Update: I hereby declare this done enough, for now.

Also I’m very sorry for spamming your RSS readers with my stupid new ever-so-slightly-different “perma”links. That is if whatever URL you were using for the feed even still works.

Now I get to go through the 5237 (not kidding!) comments made since then and see which ones were real and reinstate them. Recently I’ve been getting .6% real comments, so there may be around 20 real ones buried in there.

Update: The “display extended description” feature of that plugin is bugged. Here’s the fix. Just add these two lines to the beginning of the _delicious_startelem function:

global $_display_tags;
global $_display_extended;

Conclusion: MSN is the best search engine! Yahoo comes in second, and Google is the worst.

I also found this 2004 todo list. How did I do?

• Get Master’s degree – DONE!
• Go on big huge vacation – DONE!
• Upgrade to WP1.0 – DONE! – even better, I’m at 1.2!
• Enhance word of the day – not done.
• Spam filtering – not done. Back on b2 I had a Bayesian spam filter which was working really well. When I upgraded to WP, it seemed I didn’t need it since the built in spam filtering was so good. That only lasted a few months. I’m told that WP1.5 has recalibrated the deflector harmonics or whatever to completely defeat current-generation spambots. We’ll see.
• Feed on Feeds – release 0.2 – not done, I’m only at 0.1.9. But, I’ve released all sorts of features I hadn’t even thought of back then, like Atom, I18N, CSS and frames, and better SSL and HTTP authentication support.

If you post a comment to this site, and include an author URL, or any URLs in your comment body, they will have rel=”nofollow” slapped on them. But, after 10 days, rel=”nofollow” will come off and Google (or whoever) will follow your links and calculate rank appropriately. For the first 10 days, your comment is in a sort of probation.

The theory here is that I maintain this site fairly well, and although some comment spam does make it through the filters and appear on the site, I always delete it. I usually delete it the same day, so 10 days gives me plenty of time to take care of it before the spammer would begin to see any benefit.

The obvious next refinement would be a dead man’s switch, so that if for some reason I’m unable to come around and prune back the spam for more than 10 days, the rel=”nofollow” is applied universally as a fail-safe.