Jfoucher.com - A la voile sur la toile

Ok, I finally got the captcha working. Wasn't that hard, but it was more the concept that was kind of eluding me... Where to send the data from the image and from the text box, how to compare them and so on.

I like the way my little script works, because if for whatever reason the commenter didn't fil the captcha field properly, they wil be sent an email containing a link allowing them to publish their own comment. I'm wondering if spammers would learn how to make their robots do that... Anyway, doesn't matter because I haven't had a *single* comment spam since I changed over from wordpress yesterday. Wait and see, I guess.

So this is it. I've been working on it for the past few days, and I'm quite happy with what I've got now. Of course, I'm sure many of you will not feel that way. I myself feel somewhat like having betrayed Wordpress...

Anyway, the move is made now and I don't think there's any going back. I feel such a freedom from being able to hack the code in any (bad) way I want, it was like a breath of fresh air for me.

There are still a lot of features left to implement, like pingback (that one is a toughie!), a proper calendar, ideally using XMLHttpRequests, comments feeds, Atom feeds and a few more things. I would like some suggestions from readers as well, to see what can be done.

For now though, trackbacks should be functionnal (feel free to test it) and the RSS feed for articles is available. I reused some code from a few wordpress plugins, and I would like to give credit to Michel Fortin for Markdown, to Phu Ly & Dunstan Orchard & Michael Heilemann for Dunstan's Time of day and Time Since, to Daryl for his Amazon wishlist plugin, although I don't know if that will stay there for long, and to Bitflux for the LiveSearch functions. Thanks go out to all of them.

The Wordpress plugins are of course still available at the old URLs, although a few of them (especially the style_chooser, since the advent of themes) are now obsolete.

Anyway, hope you like the new design and all... I am waiting for your suggestions, bug reports, rants, and so on.

Since the release of Wordpress 1.5, I've been wondering what to do with this blog.

I looked at upgrading, but that would mean a few days of work to have the blog the way I like it again. I hacked WP 1.2 so much that it would be very difficult to just upgrade and expect everything to go smoothly. Also I asked to myself: do I really need a blogging tool to do coffee as well as allow me to publish stuff easily. I guess I mean that Wordpress now has many more features than I have use for, and I don't really see the point of it.

So there you have it, I decided to design a blogging software from scratch. Yes, it takes some work, but maybe not much more as what I put in to hack wordpress. It's a great learning exercise anyway...

I just got myself one of the longest email addresses of the world, over at ABC... Whatever(via)!

I just couldn't stop laughing when I saw their 'sales pitch' on the home page, so I just had to open an account with them.

So, feel free to write me at jfoucher@abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com

Ooops, looks like that address is too big for my layout! ;)

Thanks to DrDave and his spamkarma plugin, I have been able to re-open comments without fear of having to moderate an insane number of them. Wordpress is quite good, but it still takes time to delete hundreds of comments.

So there you go, have fun writing real comments!

I will see quite quickly if this plugin is as good as it's supposed to be. In the meantime don't hesitate to send me a message if your comment is deleted.