So, a part of being a domain-owning, server-space-using, web-software-running, open-source-promoting person one needs to periodically update software to latest versions and change software to meet ever changing situations and goals.
In short: I’ve made some changes around here that hopefully you have not noticed[0].
First – I finally upgraded to WordPress 2.7 (yes, a bit late). What caused me to take so long? I wanted to change my installation method to using svn so I can just “svn sw” when a new version is released. In doing so I ran into a minor permissions issue that was preventing me from completing the switch over, but thanks to my buddy (and sysadmin) Asheesh, all is better now. Do you want to have easy upgrades of wordpress via svn, check out this guide. It is a bit wordy and I never have liked their banner, but it outlines things in language for everyone.
Second – Blog Spam. Or more correctly BlogSpam. Since I do try to use Open Source solutions for my all of my needs (see my post on TinyTinyRSS) the use of Akismet was a little, well, sad. But, thanks to an Autonomo.us blog post I found out about BlogSpam.net (I love straight forward software names).
Basically it is a drop-in replacement for Akismet but it is Open Source and even complies with the Open Software Service Definition. So if you are looking to remove one more piece of proprietary software from your webpresence, check out BlogSpam.net. And for those of you who use Drupal there is even a BlogSpam.net plugin for that: check out the plugins page.
[0] – I had a minor hickup that most likely lasted from Jan 16th 3am to 3pm EST. During the re-install process I failed to copy back my .htaccess and thus none of the post were showing up since I use “pretty urls.” Sorry if you were trying to reach a post and couldn’t.
