Adam R Brown

Prior to indexing WP 2.8, I made a long-overdue fix to my WordPress hooks index. It now indexes hooks called by do_action_ref_array(), something that earlier versions omitted.

As a result, you may find that some hooks that were defined prior to 2.8 show up in my site as being added in 2.8. Well, now you know why. When I have more time, I’ll go back and re-index all the earlier versions to correct this.

The official WordPress documentation lists just over 380 hooks. Yet according to my hooks directory, that’s fewer than half of the 800 action and filter hooks included in WordPress 2.7 Sheesh. (Click the chart to enlarge.)

v1.2.2 has some minor fixes:

First: Some cosmetic changes to make the admin screen look a little better in WP 2.7.

Second: The plugin now recognizes any google domain (e.g. google.dk, google.co.uk), not just google.com. You complain, I listen. Eventually.

This blog is mainly for updates about my WordPress plugins–which, frankly, haven’t had much attention from me lately, since I’m frantically trying to finish my dissertation.

But in the meantime, check out AbstractPolitics.com , summarizing the latest research from leading political scientists in an easy-to-read digest.

Political scientists aren’t pundits; that is, the point of their research isn’t generally to predict whether Obama or Clinton will be the nominee. Instead, they try to identify broader patterns in politics.

For example, why do some Congressional races attract strong challengers, while others attract no challenger at all (or a political novice)? It matters .

And why is it that some people can speak of the “worthy opposition,” while others assume that if you belong to the opposing party you must be an idiot? It turns out that TV has something to do with it .

How about turnout? Why is it so low? Is there anything we could do to improve it? Well, yes. But it’s a brutal method .

Check it out. Have fun.

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 4:41 pm.

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');

?>