Tag: comments

I disabled comments on the site today until I can get my spam problem under control. I spent hours last night cleaning out countless comments about porn, poker and viagra only to have gotten hit again today. Argh!

Please stay tuned. Blosxonomy's gunna get a decent spam filter come hell or high water.

I saw Gravatar support implemented at Pete's blog and thought it was pretty cool - so I signed up and enabled it in my comment's plugin as well. I'm currently searching for a good default avatar to use, but for now their system's 1x1 px image is working just fine.

Gravatar is a globally recognizable Avatar system - your register an avatar associated with your email address at their site, and then anyone can look it up by taking an MD5 hash of your email address as your gravatar id. This is very simple in Ruby, just do:

require 'md5'

email = 'users_email@domain.com'
gravatar_id = MD5::new( email ).hexdigest
gravatar = '<img src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=%s"/>' % gravatar_id

More details about URL parameters can be found at Gravatar's implementation page.

The dangers of running your website on a -current code base - I realized today that I broke the comment plugin at timfanelli.com shortly after posting yesterday that I had implemented it! Whoops! It's patched, working, and tested. I had made a small change to support the trackback plugin which caused the comment system to return prematurely when handling post data from the web.

I checked my access logs, and I did miss a couple comments because of this. Please try again!

I implemented a simple comments plugin tonight for Blosxonomy - loosely based on the pyBlosxom comment plugin. pyBlosxom's comment plugin is a little more involved than I was shooting for, as one of Blosxonomy's goals is simplicity. Mine simply checks the post data for a comment, verifies all the information is there, and writes out a comment file with a simple format:

Comment Author
Author's email
Comment body

The plugin requires the current code base, which I'm going to post over at Blosxonomy sometime tomorrow (I still need to do some sanity checking on it). In the meantime though, feel free to start leaving comments!