Adam R Brown

These charts show when spammers like to attack the most. These charts use averages dating back to January 28th, 2008, when KB Spam Blacklist starting operating on this site. These times are in my server's time zone, where it is currently 12:13 am.

The red line indicates the number of spams stopped, on average, for each hour of each day. The blue line is the same data with smoothing applied (to make the trends more obvious).

Want to shoot spam on site, preventing it from even showing up in your moderation queue? Try out KB Spam Blacklist.

I’ve just tested all my plugins in the beta version of WordPress 2.5. They will all continue to work in 2.5 when it gets released next week or so. I did make a couple minor changes to some of my plugins. You should update to the newest versions before upgrading to 2.5.

My plugins .

Here’s a little plugin to fix an annoying problem. Do you ever have commenters paste an entire URL into their comment as plain text, rather than putting it in <a href="..."> tags? Or if they do use the a tags, do they still use the URL as the link text?

Sure looks ugly when people do that. Here’s a little plugin to replace URLs that occur in comments with [link]. We don’t strip the URL–the word [link] will be clickable–we just make the comment prettier. Enjoy:

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: KB Comment Links
Plugin URI: http://adambrown.info/b/widgets/tag/kb-comment-links/
Description: Replaces long, ugly URLs in comments with a short link
Author: Adam R. Brown
Version: 1.0
Author URI: http://adambrown.info/
*/

function kbcl_comment_filter($comment){
	if (false===strpos($comment,'http://'))
		return $comment;
	// links in <a> tags using URL as link text
	$comment = preg_replace('~(<a[^>]+>)(http://\S+)</a>~', '$1[link]</a>', $comment);
	// links that aren't in <a> tags
	$comment = preg_replace('~(\s|<p>)(http://\S+)(\s|</p>)~', '$1<a href="$2">[link]</a>$3', $comment);
	return $comment;
}
add_filter('comment_text', 'kbcl_comment_filter');

?>

Introducing KB New Posts, a plugin inspired by this support thread .

What it does

When somebody visits your blog’s main page, the plugin sets a cookie recording the time of their visit. If they come back a few days later, and you’ve written a new post (or many new posts) since their last visit, the plugin adds a CSS class to the new posts so that you can highlight them, or add a background image, or change the font size, or whatever you want to do to new posts. (Want to read the rest of this post? Click here.)

If you download KB Easy PicasaWeb v1.2 , you’ll find several new display options. These updates come in response to user feedback.

• Choose whether to link images to their fullsize version at PicasaWeb
• Display photos in one or two columns
• Choose whether to display captions
• Choose whether to link album titles to PicasaWeb

Enjoy.

I updated the WordPress Hooks Database today. Now, it gives options to view deprecated hooks by version. It also keeps track of hook renamings, so that if a hook was renamed, it will tell you that rather than just claiming that the hook was deleted.

WP Hooks Directory

I just uploaded v1.11, a quick update to the plugin. It doesn’t include all the feature requests folks have made, but it does make the plugin more robust on servers that have allow_url_fopen turned off. If you got a warning like Warning: file_get_contents(): URL file-access is disabled... the first time you tried this plugin, try v1.11 and see if it goes away. (If not, I’ve updated the FAQ with some tips. Look under the “It doesn’t work” section.)

Download • FAQ