Jim Dalrymple.com

Things just keep getting better. Now I’m typing on my iPhone into WordPress — doesn’t sound like a big deal, but I’m doing it in an iPhone optimized interface.

You can check out the plug-in at wphoneplugin.org.

I really like what CSS can do for a Web site. I try to build everything now without using any tables whatsoever and for the most part it’s worked really well. CSS itself has come a long way allowing you to do many things including shadows, which is what I’ve been working on recently.

There was really no need for me to have an image gallery on the site since Peter gave me a Flickr Pro account, but it’s one of those things that I wanted to work on for myself. I’m using a really nice piece of gallery software for WordPress called Gallery Manager.

Gallery Manager gives you everything you need and integrates well with WordPress itself. Having that out of the way, I wanted to give the thumbnails and images a nice drop shadow, but I didn’t want to use Photoshop, I wanted it all done with CSS.

So the thumbnails you see on this page have a slight bit of padding and a nice drop shadow, which gives them some nice depth.

I tried it with Safari and it works great, but when I align any of the thumbs to the right Camino and Firefox won’t show the images. Strange, but I’ll keep playing around with that.

Update: Shortly after posting this I found what I was doing wrong to make the images align right in Firefox and Camino. If it doesn’t look right to you, let me know.

After signing up for my Flickr account and noticing more and more sites with “tag blobs,” I decided to give it a try and see what it would be like on my site. A tag blob is the list of tags in the sidebar, representing all of the keywords I have used for blogs I’ve posted on the site.

The larger keywords are the ones that have been used most often and the smaller ones haven’t been used as much. It was fascinating last night to add tags to stories and watch the blob change keyword importance. (Okay, so my life isn’t that exciting, but it was fun anyway).

So, if you are wondering what I write about the most or if you are interested in a particular subject, just click one of the keywords and you will be shown all of those stories. I’m not finished going through all of the older content yet, but at least it gives an idea of what it will look like.

Blog spam has become a real problem for all of those people that just want to post a few personal thoughts on the Web. For some, it has meant taking comments off their sites altogether. Luckily, the Wordpress community is very active and has a lot of good developers tackling this problem — the latest plugin I’m trying is called Bad Behavior.

Unlike a lot of the other plugins, Bad Behavior doesn’t require any interaction from the person making the post. For instance, you don’t need to require a special code be typed in or otherwise jump through hoops to make a post.

I was using a plugin called Bot Check that required a 5-digit code be typed in and it was very good. I had no trouble with it at all and would certainly recommend anyone having trouble with spam give it a try.

I like to test out all kinds of things server related, so I thought I’d give Bad Behavior a try and see how it works. I had this site up for a few days before I started reciving spam, so I know it’s out there — let’s see how this does.

If you find yourself blocked for some reason, please let me know.

I did some reading over the weekend on what it would take to implement “live searching” on the site. What I mean by that is searching a Web site in a similar way to how Apple has implemented live searching on a Macintosh using Spotlight.

This morning I decided to take the plunge and after toying around off and on today I got it pretty much done. I still have to work on the CSS a bit more, but it’s functional.

It should work on most browsers, although it doesn’t for sure on IE for the Mac — then again who cares. If you use Safari, you even get the rounded corners and drop shdows.

So, to use the live search function just click in the search box and start typing. Results should popup under the search window almost immediately; using your arrow keys (or mouse) scroll down to the story you want and hit enter. If you want to exit out of search, just hit the Escape key on your keyboard.

The Worpress development team has taken a respite from developing new features for an upcoming version to issue a point release for the current stable version. The issue according to the Wordpress Web site deals with a security issue.

The developers didn’t say exactly what the issue was, but they did say that the issue was not public yet. They recommend every update to 1.5.1.3 as soon as possible.

If you are not able to update, they said to delete the xmlrpc.php from your Worpress directory.