Category Archives: WordPress

WP.com in Red Herring

Asides, WordPress, WordPress.com

Just landed in Houston, it’s chilly here. The opening up of WordPress.com got a nice write-up in Red Herring earlier today. Just to clarify two things from the article quickly: I’m working on WP.com with Andy, Donncha, and Ryan and I do think our distributed database architecture (which I’ll write more about later, it’s nothing too fancy) will help us scale cheaply but I’m also a strong believer in big things from small teams, much in the spirit of 37signals.

Akismet Stops Spam

Akismet, Spam, WordPress

Akismet is a new web service that stops comment and trackback spam. (Or at least tries really hard to.) The service is usable immediately as a WordPress plugin and the API could also be adapted for other systems.

I must say, this has been one of the more rewarding things I’ve worked on lately — when people tell you they’re able to spend more time with their family because they’re not spending 30 minutes a day dealing with spam it really puts things in perspective. If nothing else, I hope this makes blogging more joyful for at least one person.

Anyway, try it out, install it for a friend, link it on your blog. The more you use it the more effective it becomes. It’s a virtuous cycle that will hopefully curb the spam arms race.

Update: The reviews are starting to come in. Here’s some one with stats (from when the service was still in development).

AJAX and CSRF

WordPress, , ,

When working on some new AJAX features for bbPress and WordPress we’ve noticed that AJAX requests don’t seem to send HTTP_REFERER values. We check referrers as one level of protection against cross-site-scripting, or XSS, so when they’re not set we aren’t able to use that value. How are most people using AJAX protecting against XSS? It seems the same things we’re doing to make things easily accesible in a dynamic fashion are also opening new vectors for attack.

New WP.org Search

Open Source, Search, WordPress

At the last IRC meetup the WordPress community asked for better search that included both the forums and the Codex and was integrated with the look and feel of the rest of the site. When I did this before it was horribly slow and it involved several queries across several different programs and MySQL hosts to get the results from the wiki, the forums, the blog, and then splice them together somehow. Later we switched to a plain Google site-search but they didn’t like the HTML we used for the search form so we took it down. Well after the meeting I remembered Yahoo Developer Network which had some sort of API for their search with a much higher limit than Google’s.

I went to the site to see how much of a pain it would be so I could start properly procrastinating, but I was taken aback by how incredibly easy it was to get an application ID and start getting the results back as simple XML. I began hacking on it right then. It was about 5 minutes to set up a search form with URIs the way I wanted, 7 minutes to get the XML and parse it out, 5 minutes to write in some paging, and then about 20 minutes tweaking the search page to make it look a little better. The result is the new search.wordpress.org WordPress Search.

It still needs some more work. There seems to be a dupe problem, which is actually a problem with our site, not Yahoo Search. I’d like to tweak the results to highlight newer topics more, or at leats allow for a date-based weighting. Finally I think it would be nice to include some WP-related blogs like Blogging Pro and Weblog Tools Collection in the results. Most importantly we now have a clean URI structure and home for searches which is abstracted from any piece of software or particular service provider. Yahoo deserves major kudos for opening up their information in such a free way and making it so easy that it’s taken me longer to write this post than start using their API.