WordPress Shouldn’t Use nofollow
In my random wandering across the internet today, I discovered that, by default, WordPress adds the rel="nofollow" attribute to links in comments. Now, we all know the original purpose of nofollow, to try and discourage comment spam. This isn’t really relevant to Wordpress anymore, though. Akismet has been supported in WordPress for quite some time. Indeed, I noticed that 2.7 comes with it installed by default. I can attest to the quality of the Akismet plugin: out of thousands of spam comments, it has let exactly one through, and I’ve had one false positive.
To that end, I strongly recommend all Wordpress users install Akismet, and the DoFollow plugin. All it does is disable the nofollow attribute on external links in the comments. With the help of Akismet, you can safely do this without providing assistance to spammers.
And to everyone who has contributed to my blog in the past, my apologies for giving you your proper due. That has now been remedied.
Embed YouTube videos with XHTML 1.0 Strict code
Being a bit of a web geek, I like to keep my sites running in Strict mode for whatever HTML/XHTML version I happen to be working in. So, I was saddened to discover that the Embed code that YouTube gives doesn’t pass XHTML 1.0 Strict, due to their use of the now deprecated embed tag. Happily, there’s a way to fix this. As a bonus, the code required is much nicer than the code YouTube gives you:
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" style="width:480px; height:385px;" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/p1QMoQ3jbjc">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/p1QMoQ3jbjc" />
</object>You just need to replace the two URLs with the one for your video, and set the appropriate width/height. YouTube’s defaults are 320×265, 425×344, 480×385 and 640×505.
There you have it! It’s a simple as that. And to prove it works, here’s the same code from above:
Fed Square Microbreweries Showcase
Yesterday, I went to the Microbreweries Showcase, held at Federation Square. With 17 breweries showing their product, there were plenty to try from. Here are my notes from the variety I tasted:
| Brewery | Brew | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Arctic Fox Brewery | Ice Cap Lager | Light flavour, with a slightly fruity aftertaste. Drinkable, but not particularly exciting. |
| Bridge Road Brewers | Dark Ale | A solid porter. Nice smoky flavour. |
| Buckley’s Beers | Pilz Lager | Very sweet. Easy to drink. |
| Original Ale | Sweet, light flavour. | |
| Coldstream Brewery | Cider | Boring. Really unimpressive. Tasted like watered down apple juice. |
| Grand Ridge Brewery | Natural Blonde | A sweet wheat beer, with a hinte of orange. An excellent summer beer. |
| Holgate Brewhouse | White Ale | A clove flavour, reminded me of spiced wine. |
| Big Red Pilsner | Brilliant, rich red colour. Boring flavour. | |
| Temptress Dark Ale | A rich porter, made with vanilla beans and Dutch cocoa. Could work even as a dessert beer. | |
| Matilda Bay Brewing Co | Sebastian Reserve Dunkelweizen | Sweet and dark, with a hint of apple. Tasty. |
| Mildura Brewery | Mallee Bull | Brilliant colour, uninspiring flavour. |
| Mountain Goat Brewery | Fancy Pants Amber Ale | Similar to their Hightail Ale, but not quite as strong a flavour. Slighty sweet, slightly spiced. Smelled of celery, for some unknown reason. |
| Prickly Moses – Otway Estate | Summer Ale | Bleh. Reminds me of Carlton Draught. |
| Red Duck Brewery | Pale Ale | Light flavour. Nice summer beer. |
| Honey Porter | Light porter flavour, strong honey flavour. Nice, but similar to Beez Neez, I couldn’t drink much of it. | |
| Southern Bay Brewing Co | Effen Premier Lager | A fairly standard lager. Good to drink, but nothing exciting. |
| Sweetwater Brewing Company | Golden Bitter | Tastes like it should have flavour, but has been watered down instead. |
| Temple Brewing Company | Saison | Good flavour, reminded me of Hoegaarden. A hint of cloves. |
| The 3 Ravens Brewing Co | Dark Smoke Beer | An excellent stout. Traditional, tasty. |
| 2 Brothers Brewery | Growler | An American brown ale. Nice, but nothing special. Kind of a light porter. |
| Three Troupers | Pilsner | Light colour and flavour, like a Pilsner should be. Small bite in the aftertaste to keep things interesting. |
All up, a good variety from some of Australia’s microbreweries. Particularly worth mentioning is Holgate’s Temptress Dark Ale, which is probably the best chocolate beer I’ve had. Buckley’s Beers also gets a second mention, for making my two favourite beers for the night, though the Original Ale just beats the Pilz Lager.
pento.net goes mobile!
With a bit of fiddling around, I’ve found a good combination of WordPress plugins for mobile support.
- For iPhone/iPod: WPtouch. Lots of options, looks good on the iPhone browser.
- For all other mobiles: WP-viewMobile. This one is particularly handy, because it gives you the option to define the user agent strings it should activate for. To make it play nicely with WPtouch, I just had to remove the iPhone and iPod entries.
For both of these, setting them up was as simple as turning them on. I also added the various search engine mobile crawlers to WP-viewMobile. At the moment, the list of user agent strings I have are: Googlebot-Mobile, Y!J-SRD/1.0, msnbot-mobile, MSMObot. If anyone knows any others, please let me know.
So now, if you desperately want to check my site from the road, you can read it a bit easier on your mobile screen.
Don’t use GoDaddy Hosting
It will only cause you pain.
To give a brief description of the problems I had:
- Apache is horribly slow. To the point that some RSS readers were having problems subscribing to my blog.
- Apache setup is weird, and causes all sorts of problems.
- FTP access is mind-boggling slow, only allows one connection at a time, and at one point, wouldn’t let me download directories.
- MySQL is sickeningly slow.
- More expensive than better hosts.
- Really bad web interface for site management.
Now, I’m happily away from them. Never again.
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Gary Pendergast, noun: Gamer, developer, MySQL, WordPress, web and music geek. Currently taking a leave of absence from life as a MySQL Support Engineer for Oracle to tour around Europe. Can be observed in his natural habit at pento.net, or usually in Bologna, Italy.
