How about this comment:

The Cheapest VIAGRA Online-Drugstore. Always Special Offers in Our Online-Drugstore. Click on the THIS LINK or the images below to proceed to the original pharmacy shop.

http://centraltds.com/top.jpg

http://centraltds.com/viagra.png

It’s so obviously span, that no one will bother clicking. It’s so obviously spam, that it’s most likely to get filtered or moderated. It won’t help you with search engines, because WordPress adds rel="nofollow" to links in the comments. If it skips spam catchers and manual moderation, the site is probably so trashy that nobody visits it anyways.

Yes, I’m aware that they’re other blogging platforms besides WordPress, and then you’ve got the forums. But most blogs run WordPress or other secure systems that will add the nofollow attribute. As for forums, how many forums are open for guest posting without any form of validation?

So please someone explain why anyone waste their time writing and operating these spam spiders? Does it repay their efforts? Oh, and just this last question: Wouldn’t you hate yourself if you were a spammer?

As someone that has more ideas than he can handle, I often find myself building a site overnight with a $0 budget. Well, really a $7 budget cause you need a domain. 1 thing that disturbed me is that you can’t even begin to look semi professional if you don’t have a logo. In the past, I’ve used the Web 2.0 logo generator which is more of a parody then an actual tool.

I’ve seen tools that allowed you to create logos using images and text, changing fonts and colors. With these tools, you can get a pretty decent logo for a few bucks if you have a bit of a sense for design. The problem was that when you’re working on a $7 budget, even $49 is too much sometimes.

Today, I stubbled upon a site that offers that very same service, for free. LogoEase is an easy to use tool, with enough flexibility to allow your logo to look cool and unique. I’ve used this service once now, (for a site that I will hopefully present proudly in a month or two) and will definitely use it in the future. Thanks guys.

The Problems:

1. Install
Sine the beginning there have been problems installing this plugin on certain server setups, and since WordPress 2.5, it stopped working. This is now fixed. A huge thank you to Mark for fixing this.

2. File structure and SVN
WPPA relies on a specific file structure to work properly. For example, if you change the name of the directory that the plugin files are in, it won’t work.

A few problems raised when I uploaded my plugin to the WordPress plugin directory. While I do consider myself tech savy, I’ve been slow in picking up how to properly use SVN, which resulted in many file structure issues, such as the plugin files being placed in a sub directory named ‘trunk’. I’m happy to announce that I’m picking up on it, and everything is placed properly now, so it should work properly.

3. Security issues
Back in version 1.0, there was a security veunerability that enabled SQL injection attacks. This has been fixed months ago, though security notices are still floating around the web. The current version, and any version above 1.1 is perfectly safe.

Support

While I’d love to help everyone with their issues with the plugin, I simply do not have the time. While I do try to answer support questions sent by email, I can’t guarantee a reply.

Commenting on the plugin page may be confusing, because that the comments are not threaded.

That is why I set up a support forum for dealing with WPPA related support issues. It’s still under development, and may be messy, but feel free to use it.

Anyways, feel free to give it a try. I hope you like it.

Back then, there was nothing good. So I created a super simple script. I called it WPPA (WordPress Photo Album). It was just a template page, but it enabled showing albums uploaded via ftp with the right naming conventions. While it worked for me, it was quite a deal uploading photos. Other people seemed to have issues with it’s very complicated way of working. So I sat down and wrote what was later known as WPPA 1.0

After releasing WPPA 1.0, I registered to have it on the official WordPress Plugin Directory. For some reason I don’t remember, I called it WP Photo Album and not WPPA. Here was the first issue, as I would find out later.

I tired uploading my files with SVN, but as geeky as I am, I’m probably not enough of a nerd. After a few tries I gave up, Till a few months ago. At my seventeenth try, I was successful. well, semi successful. I got the files up, but apparently didn’t do it properly, and it was appearing inside a double directory and causing naming convention issues. Also, I forgot that some part of my plugin relies on calling the exact directory structure. Hence all the issues that people have been having when downloading a zipped directory called ‘wp-photo-album’ instead of ‘wppa’ As much as I looked around, I didn’t realize what the problem was, because in my installation the directory was always named ‘wppa’.

For all those that emailed me. Sorry about not replying, I didn’t know the answer myself, and didn’t have the time to check it out. Thank you

Recently, I’d outlined plans for a major WPPA rewrite. Added features, more stability, better integration with WordPress etc. And then came the sneak peeks from WordPress 2.5. Apparently,
It had an album feature built right in. So why should I bother with my plugin when WordPress has it built it.

Initially, I started writing this post to explain why I would not be upgrading WPPA for 2.5, but looking over the comments, everyone seems to want it, So I’ll do the fixes required to get it rolling with WordPress 2.5, though I will wait with the major update and see how things go with the built in WordPress feature.

So for now, thanks to the help of Greg Tangey, Alexei, nycsummer and all the commenters who helped with their suggestions, WPP 1.2 apparently works with 2.5, But I will be holding future development till I see how the built in WordPress feature works.

Download it here.

Yes, You!

Yesterday I noticed that 41.7% of you are still using Internet Explorer. And this is a blog written by a Mac fanatic, and which most probably cannot be understood by the common non techie english speaker. So you don’t have excuses like “that’s what my computer came with and installing software is too overwhelming for me”.

If you are using Internet Explorer, and you actually gave a thought to what browser you are using, you will probably argue in favor of features, comfort, or stability. You are missing the point, Completely.

The main technologies that run the web, (X)HTML and CSS, are not utilized to their full potential due to a lack of support from the most popular web browser, Internet Explorer. By using Internet explorer, you are helping in perpetuating the web, and making advancement more difficult.

Not to mention from my perspective (and any web developers perspective) the need to find hack to make sites look normal in a non standards compliant browser ads another %50 work time and expense, which can be used for better things.

If you want to know more about why IE is bad for you, check out Kill IE

To end this with good news, I just wand to link to this article that states that in Europe, Firefox has a 28% market share. Soon enough the world will catch up. Let’s hope.

Then a day later, my RSS notifier beeped. One of the new articles was about a new recipe search engine, with features exactly like I described above, and implementation beyond perfect. it’s called SuperCook”

Yes, I can always be no. 2, or if I work hard enough, beat them and become #1. But I’m not going to waste my time on something that was already done, especially when it was done so nicely. Kudos!

Now here comes the scary part. What if SuperCook would be launched only after I spent hundreds of hours, or worse, thousands of dollars in my new project? As far as I know, there’s no answer.

When choosing domain names do you get a keyword rich or more brandable name?

Basically, the days you can have a domain which is both nice and also actually has the a keyword or two in it are long gone.

But look at the real world: most brands, branded for people, do not contain any ‘keyword’ reference. Nissan doesn’t have the word ‘Car’ in it (although General Motors has ‘motor’) Ikea doesn’t have ‘furniture’ and even Coca-Cola doesn’t have ‘sugary brown soft drink’ in it.

On the other hand, in the web media, search engines give a strong weight to domain names containing keywords, so allot of sites want keyword-rich domains.

Look at your target traffic:
If you’re building another generic site, and you plan on basing most of your traffic on one-time incoming links from search engines, then yes, get yourself a keyword rich domain. But if you plan on actually building a site that will become a brand, and people will come back and recommend your site to friends, then a more brnadable domain is better.

Of course, if you’re not going to be the next web 2.1 thing, keep the name fairly simple, because you need to be really good for people to struggle with a crazy domain such as del.icio.us.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of Facebook. But the fact is that in most scenarios, I cant read certain info without adding an application, and I can’t add an application without inviting friends, and I can’t accept an invitation to add an application without adding icons and banners to my already cluttered profile.

In my opinion, all this forced noise takes allot away from the subtlety of normal socializing. And i find in quite harassing that I can’t get results for a quiz i spent a few minutes taking, without being forced to harass 5 of my friends.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the social aspects of social networks, and I invite friends to apps I find cool, and send them messages and wall posts. But being forced to send them requests every time I do something is a bit to much. If I like something, I love sharing it. But prompting me to invite all my friends and install 72 icons before I even try out the app is slightly outrageous.

While not the biggest believer in the traditional form of microblogging, such as twitter, (Face it, nobody really cares what you’re doing) I think that the format is excellent for group communication. That’s exactly what Prologue is. While not exactly a blog theme, Prologue stretches WordPress into the right mold in a way only WordPress can be stretched.

Prologue allows users with posting ability, to post short messages to the board straight from the home page. Mesages can be viewed for the whole group, or by author or tag.

Prologue is available as open source (GPL) via svn. I haven’t figured out how to use the whole SVN thing, and I’m too lazy to copy the files one by one, but I’m dying to try it out, and I will once I figure SVN out.