Jfoucher.com - A la voile sur la toile

Ok, my blog is back online after about a year in the meanders of my hard drive. Most of the stuff here is probably out of date, such as the Worpdress plugins, most of them written for pre-1.5 versions. As I don't use WP anymore, I'm unlikely to come up with more stuff, unless I decide to come back to it at some stage.

I think I will now write about other things, what exacly I'm not sure yet...

In case you're using a syndication software that can read RSS2.0 feeds, and if you don't like the layout of this blog I offer syndication feeds for its content as well as the comments posted on the posts. You can get feeds for the comments on individual posts from the link at the top of the comments section:

The main feeds are:

The entries rss feed

and the comments feed.

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.

As you've probably seen on this blog if you've been here in the last few days, I have been subject to a case of referrer spam, made very useful by my use of the Referrer plugin.

I managed to delete most of these references to web sites of dubious content by going through the StatTraq table and eliminating all references to the particular IP address using these methods. That solved the immediate problem, but it could come back tomorrow and do the same thing. So I banned that IP address from submitting it's referrers to StatTraq. This was fairly easy to do: just adding the following line at around line 38 in the StatTraq plugin:

 if ($ipAddress=='217.159.201.131') $referrer='';

That should do the trick for this address. To be sure it doesn't happen anymore, I also banned referrers containing some words, giving this kind of rule :

  if ($ipAddress=='217.159.201.131' || ereg("Let|me|spare|you|these",$referrer)) $referrer='';

Another method I used is modify the Post Referrers plugin to use a Google redirection to link to the referers, so that spammers can't take advantage of my pagerank, which might hopefully deter them. Or am I too optimistic?

I hope that should do the trick. Please leave a comment if you notice that kind of stuff again, just in case I didn't pay enough attention...

Alors ca y est. J'y pensais depuis un moment, en me demandant ce que c'etait que ces histoires de weblog, blogger, blog, etc... Et puis finalement j'ai décidé d'essayer, c'est une drôle de sensation de faire ca. Ca doit avoir une utilité pour certaines personnes, je suppose, mais alors pour moi, aucune... Et pourtant...

...Ca m'amuse.

De l'utilité du blog!!

• Je sais pas
• c'est rigolo
• dire des conneries et se demander ce que ceux qui les lisent pourront bien penser
• ecrire des trucs interessants (hein???)
• Partager de l'information

Visitez le site web de ma boite, ok ?

Il est l

Email: jfoucher@gmail.com

I'm yacht and web designer, and this blog represents my personal interests, which are more or less, yacht and web design. That's mostly what I'll write about here, anyway.

This site is published using Wordpress, a very good blogging tool, that I hacked through and through to get it to meet my needs exactly.

Edit : This is not true anymore, I am now using a blogging tool I hacked together myself.

I also publish here some Wordpress plugins that I wrote for my own needs, but hope can be useful for other bloggers.

I am enough of a geek to have my own bloggercode and a del.icio.us account.

You might also be interested to know that my very first web site was online in 1999.

If you like what you find here, or use one of my plugins, I would be forever grateful if you could link to this blog using this button or whatever else, for that matter!

This web site is personal and does not reflect opinions other than mine, especially not those of my employer, my family, my dog or my kangaroo.