You need to deactivate all your existing plugins before you upgrade, but thankfully I’ve always taken pains to ensure that any code in the templates for displaying output from plugins tests whether that plugin is activated first, so nothing broke. Also, the theme I’m currently using luckily seems to work flawlessly in 2.0 as well.

A lot of the plugins had to be upgraded, and some I haven’t found a replacement for yet. Anyone know of a good character map plugin? What about a spell checker (that doesn’t require pspell to be installed on the server)?

So what’s left to do? Ultimate Tag Warrior still hasn’t been upgraded, as I’m out of energy for tonight and I suspect that will be a huge effort. (Sorry for the lack of tag functionality for the time being!) Then after that? Time to stop using Mint 1.14…

I’ve decided that this year I’m going to focus less on the long-written, over-edited essays I’ve been writing and more on just letting you know what I’ve been up to and what interesting things I’ve come across recently.

In the mean time though, I’m going to post a serious of ‘Recent Adventures in…’ posts to catch up with the months of blogging that I should have got around to earlier. So, without further ado…

Digital Kaleidoscope readers who have posted a comment will know that I have a system in place where your email address must be verified before comments get posted. Hopefully you only found it a small inconvenience since you only ever need to do it once (per email address).

What Does It Do? Why?

The benefit of this system is that it helps stops comment spam from appearing on the site. When a comment is posted here, an email is sent out to the email address given and you need to visit a link in the email before the comment will show up here on the blog. In the meantime, the comment sits in a moderation queue.

Spammers (whether real people or automated) who post comment spam usually use fake email addresses and thus those comments will remain in the moderation queue and not show up at all. I regularly check the moderation queue to delete those comments (or approve other comments). This is still a bit of a hassle as it requires work from me, but at least it means readers never have to see unsightly and often obscene comment spam.

There is also a chance of them figuring out their spam comments aren’t posting, so they’ll stop trying to post comment spam here in the future. I’m sure this is just wishful thinking, but hey it’s good to be optimistic!

How To Set It Up

Today, I received a message from a reader who left a comment on my blog earlier this year, wanting to know how to implement something similar on his blog. I’ve decided to post a guide here so that anybody who is interested in doing this can learn from my experiences.

First of all, I’ve only done this with WordPress 1.5.2, the blogging software that powers this blog. So if you’re using another tool to run your blog, you’ll need to look elsewhere for help. Sorry!

1. What makes all this possible is the wonderful plugin for WordPress over at skippy.net called Comment Authorization. (Thanks, Skippy!) Download this plugin.
2. Follow the instructions provided to install it, remembering to change the $seed variable in both the PHP files and to put moderation.php in the root directory of your blog — not the plugin directory. Don’t forget to activate the plugin!
3. Next, you’ll want to change a few settings for your blog.
   • Login to your WordPress installation and go to Options for Discussions.
   • Under the group ‘Before a comment appears’, make sure ‘Comment author must fill out name and e-mail’ is checked. WordPress will then check to make sure people supply a valid email address when entering a comment (or they’ll never get the email asking them to verify it).
   • Also check the option ‘Comment author must have a previously approved comment’. This will put in the moderation queue any comments from email address not previously manually approved or verified (and for a verification email to be sent out), like what current happens here.
   • If you want to be a bit more paranoid, you can also check the first option, ‘An administrator must approve the comment (regardless of any matches below)’. This will put all comments to the moderation queue every single time. This has the advantage of making sure you can’t just put in someone else’s email address that has already been verified, but increases the inconvenience for your readers dramatically. When Digital Kaleidoscope first launched, enough people complained that I had to scrap this immediately. But hey, it’s still used by sites like Engadget. I guess if your readership wants to post comments badly enough, they’ll live with it.
4. If you can be bothered, you can customise the confirmation pages that are displayed when you post a comment or verify your email address. The generic ones are… very generic! To do this, edit moderation.php again.
   • Find the section from: <head> to </head> and replace all of it with your header code (e.g. <?php get_header(); ?>).
   • Next, find all the echo statements in the block containing <h2>Thank you for your comment!</h2>. This section contains what’s shown when a user submits a comment that needs to be moderated. I suggest you explain to your readers what’s happening, why and what they need to do about it.
   • To change the message shown when an email address is successfully verified, replace the section between // mom always taught me to say thank you and } elseif (($md5 == $x) && ($reject)) {.
   • The section following that shows when the person responding to the email chooses to delete the comment, up to } else {.
   • The remaining section shows when some sort of error has been encountered. You can remind your readers that genuine comments can be manually approved by moderators. Edit up to } ?>
5. Lastly, you can also edit the emails that are sent out to people posting comments. The template is stored in commentauth.php in the plugin directory. Edit the variable $message to customise the emails that get sent out.

That should be all there is to it! Please let me know if you have any problems or if I’ve got something wrong. You can always check to see if any issues you’re having have been discussed over at skippy.net.

I’ve decided to use WordPress to power my blog as it appears to be powerful, yet simple to use. I’ve also heard that it’s quite fast and doesn’t require rebuilding of pages, which sounds great. The theme you’re seeing is a modified version of Blix by Sebastian Schmieg. Any comments about the layout?

I’ve only just scratched the surface with all the plugins available for WordPress, but at the moment I’m using Ultimate Tag Warrior to feed my metadata obsession, Comment Authorization to check people are who they say they are and Smart Update Pinger to only send out pings when I post new entries (not when I edit). Anyone have any suggestions on some ‘must-have’ plugins for WordPress?

Thus far, I’m very happy with WordPress and the plug-ins - it’s been extremely easy to customise everything and keep it all looking coherent. Hopefully it stays that way, but I’ll certainly keep you posted with my experiences.

Now, how about a guessing game? There are two background images in the title (apart from my cheesy face) - the orange one on the left side, and the green one on the right. For the first person to correctly guess what the images show, I’ll uh… send out a packet of your favourite Starbursts! (To guess, just leave a comment.)

If you’ve stumbled across this, then the secret is out. Yes, it’s true! After all these years, I’ve finally found the motivation to set up a blog on my site and start blogging!

First, a bit of background (for those of you who don’t already know me). I’m a student currently studying Digital Media at the University of New South Wales College of Fine Arts in Sydney, Australia. My interests in this field include both web authoring and film production.

When I’m not slaving away with uni work (pretty often actually - my procrastination skills are unrivalled!), I help keep things together at the COFA Students’ Association, where I’m the Vice-President/Education Officer this year.

In my other free time I’m usually lusting after the latest gadgets, whining about transport in Sydney, watching movies or eating out. (If you’re not already familiar with who I am, then that should give some clues.) Oh, and I sleep a lot!

I’ll be writing about the whole gamut of things that I encounter in my brilliant and mind-bogglingly exciting existence, but it’s likely I’ll often end up focusing on one of the above-mentioned topics.

If any of that sounds remotely interesting to you, then welcome aboard! Enjoy Digital Kaleidoscope.