UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

Despite the fact that it was the decade of my youth, for which I am often nostalgic, I don’t often look back on the ’80s decade itself with a great deal of fondness. Sure, there was Pac-Man, The Breakfast Club, Duran Duran, various other things in popular culture that I liked. But that’s offset with Ronald Reagan (no I do not consider his presidency a positive, and I could catalog the ways if I cared to, but I don’t), hair bands, this version of Pac-Man, hideous fashion (yes, it was a reaction to the ’70s and its own hideousness, but as bad as it was, ’70s fashion never produced the likes of these fashion nightmares), etc. etc.

And yet, thanks once again to the brilliant musical programming of MPR’s The Current, I’ve become drawn to the unabashed nostalgia for that dark decade served up dripping in digital synth excess courtesy of M83‘s latest album, Saturdays = Youth. After contemplating it for weeks, I finally bought the album on Amazon MP3 this morning, and have been listening to it nonstop (currently on my fourth time through).

Anyone who’s known me offline for any length of time is probably aware of my affinity for Converse All-Stars, better known as “Chuck Taylors” or simply “Chucks”.

I’ve worn them more than any other kind of shoe since I was in high school, and although I had briefly moved away from them in favor of Vans a couple of years ago, it wasn’t long before Chuck beckoned me back.

Lately I’ve been wearing a pair of chocolate brown lowtops, but tonight I was at DSW and discovered a new pair that I immediately fell in love with. I’ve generally stayed with the more “traditional” solid-color designs, avoiding the plaid, camouflage, double-layer and other styles that have more recently appeared. This pair is the first I’ve ever owned that display any deviation from the original style, but I just thought the bronze-ish eyelet rings and gold stitching were too cool, and looked great with the faded black canvas. So I bought them, even though Chucks are now obscenely overpriced. (I remember when they never sold for more than $20, and routinely went for $10, and back then they were made in the USA! Tonight I paid 50 bucks for this pair made in China.) I suppose if I were really true to my ideals I’d have gone for these, especially since they’re currently selling for half the price! Unfortunately they’re clearing these out, and the only ones they have left are also half my size… so, I guess not.

Oh, and just in case you thought I’d neglect to expound upon the reference in the title, think again! (Also, be sure to give a shout if you recognize the coffee cup in the photo…)

As I have trumpeted from the hilltops on many an occasion, I have happily been using WordPress to power this site going on two years now.

Mostly happily, anyway. There are a few things that don’t sit right with me, most prominently the persistence of spambot registrations, with little (good) help so far from the plugin development community.

What are spambot registrations, you ask? Well, blogs tend to have two doors that are open to spambots: comment forms and registration forms. Comment forms are certainly more common (since just about every blog accepts comments but most probably do not accept new user registrations), and much has been done to deal with the problem of comment spam. Most notably there is WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg’s own excellent comment spam blocking plugin, Akismet. But no comparable plugin exists for the WordPress registration form, and despite many requests from the community, Akismet has not yet been adapted for this purpose. Probably since registration spam is so far only a nuisance (albeit a potentially large one for the site administrator), it has not gotten the same kind of attention.

I did manage to find a few plugins to block registration spam, but most were half-baked, and the one I did end up using for a while, which clearly has been given a lot of attention by its developer, just seemed to be overkill to me. And while it did work to prevent spam registrations for the month or so that I used it, it also prevented my legitimate, registered users from logging in!

So a few days ago I turned it off, and within hours I was receiving spam registrations again. That’s when I decided to build my own spambot registration blocking plugin for WordPress: RegisTrap. The focus is on absolute simplicity: there are no visible changes to the registration form for users, and there’s no configuration for the site admin… just upload it, activate it, and you’re done.

I’ll admit mine is probably half-baked as well, but it’s only at version 0.3 so far. I may eventually need to add an administrative tool to allow the site owner to make changes if bots start to adapt to the default settings — I don’t really know how smart bots are. But I do know that I’ve had RegisTrap running on my own site for a couple of days now, definitely long enough to be able to determine whether or not it’s working, and since I installed it there has not been a single spambot registration on my site.

If you run a WordPress site, give RegisTrap a try!

On my Tools page, I tout my use of jQuery, which is true (I do use it), but up to now I wasn’t actually using it on my own site. Like the unkempt barber, I was always too busy cutting everyone else’s hair and not my own. And by hair I mean websites. And by cutting I mean building. So, sort of the opposite of cutting. But (as usual) I digress.

Before, the Web 2.0-ish, AJAX-ified, buzzword*-izationalized features of my site were kind of a hodgepodge of built-in WordPress features, homebrewed JavaScript and partially-implemented and or modified plug-ins.

Now I’m trying to streamline and consolidate it all on jQuery and, when applicable, jQuery-based WordPress plugins, dropping the last vestiges of Scriptaculous and prototype.js (oh how they’ve served me well). To that end, I’ve changed my navigation menus from my own quick-and-dirty style to something jQuery-based and unnecessarily showy. (I may drop the sliding animation once it starts to annoy me, which will be in about 14 minutes.)

I’ve also finally addressed my annoyance with the less-than-amazing new gallery feature in WordPress 2.5. Granted, it’s way better than what I was using before, but I really don’t like how clicking a thumbnail loads another blog page that just contains the larger version of the photo, with the photo’s filename as the title. Yuck. But I found a nice jQuery-based lightbox plug-in that does exactly what I wanted. Now anywhere on my site where I’ve got a link directly to an image, that image loads in a lightbox layer instead of redirecting to another page or just a blank window. (And I didn’t even have to add a bunch of rel="lightbox" attributes to my old code like before! [And even better, I didn’t have to take out the ones I had already added!!!!])

So… well, you are either a web designer/developer, in which case you are ever-so-slightly interested, or you’re not, and you’re not. But I am, and I am, and I am very pleased with the results so far!

And the last thing I have to say is, given my inclination to talk in circles tonight solely to amuse myself, it’s probably a good idea that I decided to spend the evening tinkering with my own site rather than working on a client’s project!

* I just love how the page I linked to notes that “This page may not work with Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.xx.” Only on a page whose URL contains both .edu and a tilde. I just installed Multiple IE in my new copy of Windows last night, so maybe I should fire up IE 3.1 and see if he’s right.

An enjoyable but otherwise relatively uneventful trip to the Minnesota State Fair today was jarringly disrupted near its conclusion when I spotted a 70-something man wearing a gray t-shirt featuring a cartoon of a 70-something man and, in very large cartoon block text, read:

When I die, bury me at Walmart so my wife will visit me often.

Wow. Where do I begin?

I guess most of my initial reactions probably do not even bear mentioning here. Suffice to say, I was appalled at all levels. But I was even more deeply disturbed by what I found when, unable to suppress my curiosity, I googled the phrase. For the love of God there’s even a song about it. I didn’t bother listening to enough of it to be able to tell if it’s a joke. Well, obviously it’s a joke, but I didn’t listen long enough to determine what kind. But judging by the brain ache the hosting site gave me, it’s not one I’d appreciate anyway.

Ultimately, they could come up with the coolest new logo on the planet, but it’s going to be tough to shake their old image.