OMNINOGGIN

Today I would like to announce the release of “Project Honey Pot Http:BL” WordPress Plugin.

Description

This plugin allows you to verify all visitors’ IP address against the Project Honey Pot database. Using the Http:BL API, this plugin flags, logs, and blocks visitors with a high threat score, helping you prevent harvesters, spammers, or other
suspicious bots from abusing your blog. I’ve been talking a lot about LoJack anti-spam measures lately and this is one of them.
This plugin requires you to sign up for a free account at Project Honey Pot so that you can use their Http:BL API to verify your visitors.
This plugin is based on Jan Stepien’s http:BL version 1.4 which is no longer being supported. This version of the plugin fixes a lot of database bugs and usability issues that the original plugin had. Here are the key benefits of having this plugin enabled.

1. LoJack anti-spam solution with collective intelligence
2. Easy Project Honey Pot integration. No need to mess with Apache mod_httpbl, which means that this will work on shared hosts.
3. Ability to redirect malicious bots to a bot trap.
4. Logging capabilities

Read on…

This might be useful for WordPress widget developers out there. I wasn’t going to post this before, but I just found that another developer ran into the exact same issue. So hopefully the 10 minutes I spend writing this post can help save somebody hours of debug.

After WordPress 2.5 released I found that my NowThen Photo Display widget broke the sidebar management page in WordPress adminitration. I took the longest time to figure out why, but the root of the problem was that the new WordPress 2.5 actually executes widget code in the wp-admin area. I have no idea why this is the case. Is this a bug or a feature of the new 2.5 code? I can see it as a feature in a sense that, if the code is not able to executed properly in the wp-admin area, then it should not be added to the front-end. If that’s the case, I would expect an error message rather than a broken sidebar management page.

Anyhow, here are a couple of tips that I have if your plugin breaks after the upgrade: Read on…