i summon one kim

For a long time now I’ve removed the generator meta tag from all WordPress installations I’ve setup. Mentioning WordPress is just honey for the bees. Since I removed the meta tags the amount of spam has decreased remarkably. Posts about WordPress are targeted much sooner and for much longer than other posts.

Starting with WordPress 2.4 the generator information is inserted by the core code, as opposed to the theme. This means that the meta tag will reappear even if you have removed it from your theme. However, this is actually a good change, because now you can disable the tag not only from the HTML pages generated by the theme, but also from all other formats WordPress outputs. The information is created by a couple of functions centrally instead of scattered instances through the code.

I’ve created a plugin to accomplish this: No Generator works with the trunk code from svn, and will work with 2.4 once it is released.

The Multibyte Mail plugin replaces the wp_mail() function with one that tries to encode the usual email message headers that might contain 8-bit data. It should work well with the core WordPress code as well as any plugins, unless the plugin is sending out some unusual headers.

If you receive bounces for comments on articles with 8-bit (or multibyte) characters in their title (or in the name of the comment author), this plugin should prove helpful. (more…)

I’ve released DoFollow 2.0 to go with WordPress 1.5.1. The functionality is the same as before, and the plugin can be used with (an unpatched) 1.5 as well.

The patch I had proposed to core WordPress functionality is gone: the developers prefer to keep the current nofollow implementation as is. If you had previously applied the patch, you can download a copy from Mosquito issue #1087 and reverse it (e.g. using patch -p -R).

I wanted to make this change to DoFollow, as it removes a chunk of code that was digging in some internal structures of WordPress that don’t have an exposed and documented API. Now it is much less likely that changes to DoFollow would be required for maintaining compatibility with future WordPress releases.

If you are running a recent nightly or svn checkout, you’ll probably need to upgrade to DoFollow 1.3.

The patch detection stopped working due to a change in the wp_filters data structure. I probably should not be looking inside such stuff, but there is no interface to check if a filter has been enabled. I don’t have any other clever way to see if the speedup patch has been applied. (And I don’t want to give up hope yet on the patch being committed to svn one day…)

I just deployed DoFollow on a vanilla WordPress 1.5 installation, and found out that there was a bug in the nofollow tag removal logic used with an unpatched version of the code. If the timeout was set to zero for immediate tag removal, it wouldn’t work. I’ve fixed it, so you should all upgrade to DoFollow 1.2 now.

Another WordPress plugin: Finnish Quotes

The quote marks used in Finnish differ from those used in English. The reverse curly quotes are not used at the beginning of the quotation, instead the same quotation mark is used for both the beginning and the end. This plugin will insert an additional filter after all the default wptexturize() filters to replace the reverse curly quote marks with the forward one.

Download: finquote.php