Laurabelle’s Blog

Since I installed Opera a few days ago, I've been exploring it and especially comparing it with Firefox. Here's my tally of pros and cons:

I've used Opera in the past, but I was not completely won over. Partly it was the advertising; mostly I was just happy with whatever I was using at the time (probably Firefox in one of its previous incarnations as Phoenix or Firebird). Now that Opera is free-as-in-beer, I've decided to give The Other Proprietary Browser [...]

I must be a troublemaker. I have run into roughly the same problem with posts_nav_link() as I did with the_content().
Unfortunately, my hackery didn’t work quite as well this time. My markup validates now, but I’ve got a bogus next-link that doesn’t belong there (when there actually isn’t a next page to go to). I will [...]

Warning: WordPress rant coming.
How in the bloody effing heck am I supposed to generate valid code with the more_text_link argument to the the_content template tag?
What I had been doing was this:

the_content (’<div class=”morelink”><p>Continue reading ‘ . the_title (’<q>’, ‘</q>’, FALSE) . ‘</p></div>’);

However, that gave me output HTML like this:

<a href=”http://blog.niceperson.org/2005/09/04/heather-park-revisited/#more-441″>
<div class=”morelink”><p> Continue reading <q>Heather Park [...]

Y'all are probably taken aback when my page styles shift all of a sudden. So am I, even though I programmed the whole thing. The styles are supposed to be seasonal, but it seems like just as soon as I get used to one color scheme, it changes on me. The holiday themes are especially [...]

Well, I knew it was going to happen eventually. The Trackback spammers have finally found my weblog. They left fifteen little spams over the last three days, and I found it rather ironic that my last entry about fighting spam got more spam-pings than any other. This minor deluge of spam has at last prodded [...]

A couple of weeks ago I was trying and not succeeding in blocking external referrers from my CGI directory. I got my sysadmin to enable .htaccess and Mod_Rewrite for that document root, after which I declared success, but actually I never actually tested my rules. (Oops.) I was trying not to use Mod_Rewrite (since it's fairly [...]

This weekend I noticed that Googlebot had started indexing the URLs of my newly renamed comment script, even though it wasn't actually crawling the pages. Since comment and trackback spammers don't need the content of the page, just the URL, this was not enough for me. I wrote to Google to find out what could [...]

I think Phil Ringnalda is right about nofollow: It only actually stops you from getting spammed when the ocean starts boiling, after we've forced every single person with weblog comments to implement it, and driven the unbelievers off the web. Until then, the spammers and the search engines are going to keep working you from both [...]

Like Gloria Craney, I find myself obsessed by referrer spam. For the past few days I've often kept half an eye on my access logs, trying to make sure all requests get 301'd. I tweaked my .htaccess rules. I renamed mt-comments.cgi and mt-tb.cgi. I waged a defensive war. Along with renaming mt-comments.cgi, I also added [...]