Jim Dalrymple.com

If you’re looking for me, check out my little Blogspot page. I decided to try out for the service, just for fun.

http://jdalrymple.blogspot.com

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.

Well, I upgraded the site to the newest version of WordPress—the upgrade was no big problem so far. The thing that really gets me is that my site design is a causality of the update.