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.

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.

My plugins .

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');

?>

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. (more…)

download KB Easy PicasaWeb v1.2

• 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.

WP Hooks Directory

Download • FAQ

Get it here .

Scott Allen

WP SpamFree

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

(more…)