Our recent upgrade of WordPress has brought with it many bits of nifty goodness. The one (and so far only) downside is that scheduled entries are broken. I can schedule them fine, but they never show up. The “count down” just goes right on by and then starts counting back up. Foo.

Some poking around in the forums suggests that the problem isn’t unknown, but is rare, and the little bits of discussion frankly didn’t make much sense. So, for the moment, I ain’t gonna bother.

As part of the upgrade I turned on the Akismet anti-spam plugin that now comes standard with WordPress, and man is it wonderful. In the few days that it’s been working, it’s (correctly) identified roughly 100 spam messages per day, keeping them out of my mail spool and management work flow on the blog.

Unfortunately I only half turned off the old CAPTCHA plugin. The plugin code was all turned off, but the formatting of the comment submission area still had a (now empty) box for the authentication image, and the box for you to type in the code (which you couldn’t see). It turns out that you could post a comment ignoring the code, but that was hardly obvious from a user standpoint, and happily one of our regular readers pointed out the problem.

I believe the problem is now fixed, and I would be grateful if a few folks would post a randomoid comment on this post just to verify that all is now well.

If the Akismet tool continues to do such a good job, I’d like to turn off moderation altogether so that people’s comments will appear immediately. Stay tuned!

Thanks to freezelight for the cool photo.

I just finished a long overdue upgrade of all the UnhinderedByTalent.com WordPress installs, so everyone’s all spiffy and shiny now.

The photo (from the Green Fair where we met the River Nene folks) is just there to fool you into believing this post actually had content :-).

Someone asked over on Flickr if I knew who this was. I didn’t have a clue who he was until the question prompted me to do my homework. You’re looking at Bob Breeks, the guitarist and singer for The Bad Terrorists, a band here in Colchester. They were played with (I’m assuming) reduced amplification at the fair, so you really couldn’t hear the vocals for crap, but the playing was quite fun.