-PostViews Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 08 May 2008 13:21:17 -0000

@Rosyidi

Yes, I will make use of WP-Super-Cache's add_cacheaction hook to get WP-PostViews to count without Javascript while WP-Super-Cache is enabled. After evaluating the code, there is more work involved than I first thought, but it should be more efficient than the Javascript version when finished.

Re: Make WP-PostViews Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 12 May 2008 01:04:10 -0000

@All

Unfortunately, it turns out that I misunderstood the add_cacheaction hook. Previously, I thought that add_cacheaction hook gets called every time before a cached page is delivered. I was wrong and there currently is no such hook available in WP-Super-Cache right now. I will definitely make a request to Donncha to add this to WP-Super-Cache. So as it stands, you are stuck with the JS Mod version of WP-PostViews.

I have to appologize for getting your hopes up. The WP-Super-Cache code is quite complex (if Donncha doesn't walk you through it :)), so it took me a while to figure this out.

Re: SezWho? Says Me!

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 23 May 2008 17:07:19 -0000

@Fira

Thank you for visiting! I'm not sure what kind of cheaters you are talking about on the internet, but I totally agree that you cannot run a good website without being nice to people. When SezWho becomes widely used, more commenters would stay on their best behavior. This will result in more meaningful, intelligent, and respectful comments. This also opens up blog networking possibilities. This is why I love the idea and execution so much!

Re: Make WP-PostViews Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Sat, 24 May 2008 14:29:38 -0000

@Rosyidi
Let me look into it. I will get back to you :-).

Re: Widget Bugs or Features in WordPress 2.5?

Thaya Kareeson — Sat, 24 May 2008 14:42:15 -0000

@Rosyidi
Are you using the latest Subscribe2? I was looking at the subscribe2widget.php code and I see:


$content = apply_filters('the_content', '<!--subscribe2-->
');

instead of:


$content = apply_filters('the_content', '<!-subscribe2->
');

which is what is shown on that link you gave me. Maybe you can try using the first version to see if it work?

Re: Widget Bugs or Features in WordPress 2.5?

Thaya Kareeson — Sun, 25 May 2008 14:44:52 -0000

@Rosyidi
Did the solution work out for you?

Re: Make WP-PostViews Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 27 May 2008 18:08:30 -0000

@Andy

Thank you for the clean-HTML fixes. I suffer from a mild code O.C.D myself so I totally understand. I will include this change into the zip archive and notify Lester Chan tonight. And please remember to write about it if you like it :).

Re: Comments Were Broken Recently. It’s Fixed Now.

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 28 May 2008 03:35:15 -0000

@Rosyidi

Thank you for your suggestion on WP Spam Hitman, but it seems to me like WP Spam Hitman is more of a "The Club" anti-spam solution (unless I don't understand how it works). According to Mark Pilgrim, a Lojack solution is one that does not do anything to prevent the spam, but makes it less attractive overall to spam.

Take Akismet for example:

1. A spammer comments on your blog.

2. You marked the comment as spam.

3. Akismet will submit this spam comment to a central database where it is logged and blacklisted.

4. The same spammer will never be able to spam any site (including yours) that is Akismet enabled.

With WP Spam Hitman, you can create your own regular expressions to filter out spam based on the comment text, but no one is benefiting from your regular expression other than yourself. This is why it is more of a "Club" solution. Now if the regular expressions are being centrally stored and distributed to other WP Spam Hitman users then, that would be a Lojack solution.

Please let me know if I don't understand how WP Spam Hitman works and it is indeed a Lojack solution.

Re: Comments Were Broken Recently. It’s Fixed Now.

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 28 May 2008 16:42:59 -0000

@Rosyidi
Thank you for suggesting TextPattern's forced comment preview anti-spam. I'm neither saying that WP Spam Hitman won't work with WP-Super-Cache nor am I saying that it is not a great solution. I am saying that it is a good "Club" solution, but it is not a Lojack solution. Same goes with TextPattern's forced comment preview.

If a spam bot just wants to spam just any blog (a generic blog), then it will most likely be defeated by WP Spam Hitman and forced comment preview. But if the spam bot wants to spam *your* blog, then it can easily be programmed not use the words defined in WP Spam Hitman and to click on the preview button before submitting the comment.

Re: Make WP-PostViews Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 29 May 2008 03:53:51 -0000

I have incorporated Andy's clean-HTML fixes and repacked it into the downloadable zip. Enjoy!

Re: Developing CiCi’s Cafe Website

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 29 May 2008 06:10:56 -0000

I've finally posted the menu & pictures and released this site to the public.

Re: Lower Your Cell Phone Bill by Changing Your Billing Address

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 29 May 2008 13:43:26 -0000

@Casey
Thanks for visiting! I am still doing this and all of my friends and family are doing this too. As for the legal issue, the relevant federal law is the Mobile Telecommunications Sourcing Act (effective 2002) states that cell phone users are supposed to pay taxes in their "area of primary usage". So technically, this is illegal unless my area of primary usage is in Nevada. That said, I'm willing to take the risk.

First, I believe we are already being taxed up the wahzoo. As a Software engineer, California already takes a pound of flesh from me every month. Second, I don't believe my state government is spending the money wisely. When I get the vote ballot, they never have programs that I'm interested in. I'd rather donate my saved $30/year to my favorite charity.

If some tax guy decides that he really wants my money, he can call my wireless providers (Sprint & Cingular) and tell them to change their taxing system.

Re: Comments Were Broken Recently. It’s Fixed Now.

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 29 May 2008 14:22:12 -0000

@Rosyidi
You are absolutely right! Spam bots will usually be programmed to account for the common case, so they will most likely get caught on blogs with unique anti-spam measures. But as soon as the unique technique becomes widely used, this anti-spam measure will eventually be penetrated by spam bots.

As a side note, I would love to have a "forced preview" comment box. I believe it is great for improving comment quality (other than catching spam). Maybe I'll write a plugin that does this (if one doesn't already exist).

Re: Comments Were Broken Recently. It’s Fixed Now.

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 29 May 2008 18:11:57 -0000

@Rosyidi
Thank you for the suggestion again. I loved it so much that I actually implemented "Force Commment Preview" on this blog by modding the Ajax Comment Preview plugin. As of right now, I don't believe that it is a good anti-spam measure (yet), but it is definitely a great comment quality enhancer. I will be making a lot more anti-spam modifications to this and will commit this to the WordPress plugins repository for all you WordPress lovers to enjoy soon!

Re: Comments Were Broken Recently. It’s Fixed Now.

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 29 May 2008 19:57:26 -0000

@Rosyidi
Thank you for your kind words. I need to do a little bit of code cleanup work before I want to release it. I'll keep you posted and let you know as soon as I have a downloadable link.

Re: Comments Were Broken Recently. It’s Fixed Now.

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 30 May 2008 04:18:31 -0000

@Rosyidi
Same here. I really appreciate that you keep reading and commenting on this blog. Thank you!

Re: How to Encrypt Your Internet Traffic

Thaya Kareeson — Sat, 31 May 2008 02:18:14 -0000

@Matt
You're welcome. Please let me know if you were able to make use of this information.

Re: Comments Were Broken Recently. It’s Fixed Now.

Thaya Kareeson — Sat, 31 May 2008 06:31:30 -0000

@Rosyidi
Thank you for letting me know, but most users have Javascript turned on and most bots are not Javascript enabled so it would be nice to make Javascript a requirement for commenting on the blog. Regardless, I will definitely add text to notifying the user to turn on his/her Javascript to enable comments. Thanks again!

Re: My Cacheable WP-PostViews Mods Became Official!

Thaya Kareeson — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 18:04:35 -0000

@GaMerZ
You're welcome!

Re: Comments Were Broken Recently. It’s Fixed Now.

Thaya Kareeson — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 19:22:46 -0000

@Rosyidi
Most mobile phone browsers now-a-days should support Javascript and I don't think I know many bloggers that use lynx to comment on blogs. Regardless, many anti-spam plugins out there are requiring Javascript and cookies to be enabled to allow commenting.

Re: Comments Were Broken Recently. It’s Fixed Now.

Thaya Kareeson — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 19:26:10 -0000

I have added TypePad AntiSpam to the list. This is a new anti-spam solution by the folks at TypePad that is made available as a WordPress plugin. Has anybody tried this? If so, what do you think about it?

Re: AJAX Force Comment Preview WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:55:14 -0000

@Artem & dg
Thank you for your kind words and suggestions. I will definitely add the suggested feature into version 1.1. I have already requested this plugin be added to wp-plugins SVN repository and I'm just waiting for the green light to commit.

Re: AJAX Force Comment Preview WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 06:43:54 -0000

I've just released version 1.1 with the following changes

- Disable feature for Administrators

- Re enforce preview whenever comment text changes

- Merge "Preview" & "Submit" button

Re: AJAX Force Comment Preview WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:18:17 -0000

@Rosyidi
You do have a good point about the confusion of merged submit & preview. I will make it an option in the configurations in the next release.

Re: AJAX Force Comment Preview WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:23:40 -0000

@Rosyidi
"I’ve try to comment for many times, but allways failed, my javascript already on."
I really want to fix this problem if it's still happening. Do you have any ideas on how I can reproduce this?

Re: AJAX Force Comment Preview WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:28:42 -0000

@Rosyidi
Thank you for reporting the bug. It turns out that the Javascript was not waiting for the comment-verification key to be sent back form the server before enabling the submit button. This can cause your comments to not submit if you click "preview" then immediately click "submit". I've fix this in version 1.2. Thanks again!

Re: AJAX Force Comment Preview WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 17:57:58 -0000

@Rosyidi
Thanks! Though, releasing two versions in one day could be a bad thing :-). Luckily, the second release was a critical bug fix.

Re: AJAX Force Comment Preview WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 06:21:08 -0000

SVN access is granted so I've just committed this to svn.wp-plugins.org.

Re: AJAX Force Comment Preview WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 16:56:54 -0000

I've just released version 1.3 with the following change

- Fixed bug that causes Windows EOL characters (^M) in comments to invalidate nonce. (Thank you Artem & Rosyidi for reporting this!)

Re: Completed OMNINOGGIN Server Migration

Thaya Kareeson — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 18:22:08 -0000

@Artem

Keep checking your shared server load. The reason I switched away from shared hosting is because it was always over 10, due to other users. It might be better with your current host though, especially if each user gets a CPU cap as well.

I decided to not go with VPS hosting (as recommended by JTPratt and some other bloggers) so there is no CPU cap for each user. I'm now hosted on a machine with 8 cores at 2.0 GHz with 8GB of ram. The load is about 2.0 right now with only 346MB of free ram (looks like the httpd process is taking up all the ram - which is okay because it's pre-allocated). I just have to make sure that I'm hogging the machine myself. :)

Your email messages are coming from a different host now, not omninoggin.com.

Thank you for noticing the email change. I will be fixing it as soon as my submitted support ticket gets resolved.

I am disappointed that you want to concentrate on FreeBSD less

I won't be completely abandoning FreeBSD tutorials, but there will be less of them. The reason for this is because I still host other WordPress sites on my FreeBSD box (i.e. ciciscafe.com, twidded.com). I am bound to run into FreeBSD problems. :)

Re: iPhone 2 (3G) compared to gPhone compared to WordPress?

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:38:54 -0000

@Rosyidi
You are deprived, my friend. The iPhone is slick. WM7 looks good also, but it has to be paired with the right hardware to make it as hot as the iPhone.

Re: Lower Your Cell Phone Bill by Changing Your Billing Address

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 22:44:16 -0000

@Cris
Thank you for visiting! Don't even get my started about gas prices. $50 only gets me half a tank now and my car only goes 350 miles per tank. Good thing I work so close to home ;).

Re: Lower Your Cell Phone Bill by Changing Your Billing Address

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 01:01:01 -0000

@Artem Russakovskii
I have yet to get a call from Casesar's palace about this. I wonder if they have a stack of mail for me if I ever decide to stay there when I'm visiting Vegas.

Re: Lower Your Cell Phone Bill by Changing Your Billing Address

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:50:15 -0000

I just got my Sprint bill today and it looks like they are catching up to my little scheme. My address is still set to Caesar's Palace, but I'm being charged for California tax. I've changed my billing address to Monte Carlo to see if this will set things back to the way it used to be. For the record, here's Monte Carlo's address:

3770 Las Vegas Blvd. South
Las Vegas, NV 89109

I will keep you guys posted on what happens.

Re: Adding More Sites Social Homes Widget Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 00:09:30 -0000

@Malcolm Bastien
Indeed it is a good idea. Too bad I didn't develop it! :) Hope it works out for you.

Re: Nowthen Photo Display WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 02:49:11 -0000

Just released version 3.2 with the following change:

- Fixed a fread() bug that messes up the gallery display when displaying large numbers of pictures.

Re: Make WP-PostViews Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 01:19:55 -0000

@funnylolfunny
I'm so happy every time I get a message like yours. Thank you for the compliment and I'm glad that it works out for you.

Re: List Poisoning Email Harvesters

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:12:48 -0000

After my run in with a harvester, I decided to add a sleep delay of 3-5 seconds between each visit to the bot trap. This will waste even more of the harvester's time. I've updated the List Poisoning Package to include this change.

Re: My Bot Trap in Action

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 00:51:20 -0000

@Yayin Akisi Sinema
Thank you for visiting. To keep these bots away, I've integrated Project Honey Pot Http:BL look-up into my site. These guys maintain a list of bad bots on the internet and you can use them as a look-up service to block bad bots.

Currently, if a known bad bots visits my site, it will automatically be redirected to http://omninoggin.com/incognito/incognito.php (which is a dead-end page). If it is an undiscovered bad bot, it will stumble into my dead-end page (via an invisible link), and then its activities will get sent to the main Project Honey Pot database to be blacklisted.

The harvester bot I talked about in this post was a previously undiscovered harvester. It's activities were probably sent to Project Honey Pot's main database after it wasted all this time on my site.

Please stay tune to my posts. In my next post, I will release a WordPress plugin that will let you easily enable Project Honey Pot on your WordPress blog.

Re: List Poisoning Email Harvesters

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:23:22 -0000

@miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG
Thank you for visiting. I'm glad that the article was helpful to you. I have a question though. Do you use the Http:BL PHP API they supply or do you use the Apache mod_httpbl? It seems that the only way to use Project Honey Pot on a shared host is via the Http:BL PHP API they supply.

Re: AJAX Force Comment Preview WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 19:35:39 -0000

@Raden
Thank you for putting in a good word for my plugin!

Re: List Poisoning Email Harvesters

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:43:37 -0000

@miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG
Thank you for your reply. That was the only detail I was looking for. I'm glad that there is still need for the PHP API because I am working on packaging a nice plugin for this. I guess for shared-hosting, the PHP API is the only way to go. Thank you!

Re: Adding More Sites Social Homes Widget Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:52:35 -0000

@Mo
Actually, I'm not the author of the plugin and I would hate to not give credit to where it's due (http://silentlycrashing.net/blog/about/). You can still buy me a coffee via the link above though if you found this website resourceful. Thanks!

Re: List Poisoning Email Harvesters

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 13:45:38 -0000

@Sarah
Thank you for visiting and thank you for your kind words! Let's troubleshoot.

Can you check what your .htaccess file says? By default, the 6th line shows:

RewriteRule . /suspicious/index.php [L]

You'd have to change this to

RewriteRule . /poohbear/index.php [L]

I appologize that I forgot to mention this and have updated the instructions. Please let me know if this works out for you.

Re: List Poisoning Email Harvesters

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:19:26 -0000

@Sarah
Great to hear this! Please let me know when you catch one for yourself!

Re: My Bot Trap in Action

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 05:19:26 -0000

@Yayin Akisi Sinema
As promised, I delivered Project Honey Pot Http:BL plugin for easily integrating Project Honey Pot's Http:BL API with your WordPress blog. Check it out!

Re: Project Honey Pot Http:BL WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:29:14 -0000

@autworld
I hope this works out for you. Please let me know when you've implemented this. I love feedback. Thanks!

Re: To Follow or Not To Follow, That is the Question

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 02:26:32 -0000

@Brian
Thank you for your great suggestions about how to deal with comments that fall in the gray area. Do you know of any plugins out there that let you toggle do-follow/no-follow on a per-comment basis?

Re: To Follow or Not To Follow, That is the Question

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:52:28 -0000

Definitely not too incredible a task, but I just wouldn't want to reinvent the wheel. :) By the way, I love the Shaler jump. I love the one you did on 4th of July. Instant classic.

Re: Project Honey Pot Http:BL WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:50:18 -0000

@digitaltodd
Thank you very much for letting me know! I will change it and check it in so nobody else gets confused.

Re: Project Honey Pot Http:BL WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:57:01 -0000

Released version 1.0.1 with the following change:
- Fixed readme.txt typo to use php_httpbl_stats() instead of httpbl_stats()

Re: To Follow or Not To Follow, That is the Question

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 18:41:00 -0000

@Mark
Thank you for visiting! It's nice to see fellow BSD lovers comment once in a while. :)

I'm sorry if I have misled you into thinking that I will be making comment links no-follow. Implementing no-follow was never my intention at all. My plan is to keep the comment links do-follow forever *by default*, but I would like to have an option to mark a link as no-follow if I really wanted to.

A lot of my visitors give great comments (like yours!), but I sometimes get "gray area" comments (the ones that I'm not sure if the purpose was just to gain link juice or not). This no-follow toggle method would be a good tool for me to deal with these "gray area" comment. Also leaving things as do-follow by default should alleviate a lot of this moderation work, freeing time for quality post generation. :)

Re: To Follow or Not To Follow, That is the Question

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 19:02:48 -0000

@Mark
You have a good point about grey area posts. I guess Andy Beard said it right the first time: "If I delete it, will it be missed?"

Thank you for adding me to your rss reader. I do not post as often as many other bloggers, but that's because I only post when I have something important to say/share. So please keep me up there in your reader, I won't disappoint you. :)

Re: Project Honey Pot Http:BL WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:46:30 -0000

@Eddy De Clercq
Thank you for trying out this plugin and your great feedback. I will release a new version without these characters in them today.

Just so that I know for the future, what version of PHP are you using? Also are you running on a Linux or Windows platform?

Re: Project Honey Pot Http:BL WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:56:15 -0000

Released version 1.1.0 with the following change:
- Removed "\n\t" from HTML printout as this shows badly on some platforms.

Re: 1500VA of Battery Backup for Omninoggin.com

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:09:12 -0000

*Update* I have migrated my omninoggin.com to a shared-hosting account so now this battery backup unit is actually backing up twidded.com and ciciscafe.com.

Re: Lower Your Cell Phone Bill by Changing Your Billing Address

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 12:58:48 -0000

*Update*
The change worked. My bill is back on Nevada tax. I'm guessing that all you have to keep is keep an eye on when your bill spikes up (that's probably when they find out that your primary area of usage is not really in Nevada), then switch to another Nevada address to reset this.

Re: To Follow or Not To Follow, That is the Question

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:55:54 -0000

@Brian
Spam protection does help fight this battle since it works well against most automated spamming and some semi-automated spamming. But it does not protect you from real life spammers who go around commenting "nice post thankz" on every dofollow blog just so they can gain link juice. I've been looking at something like StupidFilter to help combat this, but the project has not completed yet. Do you know of any similar service?

Re: Project Honey Pot Http:BL WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 20:02:43 -0000

Released version 1.2.0 with the following change:

- Added backwards compatibility with Jan's original plugin (using table 'httpbl_log' for logging).

Re: To Follow or Not To Follow, That is the Question

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:24:28 -0000

@Jon Do
I used to use captcha plugins on this site but after getting frustrated by many sites with captcha on the net, I've decided to turn it off on this blog. Instead, I use a combination of Akismet, Project Honey Pot Http:BL, and Ajax Force Comment Preview plugins to alleviate my automated spam. The problem I have now is just manual spammers who come through do-follow search engines and leave irrelevant comments. Hopefully I can plug this hole once StupidFilter comes online.

Re: Nowthen Photo Display WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 03:46:21 -0000

Released NowThen Photo Display version 0.4 with the following change:

- Upgraded plugin to be compatible with the new movable wp-content and wp-config.php changes on WordPress 2.6.

Re: AJAX Force Comment Preview WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 03:47:02 -0000

Released AJAX Force Comment Preview version 1.4 with the following change:

- Upgraded plugin to be compatible with the new movable wp-content and wp-config.php changes on WordPress 2.6.

Re: To Follow or Not To Follow, That is the Question

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 04:51:10 -0000

@Jon Do
Haha, that is a good measure of intelligence. I will up the number of required words per comment. This will hopefully help filter out these manual spammers.

Re: AJAX Force Comment Preview WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:16:32 -0000

@Alex Sysoef
I use WordPress Threaded Comments. The WordPress Threaded Comments plugin asked me to copy a portion of my comments.php into an option field in plugin options. Other than that, it seems to work with my plugin fine out of the box.

Re: Upgraded to WordPress 2.6

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:24:23 -0000

@Alex Sysoef
When I first developed AJAX Force Comment Preview, I had WP-Super-Cache enabled and this plugin was working fine. This is mainly because a lot of comments code are built to be dynamic (AJAX talking to PHP script in the backend). They code hasn't changed much since I've disabled WP-Super-Cache so I'm 99% sure that they will work together. If you do check it out, I would really appreciate any feedback you may have on the plugin.

I haven't checked out WP-Hashbash, since I'm already getting no spams to moderate with my current setup (AJAX Force Comment Preview, Project Honey Pot Http:BL, and Akismet). I will definitely check it out if I start getting spam again. Thank you!

Re: Project Honey Pot Http:BL WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:20:38 -0000

@ovidiu
I use WordPress Threaded Comments. It works well with my AJAX Force Comment Preview plugin. Hope you can check that out too!

Re: Weekend Links #2

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:26:49 -0000

@Roshan Bhattarai
Glad to be of service!

Re: To Follow or Not To Follow, That is the Question

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:42:37 -0000

@Talk Binary
Thank you for visiting and for commenting! I hope you find this site helpful in developing your new website. At a glace, your site looks professional and you seem like a good writer so you shouldn't have anything to worry about.

Re: Make Popularity Contest Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 05:12:09 -0000

@Balaji Dutt
Thank you for visiting! I'm running WP 2.6 right now and the plugin seems to work fine. :) I'm planning to release my own version of Popularity Contest pretty soon, so you wouldn't have to worry when WP goes to 2.7. Please stay tuned!

Re: Make Popularity Contest Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:42:41 -0000

@Balaji Dutt
Symbolic links are not required. You can just move popularity-contest-js.php to under your wp-content/ directory.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:18:32 -0000

@Artem
Thank you for your kind words! Please let me know when you have these plugins integrated to your site so that I can check it out.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:20:29 -0000

@Brian
From the F.A.Q. in readme.txt :)

How do I add additional greeting messages?
Right now you will have to hack wp-greet-box.php by adding another element in
the arrays in get_default_options() and get_messages() array. That said, I do
not recommend doing it beacuse because I will soon enhance the plugin to let
you add as many greeting messages per referral domain as you want without
hacking the code. Please stay tuned!

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 22:18:23 -0000

Released version 2.0 with the following new features:

Added ability for users to add/delete/disable greeting messages.
Added confirmation dialogs for delete and reset function.

Told you it was coming ;).

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 22:40:23 -0000

Version 2.0 allows you to do this through the WP Greet Box options menu. No more hacking!

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 15:08:16 -0000

@cashy
Thank you for writing about my plugin!

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 15:22:40 -0000

@caschy
I haven't had the chance to add exception rules to this plugin. I'll add that to the feature list for the next release (which will probably be soon since this would be an easy fix).

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:49:26 -0000

@Stefan
Did you place <?php wp_greet_box(); ?> in your code? Make sure you use wp_greet_box() and not wp_greetbox().

Re: Project Honey Pot Http:BL WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 17:31:39 -0000

Released version 1.3.0 with the following changes:
- Fixed a major bug in the previous release that broke logging.
- Added CSS to admin menu to let user identify options groups easier.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 16:20:46 -0000

@Frank Koehntopp
Sounds like you are on PHP4 (right?). PHP4 doesn't support &$message syntax, but I think you don't really need the '&$' in this case. Try just removing '&' in '&$' and see if it works for you. I remove this on the next release.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 16:31:21 -0000

@Stefan,
Looks like it should work. Maybe you need a semicolon at the end of wp_greet_box():

<!–- TEST GreetBox -–>
<?php wp_greet_box(); ?>
<!–- Ende GreetBox -–>

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 13:39:15 -0000

@Stefan
I've sent you an email. Let's discuss it there so we can resolve this issue quickly.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:33:47 -0000

Released version 2.1 with the following change:

Fixed PHP4 incompatibility.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 19:21:59 -0000

@Barry Flanagan
Let me look into this. I'm planning to enable cookies support too so it can do what "What would Seth Godin Do?" does plus showing customized greeting messages per referrer. This doesn't seem hard to do at all, but I'm suffering from a stomach flu right now so development might be delayed till next week.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:43:50 -0000

@danielcreus
Sorry you are had this problem. It turns out that I kind of goofed on the last SVN commit so the WordPress plugins directory did not get updated properly. I have resolved the issue and you can now download the plugin at the official plugins directory.

Re: Project Honey Pot Http:BL WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:53:02 -0000

@Clay
I'm sorry you are having this issue. I haven't noticed any outages or stoppage of new accounts. They are usually good at letting us know if they are going to be down for maintenance or anything. Did you try to send them an email? You can get to the email link on the about page.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 16:54:36 -0000

@Frank
Thank you for noticing. This is intended as wp-greet-box.js is supposed to be automatically generated upon plugin activation and every time you visit WP Greet Box options. Please let me know if you have any issues with it.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:58:53 -0000

Released version 3.0 with the following new features:

Added cookies support so we do not keep showing the same message to returning visitors.
Added default message when no referrer match is found.

Re: Released WP Greet Box version 3.0

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 04:24:07 -0000

@orangeguru
Is this your first time installing WP Greet Box? I've ran into this problem before, but my problem was me already having WP Greet Box activated and trying to activate another instance of it (having 2 copies of the same plugin in separate folders).

Re: Released WP Greet Box version 3.0

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 04:35:36 -0000

@orangeguru
I have a feeling that it has something to do with write permissions. Can you make sure that your apache user (www, httpd, apache, or whatever it is) has the ability to write to the /wp-content/plugins/wp-greet-box folder?

Re: Released WP Greet Box version 3.0

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 04:48:02 -0000

Not sure if you got the email, but since I don't know how your host is setup, can you try doing chmod 777 on wp-greet-box/ and try reactivating? If it works then it's indeed a permissions issue.

Re: Released WP Greet Box version 3.0

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 04:58:43 -0000

@orangeguru
No problem. I believe that you can probably get away with 775 because in most cases the apache user is setup to act on group permissions. It might be worth it for you to try 775 to see if it works.

Re: Make Popularity Contest Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 13:55:13 -0000

@Lino
Thank you for visiting. Are yout talking about wp-postviews or popularity contest? With popularity contest, I don't think you can use the "upgrade automatically" feature with this mod because the modifications will just get overwritten.

That being said, please stay tuned. I'm planning to release my own version of Popularity Contest soon with more features to chew on ;). You can subscribe to the RSS feed to stay posted.

Re: Make Popularity Contest Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 21:36:27 -0000

@Yan
Thank you for visiting. I'm using my own modded version of Popularity Contest (the one I packaged for WP 2.5). It works fine with WP 2.6 as long as you do not move your wp-content folder. SezWho did not fail on me either. Do you have the latest version installed?

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:31:27 -0000

@Sid
Thank you for your kind words. That is interesting. I will have to try this plugin with DISQUS. It's my responsibility to try to make it as cross-platform as possible :). I'll let you know what I find.

Re: 3 Web Design Mistakes That You May Need to Fix NOW

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 13:24:32 -0000

@Will
Thank you for visiting. Please let me know how it works out for you.

Re: 3 Web Design Mistakes That You May Need to Fix NOW

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:24:12 -0000

@Artem
Thank you for the compliments. The titles may be a little too big as your said because some of my titles are now taking up 2 lines. Another suggestion Emily had was to make the text all caps and decrease the font size. That way you can get away with smaller font (and fit more), but achieve the same attention grabbing effect.

On a side note, to make any text uppercase, you can add this to your CSS property:

text-transform:uppercase;

I will experiment with this for my post titles.

Re: 3 Web Design Mistakes That You May Need to Fix NOW

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:55:18 -0000

@Sid
Thank you but I did not create the icon! I found it in a set of freeware icons at FastIcon. I can't remember where I grabbed the email icon from, but I'm pretty sure it had a freeware license (I'll update later once I find it).

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 18:17:48 -0000

@Sid
Thank you for opening a thread with DISQUS. Hopefully you get this issue resolved. Can you please let me know later if it works out for you or not?

As a side question, how do you like DISQUS? Have you tried SezWho? If so, why do you like DISQUS better?

About the feature request, looks like the feature you are requesting is different levels of tracking visitors (i.e. site level, referrer URL level, page level).

So for sites like del.icio.us you would want the plugin to be tracking visitors at the "page level", which means that if they are visiting from del.icio.us to a page that they have not seen before, then the message will show. But if they are visiting from del.icio.us to a page that they have seen before, then the message will not show.

For sites like google.com, you probably would want the plugin to be tracking visitors at the "referrer URL level" (which is what we have right now).

For other visitors, you probably would want the plugin to be tracking visitors at the "site level" (which is what the default greeting message display is doing right now).

Is this correct? If so, it sounds good and do-able for me to include this in the next release.

Re: Make Popularity Contest Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 18:27:32 -0000

@Yan
That's interesting. Let me email you to see what issues you are having. It'll be easier to debug that way.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:11:45 -0000

@Sid
As far as I know, SezWho doesn't have that functionality. I've heard from others that SezWho is pretty lightweight and it doesn't take over your comments like DISQUS so that's why I chose it. I do like the email comment reply feature of DISQUS, but I believe there is already a plugin that does this (or a feature that is coming in WP 2.7).

I guess it boils down to which one people use the most. If more people are using DISQUS then I might switch over.

About the WP Greet Box plugin. It sounds like if I want to implement the feature I described, I will need to hide the feature by default, and display it when "advanced options" is enabled. Nevertheless, I saw WWSGD's feature of counting the number of visits, but I didn't really like it much in the beginning. I like WP Greet Box's feature that keeps track of the visitor's last visit more, but it sounds like you've found a good use case for this for bookmarking sites like del.icio.us.

I will definitely add this to the features list for next release.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:54:58 -0000

@Sid
Looks like SezWho does have some of these features that DISQUS has, but I just do not know how to utilize them myself. I have to check this out and compare it to DISQUS

===

The default "noscript" thing is also a good idea and is worth adding.

I don't have source control setup anywhere outside of the official WordPress plugins SVN repository and unfortunately I don't think the WordPress guys grant multi-user checkins to their database. Regardless, please feel free to make any modifications you like and send them to me so I can integrate it and credit you properly.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 20:39:13 -0000

I know that the SezWho guys have a new version coming up and I'm quite excited to see what they've got in store for us. Maybe they'll have the thumbsup/thumbsdown voting system too.

Re: Make Your WordPress 10X faster During Traffic Storms

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 20:45:39 -0000

@Sid
I haven't updated this project yet (so many projects going on!). I've written this before or at the beginning of my WordPress plugins development. I was waiting for the right time (when I learn more about WP Plugins) to wrap this up into a nice little plugin for the masses. I guess the time has come. Nice that you reminded me!

Re: List Poisoning Email Harvesters

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:16:11 -0000

@Bazilicum
I can't see any way of verifying if a bot is harvesting emails or not. Even if that's the case, this trap also fights against downloading bots and indexing bots since there are recursive links and time-delays between each script call. Bots will waste valuable time doing useless things like crawling a recursive page structure.

Project Honey Pot is a centralize database that tracks bots' IP addresses and activities to determine what kind of bots they are (not sure how they do the "determining" part). Regardless, you should check them out. I also made a plugin that you can use to easily integrate them into your WordPress blog (if you have one).

Re: 3 Web Design Mistakes That You May Need to Fix NOW

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:46:08 -0000

It doesn't look to me like your blog needs so much work at all. Regardless, take baby steps :).

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 17:54:32 -0000

@Bjorn V
Can you make sure that your server has write permissions to the plugins/wp-greet-box folder? That is the most common issue. As the readme.txt say under "Frequently Asked Questions":

= "Fatal error: Cannot redeclare wp_greet_box()" What gives? =
This error can occur from 2 things:
1. Having multiple versions of WP Greet Box and attempting to activate both of
them.
2. The web server does not have proper write permissions to the wp-greet-box/
plugin folder. To confirm that this is the issue, try to chmod 777 the
wp-greet-box/ folder and reactivating the plugin.
I'll try to add more error detection on an upcoming release so it's more clear
during installation.

Hope this helps.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:10:17 -0000

@Micke
Are you able to activate the plugin successfully? It looks to me like in your case, the $messages hash was not initialized properly. Also your options table might be corrupted. Try checking to see if you have an entry in your wp_options table called "wp_greet_box". If so, delete that row and try activating the plugin again.

Hope this helps!

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:22:32 -0000

@Micke
Did it work?

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 00:44:13 -0000

@Andy Beard
I haven't even thought about that. I agree that writing to a file is pretty archaic (but it sounded like a good idea in the beginning). Thank you for your suggestion. I will incorporate this change in the upcoming release.

Re: To Follow or Not To Follow, That is the Question

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 01:18:15 -0000

I wish I was getting 1000 comments per month to moderate. That would be a good problem to have on my site :).

Re: How to Encrypt Your Internet Traffic

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 03:50:03 -0000

@Natty
You can try following the Putty method described here. Let me know if that works for you.

Re: Project Honey Pot Http:BL WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 03:57:07 -0000

@Eddy
Sorry for the late response (I've been on a bit of a vacation).

To debug, I recommend enabling logging in your the plugins options and temporarily modifying php-httpbl.php line 321 from:

if ($log)

to:

if (true)

Now wait a few days to see if you are getting hits.

Please let me know if this helps.

Re: Make Popularity Contest Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 04:02:19 -0000

@Sabastian
Thank you for visiting and sorry for the late response (I've been on a bit of a vacation).

What you need to do is have chCounter count via Javascript instead of via PHP. For example, you should write something like this to your footer:

<script type="text/javascript">
// <![CDATA[
cstatus = "active";
visible = "0";
page_title = "";
url_of_counter_file = "http://chCounter.omninoggin.com/counter.php";
page_url = unescape( location.href );
referrer = ( document.referrer ) ? document.referrer : "";
page_title = ( page_title.length == 0 ) ? document.title : page_title;
document.write( "<script type=\"text/javascript\" src=\"" );
document.write( url_of_counter_file + "?chCounter_mode=js&jscode_version=3.1.3&status=" + cstatus + "&visible=" + visible + "&page_title=" + encodeURIComponent( page_title ) );
document.write( "&page_url=" + encodeURIComponent( page_url ) + "&referrer=" + encodeURIComponent( referrer ) + "&res_width=" + screen.width + "&res_height=" + screen.height + "\"><" + "/script>" );
// ]]>
</script>
<noscript>
<object data="http://chCounter.omninoggin.com/counter.php?chCounter_mode=noscript" type="text/html"></object>
</noscript>

Ugly isn't it? You're probably better off by just viewing this page's source and grabbing the code from my site's footer.

Re: Make Popularity Contest Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 06:57:55 -0000

@LastOne,
No problem. I'm sure you remembered to change the omninoggin.com URL in the javascript to your own counter URL.

I had a wonderful vacation with lots of outdoors activities. It's good to get out once in a while.

Re: Make Popularity Contest Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:28:50 -0000

@LastOne
I just looked at the chCounter source code to figure this out. It's quite clever actually. The "noscript" part will execute when the visitor doesn't have javascript enabled. When this happens, the browser will try to access the "counter.php?mode=noscript" version of chCounter, which just counts the visitor with minimal information logged. Things like referrer URL, search phrase, etc are not logged since you do not have access to it via javascript variables.

Re: Make Popularity Contest Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:30:15 -0000

ZimTimes
As I said before, you do not need chCounter to get Popularity Contest to work.

Re: Make Popularity Contest Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:32:05 -0000

LastOne
What do you mean by 87/30 and 401/46? Do you mean pageviews/unique visitors?

Re: Project Honey Pot Http:BL WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:41:39 -0000

Eddy De Clercq
Do you know if the code even executes at all? Can you add some echo commands in php-httpbl.php in php_httpbl_check_visitor()? I would place one before and after line 253 to print out the $result for sure.

echo "result before if:" . $result[0];
if ( $result[0] == 127 ) {
echo "result after if:" . $result[0];

It might be possible that your service DNSBL stopped working. You might also want to log into your Project Honey Pot account and check the statistics if you have been detecting any bots lately.

Re: Make Popularity Contest Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 18:24:04 -0000

@LastOne
I'm not sure why the numbers are different from just the data that you give me. Have you looked into the online log for both chcount and chcount2 and see if you can figure out what kind of visitors did not get counted?

Re: Make Popularity Contest Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 19:14:05 -0000

@ZimTimes
You do not need to add the above quoted javascript to your footer. Please leave it out.

I just went to your site, enabled firebug and inspect the section of your site that's supposed to call the javascript and count the visitor in popularity contest and I see:

Warning: main(plugins/popularity-contest/popularity-contest.php) [function.main]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/thezi0/public_html/wp-content/popularity-contest-js.php on line 3

Warning: main(plugins/popularity-contest/popularity-contest.php) [function.main]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/thezi0/public_html/wp-content/popularity-contest-js.php on line 3

Fatal error: main() [function.require]: Failed opening required 'plugins/popularity-contest/popularity-contest.php' (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php') in /home/thezi0/public_html/wp-content/popularity-contest-js.php on line 3

Did you follow instructions and

Move popularity-contest-js.php directly under your wp-content/ directory?

Re: Make Popularity Contest Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 19:46:15 -0000

O, I see, you have an irregular plugins structure. Is there a reason for that? It would've been easier for you to just place all contents of the zip file under under plugins/popularity-contest/* and move poplarity-contentest-js.php to your wp-content/ directory. That way the plugin will get recognized by the dashboard too.

Re: Make Popularity Contest Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 20:42:22 -0000

@LastOne
I'm asking if you can look at the visitor logs to see what type visitors got recorded with PHP counting vs. JS counting. You can do so by logging into your chCounter admin and clicking on the "Log data" page.

Re: Make WP-PostViews Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 14:06:44 -0000

@Chris SX
Lester Chan did integrate this change into the WP-PostViews release. See my post about it.

Re: AJAX Force Comment Preview WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:43:24 -0000

Interesting, I'll install WP Wall tonight on my test blog. Let me get back to you on this.

Re: AJAX Force Comment Preview WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 19:37:29 -0000

Released AJAX Forced Comment Preview version 1.5.
- Added mode to send() that returns the nonce value used for bypassing verification.

Re: AJAX Force Comment Preview WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 19:41:06 -0000

@ovidiu
This bug turned out to be quite tricky! Regardless I have released version 1.5 to help with the issue.

To get these two plugins to work you will have to:

1. Upgrade to the latest version of AJAX Force Comment Preview
2. Add the following lines of code in wp-wall-ajax.php before the line that calls "wp_new_comment".

// Ajax Forced Comment Preview Compatibility Code - START
$_POST['author'] = $_POST['wpwall_author'];
$_POST['text'] = $_POST['wpwall_comment'];
$_POST['email'] = $_POST['wpwall_email'];
$_POST['afcp-nonce'] = Ajax_Force_Comment_Preview::send(true);
// Ajax Forced Comment Preview Compatibility Code - END

Re: Lower Your Cell Phone Bill by Changing Your Billing Address

Thaya Kareeson — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 19:46:46 -0000

@Frydel
Thank you for visiting and sticking it to the man!

Re: AJAX Force Comment Preview WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 03:47:49 -0000

@ovidiu
I have not informed the author of WP Wall yet. The main reason is that this code insertion I suggested is quite specific to my plugin. Please feel free to contact him/her though. Maybe they wouldn't mind adding it into the WP Wall plugin.

Re: AJAX Force Comment Preview WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 03:49:10 -0000

@ovidiu
This is my fault. I had the get_avatar() function query for a 32x32 pixel version of the picture and blew it up to 48x48. Most other avatars on my sites are supplied by SezWho. I've fixed this and your avatar should display fine now.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 13:42:11 -0000

@Mark
I'm not sure why it doesn't work for you in FF3. I use FF3 and I haven't seen any issues with it. What is your website? Can you try turning on the plugin so I can run firebug on it?

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 16:45:41 -0000

@Steven
I don't think WordPress allows you to use PHP code within a text widget. You will have to manually modify your sidebar.php file and drop the code there.

Re: Programming for Halloween 2008

Thaya Kareeson — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 06:13:22 -0000

You're very welcome! I love the music.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 04:57:45 -0000

Released version 3.1 with the following features:

Added referral URL exclusion rules capabilities.
Added noscript support for users with javascript disabled.
Paginate admin pages.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 04:59:49 -0000

@squeeq
I'm not sure why that is the case. It shouldn't work any differently. Can you check the facebook referrer URL against what you have specified in your settings?

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 05:01:03 -0000

@Steven
Let me look into this. I might have to release another version to get this fixed for IE. Also, what version of IE are you using?

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 05:13:33 -0000

Just added delicious.com to the default of version 3.1. Thank you Sid!

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 20:40:23 -0000

@Steven
I cannot reproduce this with IE7 or IE6 on my site. I do see that it is not working on your meditation site though. There must be some sort of site specific code on your end?

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 22:23:29 -0000

I'm looking at your site right now and I can't get the Greet box to show up after clearing cookies even in Firefox anymore. Can you revert what you are doing? I'm going to run the IE7 debug toolbar on it.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 23:28:22 -0000

Released version 3.1.1:

Fixed a bug that caused the greet box to not show up if exclusion rules are not specified.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 14:11:37 -0000

@Steven
For some reason, I cannot see the onclick action through the IE debugbar, so I suspect that Semilogic might not allow link onclick actions.

Can you try the following on your site? On line 262 of wp-greet-box.php, modify:

<a onclick="wpgb_close()">X

to be:

<a href="javascript:wpgb_close()">X

Now try to close the box in IE again.

Re: Released WP Greet Box Version 3.1

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 14:19:29 -0000

You should upgrade to version 3.1.1, as I've fixed an upgrade bug I introduced in version 3.1.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 15:13:20 -0000

@Steven
After that change, when I click on the X, I noticed that the greet box actually closes after the Javascript error. I really think it's something on your site analytics that's causing this. Basically, some Javascript is trying to intercept all "clicking" action to record it for analytics, then it returns to the actual function, which is wpgb_close(). The wpgb_close() code executed fine (that's why the box disappeared) without any Javascript error message.

Also, if I click on any link on your page, I get the same error Javascript error message. This is definitely a Semiologic issue.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 19:40:18 -0000

@Kelson
Thank you for trying this out. I wasn't aware of this issue, but I'm actually on the verge of releasing a new version of WP Greet Box that will resolve this issue and many other issues. Please hang tight!

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 07:53:37 -0000

Released version 4.0:

- Greeting message now fades out when the close button is clicked.
- Frontend greeting message display now uses AJAX to display the proper greeting message.
- There is no longer a need to pre-generate a static wp-greet-box.js file for these greeting messages. This also fixes the "Fatal error: Cannot redeclare wp_greet_box()" error that many people are getting from incorrect permissions.
- Greeting message administration UI became a lot easier and quicker after AJAXification.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:13:44 -0000

@Kelson
I was afraid of that. I think I have a solution for this without having to manually edit the file to point to the right place and without enabling write access to the javascript file. I'll see what I can do about it. Thank you for reporting back! Also, please remember to write about it if you like the plugin!

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:15:35 -0000

Released version 4.0.2

- Fix some IE compatibility issues.
- Also fixed Javascript to work with non-standard directory WordPress installs.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:26:42 -0000

I am very happy to hear this! I have subscribed to your blog. Thank you!

Re: Released WP Greet Box Version 4.0

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:29:54 -0000

@Study Babes,
You can definitely do that with WP Greet Box. You just have to place the <php? wp_greet_box(); ?> where ever you want it to show up in your theme.

Re: Released WP Greet Box Version 4.0

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 16:33:30 -0000

@Andrew
That was an incredibly fast response. Thank you so much for your review, tips, and pointers! I haven't checked out how my plugin fairs in WP 2.7 myself, but I will now. You just gave me a really nice/interesting feature list to help me polish the plugin. I will work hard to implement them.

Question:

I also think it would be good to include a filter for the message so that a plugin can filter what shows up in the box based on the referrer.

Are you talking about providing a filter for a 3rd party plugin? I'm not sure what you mean by filter here.

Re: Released WP Greet Box Version 4.0

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:24:15 -0000

Great idea. Thanks Andrew.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:28:28 -0000

Looks like 4.0.2 triggered a regression failure. Let me check it out.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:55:14 -0000

Released 4.0.3

- Fixed regression AJAX bug.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:58:51 -0000

@Robin Hood Adventures
Can you give 4.0.3 a try? Thanks!

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:59:28 -0000

Can you give 4.0.3 a try? Thanks!

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:06:13 -0000

Relase 4.1 (last time today, I promise)

- Security patch using nonce verification on admin AJAX calls.

This fix takes care of the security loop-hole that was left open by having AJAX in the admin section. I think Referrer Detector also has this issue (as of 11/14/08). I highly recommend that everybody upgrade to this version of WP Greet Box.

Re: Released WP Greet Box Version 4.0

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:10:53 -0000

@Study Babes
Can you please try version 4.1? This should fix your issue along with a security loop-hole in version 4.0.x.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:27:40 -0000

@Kelson,
Thank you Kelson. I didn't get the chance to read your comment about find_greet_html before I released 4.1. Bummer! I've been pushing updates a lot (with little sleep). So it might be best for me to take a few days break before I push another bug fix.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 22:16:52 -0000

@Robert
That is quite odd. The new version make no references to wp-greet-box/wp-greet-box.css since it has been moved to wp-greet-box/css/wp-greet-box.css. Also the code is no longer referring to wp-greet-box/wp-greet-box.js (since it is no longer used). Can you try doing a clean install (by removing all files and then re-downloading?)

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 22:19:02 -0000

@Mike
Depending on the theme (and how you like it to display), the <?php wp_greet_box(); ?> can go in different places. In most themes, it is best placed in the header.php file.

Re: Released WP Greet Box Version 4.0

Thaya Kareeson — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 22:36:48 -0000

@James
It should work if you place <?php wp_greet_box(); ?> into any of your theme files (I like to place it in header.php). It's quite odd. I visited your site, did "View Source" and did not find anything that says "wp-greet-box". Did you remove it from your site?

Re: Released WP Greet Box Version 4.0

Thaya Kareeson — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 22:42:57 -0000

@MrsDealFinder
I think this is a feature/flaw in the WordPress plugins upgrade system (I can't do much about that). You can try placing your images outside of the plugins/wp-greet-box directory and use the new images URLs when you specify your custom greeting messages.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 22:49:09 -0000

@Jon
I'm going to release a new version (4.1.1) that will be using onload.js and other scripts on only pages that you specify <? wp_greet_box() ?>. Please hang tight!

Re: Released WP Greet Box Version 4.0

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 03:37:03 -0000

@Study Babes
I've released version 4.1.1 that should resolve the adding new custom messages issue. I've also written a test plan to run through for each release so I shouldn't have these many bugs in the future. Thanks for trying it out!

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 03:37:59 -0000

Releasing WP Greet Box version 4.1.1

- Modification so that Javscripts are only ran on pages with
that has <? wp_greet_box() ?> calls.
- Fixed adding new message bug.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 04:50:51 -0000

Please let me know how it works out for you. I wrote a test plan and ran through them on this release, let's hope I didn't miss anything. :)

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:24:29 -0000

@Steven,
I need to start using that plugin :). Thank you for reporting this. Anyhow, I found the culprit. I have accidentally left a reference to admin_functions.js in wp-greet-box.php. It is harmless to leave it there, but notifications are annoying so you can remove it by removing that line from wp-greet-box.php:

function load_admin_scripts() {
echo(
'<link rel="stylesheet" href="'.wpgb::get_plugin_url().'/css/wp-greet-box-admin.css" type="text/css"/>'.
'<script type="text/javascript" src="'.wpgb::get_plugin_url().'/js/jquery.livequery.js"></script>'.
'<script type="text/javascript" src="'.wpgb::get_plugin_url().'/js/admin_functions.js"></script>'
);

to:

function load_admin_scripts() {
echo(
'<link rel="stylesheet" href="'.wpgb::get_plugin_url().'/css/wp-greet-box-admin.css" type="text/css"/>'.
'<script type="text/javascript" src="'.wpgb::get_plugin_url().'/js/jquery.livequery.js"></script>'
);

I'll add this fix in the next WP Greet Box release.

Re: Released WP Greet Box Version 4.0

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:55:47 -0000

I'm glad to hear that! Please remember to write about it or spread the word if you can!

Too many is a loosely used term :). I would say that if you have thousands of referrers then the greet box display will definitely show up slower. But 30, 40 or so shouldn't give you any performance issues.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 22:53:15 -0000

@Steven,
Wow, IE does look "horrible". You can try changing it to non-italic, by modifying wp-greet-box/css/wp-greet-box.css (remove "font-style:italic" from the .greet_block declaration).

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:36:55 -0000

@LGR,
Thank you for reporting this and for the debug work! I will look to see if I can fix this in the next version.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:51:45 -0000

@Steven,
Try using:

font-family:Verdana,Tahoma,sans-serif;
font-size:18px;
font-style:italic;

I have nice results with that setting on IE7 & Firefox3. I'll probably release with those settings in the next release.

For the second issue. Is this in both IE and FF?

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 17:17:53 -0000

@akash,
This message shows up if you do not have a referrer specified in one of your greeting messages. Please check that all of your custom greeting messages have a referrer specified. I will include a fix for this (and some form verification) in the next release.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 05:58:57 -0000

@Mistigen,
Sadly, Referrer Detector actually "ripped-off" my plugin (it even says so on the original plugin page). I am quite disappointed since, all it is is a admin face-lift of my plugin with mostly less core features and a security flaw (as of version 2.0). WP Greet Box has some admin face-lifts now also.

I don't see the point in ripping off a plugin if you do not have anything substantial to add to it :(. I'm trying my best to keep my users happy, but it's hard to balance work, hobby, and family obligations during the Holidays.

Rest assure, I will tend to all of your needs as time permits. :)

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 14:16:03 -0000

@LGR & @Mistigen,
I've been trying to reproduce this bug, but I've been unsuccessful. Here are my settings:

In WP Admin Settings:
General->WP URL: http://omninoggin.com/staging/
General->Blog URL: http://omninoggin.com/staging/
Permalinks->Custom Structure: /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

My public_html/staging/.htaccess file:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /staging/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /staging/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

Calls to http://omninoggin.com/staging/2008/10/index.php... is not returning 404 for me for some reason.

Can you guys let me know what else I need to do to reproduce this bug?

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:20:12 -0000

@LGR,
I had a feeling that was the case. Let me try configuring my test blog that way and try it again.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:55:24 -0000

@LRG,
I still cannot reproduce the problem with the subfolder setting specified per codec (I did manage to break my own website though :)). Can you do me a favor and try changing one line in onload.js from "index.php" to "/index.php" and retry this on your settings?

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 17:40:48 -0000

@Chris,
Thanks for your review. Version 4.2.2 will allow you to automatically insert the message before and after your post. I will also try the default CSS font setting per you suggestion. Also, please help me spread the word by writing about it if you like it!

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 06:38:59 -0000

Released version 4.2:

- Auto-insert into the top of posts by default.
- Added ability to auto-insert into the top of pages.
- AJAXify adding new greeting message in administration.
- New settings to make messages closable or not.
- Easier exclusion rules (with regex toggle).
- Prevent self-referral to trigger greeting messages.
- Refferals are now per domain, instead of per URL.
- Fixed a bug that causes greeting messages to not work if one of the custom messages did not have a referrer URL specified.
- Fixed a bug that causes greeting messages to not work on non-default path WordPress installations.
- More generic/stable CSS defaults.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 17:16:01 -0000

Released 4.2.1:

- Removed forced hidden back-link and added optional "Powered by WP Greet Box" at the bottom right of messages.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 16:46:05 -0000

@PzheL,
That is odd, the PHP documentation says that parse_url() accepts two parameters. Maybe it's a specific PHP version issue. I'll make a fix for it in version 4.2.2.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 19:36:48 -0000

Released version 4.2.2

- Added ability to auto-insert greeting message before or after the post.
- Fixed default CSS (again).
- Fixed parse_url() incompatibilty in some version of PHP.
- Fixed blank line bug that shows up in IE when no greeting is shown.
- Fixed invalid reference to wp-greet-box/js/admin_functions.js.
- Hide advanced options in general configurations.
- Gave administration pages a bit of a facelift.

@Steven and @PzheL, this should fix all of your problems.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 19:40:21 -0000

@creativeherb
Thanks for the feature request. I was planning to do this, but I haven't yet because no one has requested it. I'll bump up the priority in my upcoming features list.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 17:20:20 -0000

@Kelson
Thanks for reporting this. Can you do me a favor and try using just index.php instead of /journal/index.php? Someone else with their blog installed as a subdirectory also had issues with index.php though. I'll address this issue when I get back from camping on Sunday.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 16:28:16 -0000

@LGR
Thanks for letting me know! I usually read Daily Blog Tips also, and I am quite shocked that Referrer Detector news made it to that blog before WP Greet Box does. I've emailed the Daniel (of DBT). Hopefully he will give my plugin a try and give an honest review between the two plugins.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 16:47:09 -0000

Released version 4.2.3

- Fixed bug that causes WP Greet Box to not work with sites with WordPress
not installed in the root directory.
- Changed donation URL.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 22:49:33 -0000

@Chris
Is this bug showing up in IE or FF or both?

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 23:14:59 -0000

@Chris
Can you please do me a favor and try modifying wp-greet-box.php line 641 from:

if(($show_page && is_page()) || ($show_post && is_single())){

to:

if(is_feed() || ($show_page && is_page()) || ($show_post && is_single())){

and see if the feed works for you?

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 04:17:32 -0000

Released version 4.3

- Added ability to detect the visitor's search keywords from major search engines and automatically display related posts under the greeting message.
- Fixed blank line bug in RSS feeds.

REMINDER Make sure you deactivate then reactivate the plugin upon upgrade so you can get new options defaults.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 04:21:46 -0000

Awesome detective work @Steven! I will test this out and make the fix in the new version. Thank you!

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 04:22:37 -0000

Good luck Rudy!

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 13:47:57 -0000

@Kelson
Sorry about that. I thought I left it as index.php. I must've had an old version of onload.js somehow. Maybe I should move my blog to a sub folder :).

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 14:13:38 -0000

@Steven
Can you please give me an example of a Digg and a Stumbleupon URL that has extra referral info in them? I'm trying to reproduce the bug, so I can test out these changes.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:59:14 -0000

@Christine
Are you using automatic greeting message insertion or manual (by putting <php? wp_greet_box() ?> into your theme). Also, what version of WordPress are you using?

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:07:31 -0000

Also, can you try modifying "site_url()" on line 625 to "get_option('siteurl')"? If this works, I will release a new version with this compatibility fix.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:18:21 -0000

I just found out that get_option('siteurl') is the standard way of doing things:

Released WP Greet Box version 4.3.2

- Fixed site_url() compatibility.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:29:19 -0000

@Christine
No need for sorry! Thank for for reporting the bug. If you didn't report it then I wouldn't have known about this incompatibility.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 00:33:11 -0000

@Karen,
If you try accessing this background link on my site

http://omninoggin.com/index.php?wpgb_public_act...

you will see a semi-greeting message.

I tried accessing this background link on your site:

http://mrsdealfinder.com/index.php?wpgb_public_...

and I couldn't get anything back.

I also confirmed that if I try to access:

http://mrsdealfinder.com/index.php?wpgb_public_...

so it works properly for default greeting messages.

It looks like something is wrong with your .htaccess file. It is preventing WP Greet Box from accessing urls with referrer=http://twitter.com at the end.

You can try to debug your .htaccess file on your end. On this end, I'll see what I can do to encode this URL value prior to passing it to the URL as a query to increase compatibility.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 02:22:49 -0000

@Karen
Can you please do me a favor and try changing onload.js from:

"&referrer;="+document.referrer

to:

"&referrer;="+encodeURIComponent(document.referrer)

and see if it works for you?

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 03:09:05 -0000

Released version 4.3.3

- Fixed incompatibility on some web server setups which required URL escape.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 13:37:24 -0000

@lorenzo
Thanks for reporting back to the crowd. I haven't had to chance to make related posts more customizable yet, but it will be in the future.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 13:47:37 -0000

I went to digg.com, used firebug to modify one of their links to one of your posts then clicked through. I was able to see the greeting message fine. How are you testing for this?

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:16:32 -0000

@Karen
No need for sorry! I encourage all discussions good & bad. That way I can shake out as many bugs as possible so people can run the plugin without a hitch.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 01:01:56 -0000

@Lorenzo
The initial text is actually supplied by wp-greet-box.php, search that file for "You were searching for" and you should find what you are looking for. I'll consolidate this later when I make this text customizable.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 13:43:08 -0000

That's because I coded the darn thing. Hehe

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 06:19:41 -0000

Released version 4.4

- Added more default greeting messages.
- Created and used my own set of free transparent icons.
- Added support for wildcard referrers (*.fr, *.uk).
- Added ability to specify multiple referrers per greeting message.
- Adjusted default CSS again.
- Fixed bug with stumbleupon & digg URLs that won't work on some sites.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 06:20:20 -0000

@Sean,
Version 4.4 should fix the issue you are having. Can you give it a try?

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 13:51:16 -0000

Released 4.4.1

- Fix preg_match() error that occurs when there are slashes (/) specified in the referrer URL of each custom greeting message.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 13:52:55 -0000

@Alex,
Thank you for reporting this so that I can make a quick fix for everybody else. Version 4.4.1 should fix this issue.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 14:42:44 -0000

@creativeherb,
Version 4.4.1 should have this feature you are requesting. :)

Re: Released WP Greet Box Version 4.4

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 03:04:43 -0000

@Farrhad,
Glad to see you are back! Let me know how you like it!

Re: Released WP Greet Box Version 4.4

Thaya Kareeson — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 22:23:46 -0000

You can add <?php wp_greet_box ?> to have it show up anywhere in your theme file.

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 17:23:35 -0000

@Eduardo Arcos,
Looks like it's a site specific htaccess path issue. Let me resolve this with you through email so we don't expose any directory paths to the public.

Re: Are Premium WordPress Plugins/Themes Unethical?

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:54:06 -0000

@Sid Savara
Nice to see you dropping by again :). You are right about WordPress repository having the right to do what they want with it (i.e. post only GPL compatible themes that link to the author's website which has *only* GPL themes). The thing that bothers me is that if the author satisfies these requirements, but has any 3rd party advertisements selling premium non-GPL themes, then the author's GPL theme will also get removed from the repository.

It seems to me that advertisements should not count. On the other hand, if we really want to stick to the true spirit of GPL, then we shouldn't take money from those advertisers in the first place. It's a tough decision.

Re: Are Premium WordPress Plugins/Themes Unethical?

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 17:33:44 -0000

I agree. People who code for money have an obligation to deliver their best.

Re: Are Premium WordPress Plugins/Themes Unethical?

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 18:36:32 -0000

@Sid
I forgot to comment on your previous statement:

The whole Revolution theme going GPL was very interesting: I think perhaps they looked at the numbers and decided that if we open source it and provide only support etc, we can make more money.

I'm not sure if it was a marketing/sales move though. To me, it seems to me like that is the only thing Brian Gardner can do to be able to fully honor GPL and not start bad blood with Matt Mullenweg/Automattic. (I respect him for doing so!)

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 13:43:07 -0000

@Michael Garmahis,
Sorry you are having issues with the plugin. Let's deal with these as separate issues:

1.

On one blog with Wordpress 2.6 it doesn’t show up

What is the blog you are talking about? Can you enable WP Greet Box and give me the URL so I can check it out?

2.

another with 2.5 give me ‘fatal error’ Parse error: parse error, unexpected $, expecting ‘(’ in ***/wp-greet-box.php on line 717

I'm looking at wp-greet-box.php line 717, but I cannot find any "$" anywhere. Do you have a modified version somehow? My line 717 looks like:

extract(get_option(wpgb::get_name()));

is WP Greet Box compatible with Wordpress 2.7

I and some other people are using WordPress 2.7 right now with WP Greet Box. I haven't seen any bug reports specifically for WP 2.7 yet, so I'm assuming that there is no compatibility issue :).

Re: WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Thaya Kareeson — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:56:56 -0000

@Michael Garmahis
Good to hear that it's not my bug :). Too bad that Adblock Plus is too smart for my plugin though :(.

Re: How to Encrypt Your Internet Traffic

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 14:25:09 -0000

@Natty
I think it they should work assuming that they are configured properly. Are you trying to chain tunnel or are you just planning to keep on Tor and use putty to SSH into boxes?

The way I see it, there is no need for SSH tunneling if you are already using Tor.

Re: Are Premium WordPress Plugins/Themes Unethical?

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 19:41:10 -0000

@Jeffro2pt0

I wasn't aware of Matt's intentions for the WordPress theme repository in the first place. After listening to the various clarifications in your WordPress Weekly podcast, I have a lot more respect for the guy (THANK YOU for coming up with those wonderful questions) and after being aware of his intentions, I truly understand the basis for these theme removals.

I also feel that if the premium theme developers are not happy with the new guidelines, but still want to be re-included into the repository, then they should just make the necessary modifications and contact Matt for re-entry. Matt is such a standup guy. I'm almost certain that he will definitely give them a second chance if they follow the new guidelines.

Re: Are Premium WordPress Plugins/Themes Unethical?

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 13:42:36 -0000

@kristarella
Thank you for stopping by and providing your insight!

You are right that the original statement is definitely contradictory. I wasn't aware that GPL allows you to resell GPL'd code for money (thus the update as you said). Sounds like my solution is not viable at all :(. I must strike it out.

Matt Mullenweg uses one rule of thumb to determine if something is a derivative work. The rule is, "If you take WordPress away, will the plugin / theme work?" In most cases they will not. That's why it's a WordPress plugin / theme. A good example of a semi-plugin that is not a derivative of WordPress is sharethis.com. The ShareThis WordPress plugin is derivative work, but the ShareThis widget (javascript you grab from sharethis.com to incorporate into your site) is not derivative work as it can work on any website (not just WordPress).

Re: Are Premium WordPress Plugins/Themes Unethical?

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 13:54:19 -0000

@Jeffro2pt0
I respect that Matt is not planning to legally pursue anybody who is violating WordPress GPL.

An interesting topic that you guys discussed in the WordPress Weekly podcast was Brian Gardner's new GPL themes and paid support/service model. I've email Brian to ask what he considers as service and support. He says that anybody is free to post bugs onto the general forum. Only theme customizing questions and requests are considered as support and should posted at the paid forum. This seems like a viable business model for premium themes, but what about premium plugins? I can't imagine anybody requesting anything from a plugin author than bug fixes and feature requests. What would be a good business model here?

I would really be interested to hear you interview Brian Gardner on your WordPress Weekly show discussing his premium theme support business model. Maybe that would be a possible future show?

Re: Are Premium WordPress Plugins/Themes Unethical?

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 14:53:12 -0000

@kristarella
As of now Matt considers all WordPress themes derived works (even if the CSS files and images have nothing to do with WordPress function calls). He says that the way to look at it is, "If you are given a free theme without images or CSS files then would you use it?"

An interesting discussion arises from child themes though. This is because the theme author can make child themes consist of purely CSS files and images. If that's the case, there is really no reason that child themes need to be GPL.

Re: Are Premium WordPress Plugins/Themes Unethical?

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 18:21:48 -0000

@Kristarella,
That is true. Most of the internet will not work without Apache, PHP, or MySQL.

Personally, I believe that if themes do not make any WordPress function calls, it should not automatically fall under GPL. Unfortunately, I am not a lawyer and, I'm not legally sure :(.

Re: 2008/05/15/cox-blocks-interne/

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 15 May 2008 19:08:00 -0000

Is nobody aware of the pun intended here? I think it's hilarious!

Re: WP-Greet Box

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 16:46:07 -0000

Thank you for doing such a good write up about my plugin Sarah! I couldn't have done it better myself!

Re: WP-Greet Box

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 21:48:55 -0000

What kind of tracking do you use to find out if your search visitors are staying longer? Just Google Analytics?

Re: WP-Greet Box

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 04:10:51 -0000

Thanks. I will have a go at those two.

Re: Cool Market Research Tool: Filtrbox

Thaya Kareeson — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 16:39:17 -0000

Good review. I have never heard of this tool, and I believe it would be a great addition to my toolkit. I'm already starting to feel the burn of keeping up with the latest news & articles in my niche. I will definitely try to out to see if it can alleviate some of my pain. Thank you!

Re: Referrer Detector

Thaya Kareeson — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 07:34:27 -0000

They say imitation is the best form of flattery

:) That being said, I've made some enhancements in WP Greet Box (version 4.0), that makes some of your feature comparisons outdated.

Re: We are the champions

Thaya Kareeson — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 22:11:47 -0000

Darn you guys!

Re: To twitter or not to twitter

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 02:14:56 -0000

I consider Facebook for people you already know and Twitter for people that you'd like to know. :) It's a good way to me to keep in touch with my readers.

Re: WordPress plugins I’m using

Thaya Kareeson — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 04:13:21 -0000

You always say that you don't write well but in fact you do! Out of this list, Ozh's Admin Drop down and Akismet is definitely a must.

Re: If I don’t write a post, people may think I’m dead :)

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 18:59:08 -0000

Welcome back to the WordPress world! Maybe you can have some time to work on our little project? :)

Re: Referrer Detector 4.0 is out!

Thaya Kareeson — Tue, 12 May 2009 13:42:14 -0000

Congratulations on this release! I'm glad you found some time in your schedule to update this plugin. I still have to find time to fix some of my own bugs in WPGB :P.