Today’s Firefox plugin of the day : ForecastFox, which now sits in the status bar and reminds me that there is such a thing as weather going on outside my basement office.

I’m getting increasingly bored with coming back from pubs stinking of cigarettes, without having any of the pleasure of smoking them in the first place. I realise there’s a few options - start smoking, don’t go to pubs, or try and find the few pubs that have good enough air-con to whisk away the odours created by those of low moral conscience.

Or, soon, I’ll be going to Wetherspoons more often. Adam has said that he would like to see smoking banned in pubs, but not by government regulation - the choice should be for the pubs themselves to decide. So pre-empting government regulation is only a half-way house, but it sounds good to me.

Well, a few minutes playing around with Wordpress plugins, and I’m a happy bunny. Installing plugins for this weblog is a breeze - I guess I’ve just had too much experience with nasty nasty php programs (cough phpBB), which was putting me off sorting out the spam issue with this one.

So I’ve now got plugins to automatically put trackbacks and pingbacks in the moderation queue, and I’ll see whether they work the next time I get attacked. I’ve never had a proper trackback or pingback before, so I’m not that bothered about them. I’ve also added a general comment moderation thing, which looks quite cool. It’s the Spam Karma plugin, and it rates comments by all kind of options, letting good ones through, giving dubious ones a further test, and just killing the dodgy posts outright.

I tried testing it, only to find that the plugin is more clever than I am. First off, it would let me post whatever I wanted, since I was logged in as the administrator. Then when I logged out, and tried using the text of one of the spam comments from yesterday, it successfully intercepted the comment, told me to piss of, and automatically blacklisted my IP and the URL I had given. Oops! So don’t try testing my comment moderation system, it works quite well…

I’ve had around 700 spam comments and now trackbacks since the start of the holidays, and I’m fed up with it. For the moment all comments are being moderated until I get round to putting in place one of these anti-spam things like Mike has. The trackback spam is a new one today, but since everyone running WordPress is being hammered, I expect the new versions to be able to deal with it better.

And I feel ill, which isn’t helping.