WordPress has a cool WYSIWIG editor that lets you easily resize images by dragging the corner around. The problem is that WordPress does not actually resize the image, it just tells the browser to display it smaller. This means that the full sized image is being sent to the browser, which makes the page load slower and take up more bandwidth. Additionally, most browsers are bad at resizing images, so the images look worse than if they were properly resized.
To get around this, I wrote a WordPress plugin called ImageScaler. I am still waiting for it to be approved by WordPress for hosting, so I have hosted it myself for now. It requires GD (almost all web hosts with PHP will have GD). It should work with PHP 4, but it has only been tested on PHP 5.
Here is an example of a scaled image (click it for the original):
Download ImageScaler 0.1
Update: the plugin is now hosted by WordPress.
I have made a few small changes to JSSpamBlock, my WordPress spam detection plugin. I found that the plugin had some problems with custom WordPress themes, since some theme developers apparently don’t include the comment form hook. I have added instructions on how to call JSSpamBlock manually from the template file. I have also fixed the plugin for older versions of WordPress which did not have the wp_die() function.
The plugin is now hosted at the WordPress Plugin Directory. You can find it’s page here: JSSpamBlock 1.2. If you have a working installation, there is no reason to upgrade.
I got my first comment spam on this blog the other day. It inspired me to try an idea I got a few months back. My theory was that these bots aren’t very smart - they are programmed to post as many comments as possible on as many sites as possible, hoping that a handful of these comments would get past whatever system the blogger was using to prevent spam. I hypothesized that these bots did not execute JavaScript, and that by requiring some JavaScript to run in the browser I would be able to check with reasonable accuracy weather the comment was submitted by a human or a bot.
I wrote up a simple plugin to test the theory. I checked the logs to find that I was right. In fact, most of the bots that were spamming my blog did not even include the hidden element, which indicates that they were posting to the wp-comments-post.php file directly rather than accessing the form first. The bots that did access the form did not execute the JavaScript and therefore their comments were blocked. Since the trick only involves JavaScript, most users will not even notice the difference. Users without JavaScript simply need to follow the given instructions to copy a number to a text box in order to prove they are human. This is what users without JavaScript will see:
If you are interested in using JSSpamBlock on your own blog, here are the download links:
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