No more All-time stats on Feedburner?

“FeedBurner Quietly Kills All-Time RSS Feed Stats [1],” posted LouisGray.com. LouisGray.com posted on Feb. 18, 14:10 (Time Zone unknown) and Weblog Tools Collection posted same topic [2] on Feb. 20, 5:15 (+08:00).

As of Feb. 20, 08:37 (+08:00), there is an option for all-time stat for LLBB feed on Feedburner. However there is no official announcement for this incident in this thread [3] on Feedburner forums, mentioned [1], about this is an problem or a internal plan, and if this has been resolved if it really was a problem. Neither is a blog post on FeedBurner blog, it has no update since last incident with Feedfetcher [4].

Update:
Matt said at Feb 19, 2008 7:09 pm (-06:00) [3]:

It’s back! sorry for the trouble. A misconfiguration in a recent code push pulled this option and we’ve since completely restored it.

References

1. FeedBurner Quietly Kills All-Time RSS Feed Stats
2. FeedBurner: No more all time feed stats
3. “All time” option disappeared from Show stats menu
4. Saturday Subscriber Count Drop?

“Say it again” by Marié Digby and 400th post

Three things:

1. This good song “Say it again”.
2. This post is my 400^th post on this blog.
3. And I just paid US$9.97 + $9 (international shipping) for her album Unfold.

I was thinking what would be my 400^th post, never thought it would cost me some money. I think this will be worth. I had never watched her videos before, just saw her video showing on Videos being watched right now… hours ago.

Shouldn’t check YouTube so frequently, and of course Flickr. They are the most evilest websites! 😈

There is a note from my order:

Pre-Order Item Shipping Date Reminder
Please note that your order contains a Pre-order item that does not release until (04/08/2008). Your pre-order will ship as the product(s) arrives in our shipping facility and your card will be charged when your order is prepared for shipment.

No idea how long I have to wait and I don’t know what songs are in this album… must be the drink…

Using WordPress Securely

This post is written for blog readers and blog owners. I am not an expert, only a user. If you find any mistakes or you have some ideas, please feel free to tell me.

For blog readers

Do not register

Most of blogs allow non-member to comment, so I can see no reason to register.

How many of blogs you know which support HTTP over SSL? Without the support, your password or cookie (hash-hash-hash of password) are in clear text. Your classmates, roommates, colleagues, unencrypted wifi co-users, bother(s), sister(s) (don’t underestimate females), boy/girl friend(s) (plural is possible, nowadays) or someone who helps pass the notes probably are enjoying them.

It’s easy to know whether the blog web server support SSL or not: a) check address bar, if you read https, then that’s it; or b) read the HTML source, check the login form’s action attribute, if there is https in it, then that’s it.

However, the SSL support may only be used in logging process by default meaning your cookie may still be sent insecurely afterwards (and cookie need to be specified with secure attribute). Although, you can forcedly use https to visit throughout whole session, but the unauthenticated content may not be loaded.

If someone gets your cookies, they can log in and do whatever you can, like changing password (I wonder why WordPress doesn’t request your old password?) No need to mention what if they get your password.

Do you know the blog owner?

How do you know s/he didn’t modify WordPress core file? (actually, that only need one line or two, then s/he can get your password while you are registering/logging in)

If you really need to register, please must use a unique and special password for each blog.

Once again, password matters

You probably think even someone gets the hash of my password is OK, at least they don’t have my password in clear text. That’s completely true, if you use lazy password! I personally believe there are some people can recite md5 or sha1 hash of passwords “123” or “abc” from their memory. Yes, some lazy passwords are more complicated than that. But I also heard there is a DVD stores hashes of strings.

For blog owners

Do not allow blog reader to register

It’s time to bring my Blogroll back

Google Code just released Social Graph, that uses XFN and FOAF. WordPress supports XFN for a long time. Months ago, I removed blogroll, I thought that was a waste of my bandwidth. Well, it’s the perfect time to bring it back since Google mentioned. I bet you that we will see some uses of this new API in next week on Digg or somewhere else.

Related Link: URLs are People, Too

A kind spammer?

If you don’t wish to receive such messages, please send your domain name to jj([at])dedik_dot_biz to remove your site from our list.

Although I 100% believe that email is fake or that would be additional bonus to the spammer if I was stupid enough to send a mail. Why the email address not in clear text? Spammer is afraid of spammers, too?

Hello! I’m Googlebot

I got a funny comment: “Hello! I’m Googlebot.”

Really? Oh! I see, and I’m your father. You are grounded. Go back to your room! NOW!

Spam Filter Free Day?

This sounds interesting. Currently, I use Akismet + comment approval + .htaccess blocking. I will try to turn off Akismet and remove blocking in .htaccess, but I won’t let comment shows up without my approval. I can also test how good Akismet can re-check comments if they are spams or not.

Block, block and block WordPress spammers

Sadly, blocking seems to be the only way we can stop them ruining our blogs. Akismet works perfectly, it blocks 100+ spams a day. However the bandwidth is wasted, although the amount is not much.

I tried to find out who requested wp-comments-post.php more than 5 times before 18th of November. The results more than 100 IPs, I denied them in .htaccess. Less than 7 days, the number of last 15 days spams dropped from 1500+ to 850. If there is a WordPress plugin can use Akismet’s data to block, that would be more efficient. Yes, this could be my next WordPress plugin.

Updated at 12/10: I have unblocked those IPs for few days, interesting thing is the Akismet blocking count didn’t increase. Now is around 100. I wonder if spammer’s programs record were they blocked?

歷史上的今天 WordPress 外掛

這個頁面是簡單的中文介紹，詳細資訊請參考外掛主站（英文）。若有使用上的問題，歡迎於此處發問。

簡介

這個外掛的靈感是來自於維基百科的首頁。它能列出同今日日期的歷史文章或是同特定文章的發表日期的文章。

特點

• 完全自訂 HTML
• 支援模組
• 自動列出 — 不需添加程式碼
• 在 Dashboard 中列出七日內舊文
• 外掛設定頁面
• 搜尋表單 — 以不完整的日期進行搜索
• 完全移除外掛
• 多國語系
  • bg_BG — 保加利亞語
  • zh_TW — 繁體中文

自動地將「歷史上的今天」列表列於文章末。也能以模組方式呈現或是在需要的地方呼叫 OTDList()。

參考範例

畫面截圖。

下載

請至 WordPress Extend 下載最新版本。

Internationalizing WordPress Plugin

I just finished writing this article. It is only available in OpenOffice Text and PDF and licensed under GNU Free Documentation License.

It describes how I internationalizing my WordPress plugin, what tools I used, the work flow, etc.