Adam R Brown

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.

Recently, Scott Allen released WP SpamFree , claiming that it “virtually eliminates automated comment spam from bots.” It does so by using JavaScript to send a cookie to the commenter’s browser. Since most bots ignore javascript, Scott reasons, then this should eliminate automated comment spam.

There’s only one problem: The plugin is way, way, waaay too easy to defeat.

(Want to read the rest of this post? Click here.)

I’ve just installed the spankin’-new wavatars plugin, and it has my vote for plugin of the year.

Wavatars are an extension of the gravatars concept, but a dramatic improvement. So here’s the backstory:

In the bad old days, if you wanted to put an image (an “avatar”) next to your comments on somebody’s blog, you would have to upload your avatar to that blog. You would have to repeat this process at every blog you visited. As such, avatars were a major pain in the rear, so nobody supported them on their blog.

Then, gravatars came along, with a simple concept: When people comment at your blog, they leave an email address–why not convert that email address into an image? That way, you can just upload an image of your choice to gravatar.com , and whenever you post a comment on any gravatar-enabled blog (like this one), your avatar will show up automatically.

Gravatars were an awesome concept, and they’ve been slowly catching on for the past several months, especially since automattic bought gravatar.com . If you look through comments on this blog, you’ll see that between 25% and 50% of my commenters have created gravatars for themselves.

But turn that math around, and you’ll see the problem with gravatars: Between 50% and 75% of my commenters don’t have a gravatar. So instead of a little picture next to their comment, they get the default gravatar, which is booorrring.

Solution: Wavatars. If you don’t have a gravatar, no problem: The wavatars plugin will convert your email address into a randomly generated avatar. It’s easy to tell wavatars from gravatars on my blog–the wavatars are the cartoony-looking polygons with faces.

What I want to see next: I’d like to see the gravatar folks purchase the wavatars concept and implement it by default. That way, we would need only gravatars and not need the wavatars plugin. This has several benefits. These are the biggies:

• Gravatars get served from gravatar.com’s fast servers; wavatars, on the other hand, use up my server’s bandwidth
• Gravatars are cached on gravatar.com’s servers; wavatars get cached on my server, using up my storage space

Plus, if wavatars were offered by gravatar.com, they could have several different “theme” packs of wavatars that website owners could choose from.

So, how about it, gravatar.com?