Comment Spam is a thing of the past. That method I’ve found to be 100% effective in stopping bot-based spam, but you still need some sort of content moderation for manually-entered spam. A version of Stopgap Extreme called WP Hashcash is in the new plugin repository and undergoing shared development. The repository has over 55 plugins already and it hasn’t even been officially announced. 🙂 (And this doesn’t count.)

Check out Jonas’ predictions for 2005 and his hilarious follow-up. Thanks to Jonas for reminding me it’s just 15 days until my birthday.

The new Ruby on Rails site looks great, and I’ve been impressed with the framework a lot lately. You can tell they have good taste because they’re using WordPress for their blog. Rails is from the guy who brought you Basecamp.

A Javascript implementation of Markdown, useful for live previews. It doesn’t do all of Markdown, but that’s okay because a lot of it isn’t needed/used anyway. Might be useful to define a “Markdown-lite” subset of the syntax to target for. It would also be great for there to be two-way tools for going to and from HTML.

When renewing a domain at GoDaddy I just had to fill out a captcha to complete the transaction.

So apparently the first year I’m not home for the holidays Houston decides to have a white Christmas, snowing in places that have only seen snow maybe once before in my lifetime. As an early present, however, my friend Jess sent me this awesome picture. Update: One from Sarah too! (And another)

A little Christmas music for all of you from the big band arrangement of the Nutcracker Suite. (Sorry I didn’t have the Duke Ellington version handy.)

There’s a new WordPress list manager and plugin that looks pretty swank and nicely integrates into the WordPress admin pages.

Python guy Matt Croydon is back and blogging with WordPress. He must have heard of our next version, WordPresssssssss, which is going to be in Python.

The GPL is getting a facelift, sounds neat.

Apparently I’m available on LiveJournal now. Update: I didn’t do this, so I don’t know exactly how it’s done. I believe it’s just polling my RSS feed and making that a LJ “friend”. I wonder who set it up?

Nice Linus Torvalds interview

The new version of Movable Type addresses the issue that was supposedly causing incredibly high loads and causing hosts to disable MT. Congrats to the team for addressing this so quickly.

By the way, WordPress is now available in at least 30 languages.

Awwwwww, that totally made my day. Check out the rest of the awesome WordPress.de site.

Joeseph Scott says Fixing Search Engines Won’t Stop Comment Spam.

Matt Kingston does a weighted list or heat map plugin for categories, nice! See it in action on his archives. He should drop that in the new repository (which I would say in his comments but they’re broken at the moment).

I accidentally left AIM on my laptop at the office this weekend and I didn’t get a chance to come up here to turn it off. Now there are 33 open message windows from people who IMed me, probably all thinking I ignored them. One interesting note, when this many windows are blinking XP has a noticable delay between them, it’s almost like running lights.