WordPress comments and numeric entity codes

15 Sep 2005

I received an email from Matt Thommes (matthom) today, regarding his comments on a post not showing up as he’d commented a few days back. I thought that was odd, because I don’t think I’ve ever moderated one of his comments — they’re perpetually relevant and on topic, or just said in good fun with taste –, and people who have posted here previously should be automatically authenticated and allowed to post.

His problem arose, he says, when trying to include certain character entities, or when posting twice on the same topic. I think I’ve misproved the twice-on-same-comment thing, but the entity concern is valid — when using numeric entity codes. (Those are the ones that take the form &#xxxx; where xxxx is a number)

There’s not much documentation on this, but it would appear it’s an inherent WordPress anti-spam procedure, lest spammers encode their entire message in this way (that would have negligible SEO benefit, but carefully crafted messages can entice users, and the ease of distribution means that the chance of someone clicking through makes it worthwhile, for them) and thus avoid detection.

In fact, the only near-official word I could find on the matter was this comment on Matt Mullenweg’s (WP lead developer) weblog, in which he states:

I do block comments with numeric entities lower than a certain number.

Whether or not this holds true for the WordPress platform as a whole, I can’t say conclusively — though it seems that’s the symptom, here.

In Matthom’s case, the concern was marking up an HTML tag for display in a comment — using entity codes < (<) and > (>).

I usually use < and > for this purpose, so I hadn’t noticed the problem until now. That works fine, but I think WordPress deleting this outright is a little extreme… Not entirely sure what the problem is here.

Off the Rails?

15 Sep 2005

josh@joah:~/Desktop/test$ rails Test      

    Rails requires Ruby version 1.8.2 (2004-12-25) or later.
    You're running 1.8.2 (2004-12-23); please upgrade to continue.

josh@joah:~/Desktop/test$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.2 (2004-12-23) [i386-linux]

I am indeed running a build released two days prior. The version number is the same. What gives?

Firefox Web Developer Extension and View Style Information

15 Sep 2005

“View Style Information” wasn’t working here for a while, and I couldn’t figure out why. Turns out it’s dependent upon the Firefox DOM Inspector being installed — and, in Ubuntu at least, that’s a separate package.

If this feature of Chris Pederick‘s excellent Web Developer Extension isn’t happening for you, try adding the firefox-dom-inspector package. If you’re not using packages, reinstall Firefox ensuring that the “Developer Tools” option is checked (more on this issue for non-packaged versions here)

Cat-man.info outage

15 Sep 2005

As a result of trying to transfer a domain between registrars in not-quite-enough time, Ben’s domain dropped off the map. Hopefully, when it’s released back onto the market next month, we’ll be able to grab it again — but, until then, you can get to his site (which, you know, hasn’t been updated for ages! Update your site, Ben!) at cat-man.joahua.com or simply via cat-man.homeip.net.

The DNS change should have propagated most places now — cat-man.homeip.net will definitely be working, even if cat-man.joahua.com isn’t yet.

Ansearch style indexing fixed

15 Sep 2005

I’ve been advised that Ansearch’s style indexing bug has been ironed out, and will wash out as the next round of indexing comes into service. Chances are this hasn’t really affected anyone, as it’s unlikely a substantial number of the top 500,000 sites according to Ansearch’s statistics would have firstly picked up on it, and secondly bothered to do something meaningful about it.

But hey, it’s still nice to know, right?