The Voice Auditions - I wanna go! [news]
Alright, so for those of you who haven't seen it yet, there's a show on NBC. "The Voice". You better be watching it. This show actually showcases vocal talent in it's first round "Blind Auditions".
Anyways, the first season is well underway and I found out they've opened auditions for Season 2. I'm signingup to go down to San Francisco for the August 23rd/24th auditions. Unfortunately those are the closest auditions and the ones far enough out where I can attempt to make some arrangements.
The first step is to sign up and give a link to myself singing so I've added some of the recordings I have from karaoke online for the mysterious check.
We'll see, I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
So take a listen, and keep your fingers crossed for me. Heck, pray even if you want to, Lord knows I could use all the good thoughts for this!
-Mike
zenFBSuite - version 1.4.1-BETA [7271] [news]
I'm excited! Zenphoto 1.4.1 is just around the corner! So in the spirit of the project I decided to update the zenFBSuite and my other plugins to the most recent trunk build, which as you can see from the title is the 1.4.1-Beta.
While updating the site to the 1.4.1-beta and fixing a couple of things that needed to change in the zenFBSuite to match, I added a new feature to the zenFBSuite. A "Send" button. What this will allow you to do is similar to the Like button. It will share all the pretty info the Like button does, but instead of posting it to your wall, it allows you to send a facebook message to a person, people, or groups. Pretty keen eh? Check it out in action around the site or the demo/info page: here.
Aside from it being it's own plugin, I've also included it as an option in the Like button options so it can be included right alongside your Like button.
Updates, updates, updates! [news]
Ch...Ch...ch...Changes!
(sorry song was stuck in my head)
The Site
So it appears over the last few days I've had a chance to do some updates on my plug-ins. As well as plug-in updates, I updated the site to use the 4/18/2011 Trunk build. I try to keep up-to-date with the nightlies and almost always update the site and test the plug-ins before doing and "upgrade" notes.
Everything appears to be functioning as planned with the changes to the plug-ins and the site.
Please see general notes below as well as visit plug-in pages listed in menu for info/demo/download per usual.
zenFBSuite
A few changes to the suite. Archives will now be uploaded with two names. One for archive/version number, and one labeled current. This is merely a housekeeping item and will let me avoid having to update every download link on each page to the new archive/version numbers.
Development Note: Soon, I will have the plug-in disable itself if you do not provide your OWN application ID and/or admin ID. This is done for your sake, believe me. So follow the steps in the articles linked in the menu to the left please!
zenFBComments
Updated to utilize the "new" Facebook comments plug-in. I put new in quotes because it's been out for a while now, I just didn't want to make changes until they allowed for either CSS updates or a dark theme option. Eventually they did as well as a few other changes to the API.
Also, as the zenFBComments style is now handled via a light/dark theme option provided by facebook, the "plugins/zenFBComments" folder with the various CSS files are no longer needed.
Provided a link to the new Facebook moderation/comment tool that allows you to see a centralized listing of comments on your site, and if you've enabled moderation as default option, allow you to moderate comments.
zenFBcommon
A couple of quick changes here. Most notable would be the addition of the "Default Logo URL" option. If zenphoto is now on a gallery page showing an item with a thumbnail, it will populate og:image with the cached thumbnail. If it is not, it checks to see if anything is specified for the URL to default logo. If "default logo" is not null, it will then populate og:image tag with information pointing to default logo. If "default logo" is null/empty, it will not add og:image metatag.
The rest are minor housekeeping/commenting of code, which includes removal of some stray google verification code that may have slipped through on last release.
zenTwitter
Just a version update after verifying changes with the site's current trunk build.
Development Note: I'm looking into the Twitter API to see if there is a better way to handle this plug-in but for now with my current time constraints I'm leaving plug-in as is.
zenHttpbl
Just a version update after verifying changes with the site's current trunk build.
Development Note: I'm pondering a change to the zenHttpbl plug-in to display the stats of blocked users. Ideally I'd like to have a log of IPs blocked, as well as display the stats from the HTTP:BL dashboard but as far as I can tell there is no API interface to pull those stats. So, hopefully in the near future I'll have at least implemented a counter to show the # of blacklisted IPs blocked so you can proudly show that you are spam free and have a log of the IPs that you have denied access to.
google_analytics
As a note, this plug-in still works under current build (1.4.0.3-7031). As this was really just a minor update to another authors plug-in I'm not keeping current archives of this plug-in.
I think that about does it with the changes. I'll update if I remember anything else.
Onward & upward!
What's up with zenFBSuite?? [news]
So you might be thinking, "Hey Mike! That's some spiffy looking comments you've got enabled there! How can I get my hands on that?"
Simple answer? Patience. Sadly I'm not going to release it until the Facebook dev team updates their API to include the ability to either customize it with CSS or a dark theme (like the like/recommendations/activity).
Sadly, the new comments plug-in, while extremely feature packed, is really only designed to be used on lighter colored sites.
To top it off, I haven't decided what I want to do about the migration part of it.
The new system allows you to "migrate" old comments over, but it's ugly and not really functional. So I haven't decided if I want to setup the new version to be "migrate-friendly" or not. I probably will, but I just have to convince myself that it's worth it.
zenHttpbl released! [news]
What is it?
zenHttpbl is a spambot/harvester blocking tool. zenHttpbl is a Zenphoto plug-in implementation of Project Honey Pot's HTTP:BL system. Sounds neat right? Let me guess, you have no clue what I'm talking about. Keep reading...
Q. What is Project Honey Pot and why would I want to use the HTTP:BL system?
A. For the best description about what Project Honey Pot does I'll simply provide this link to their About Page and give you an excerpt:
Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it.
Pretty nifty right? But that's not all.. Imagine if one of the spambots or harvesters browsed on over to your gallery... Wouldn't it be amazing to simply stop their traffic? Instead of wasting precious bandwidth just simply shut them down? That's where the HTTP:BL system comes in. From the HTTP:BL about page:
The HTTP Blacklist, or "http:BL", is a system that allows website administrators to take advantage of the data generated by Project Honey Pot in order to keep suspicious and malicious web robots off their sites. Project Honey Pot tracks harvesters, comment spammers, and other suspicious visitors to websites. Http:BL makes this data available to any member of Project Honey Pot in an easy and efficient way.
So... what I have done is written an plug-in implementation of the HTTP:BL API system for ease of use with Zenphoto. You simply upload, enable, set your options and enjoy a spamfree site. There's obviously a more technical explanation of it, but do you want that? Or do you just want to cut the spam? So what are we waiting for, right?
Technical Tidbits
zenHttpbl utilizes Project Honey Pot's HTTP:BL service to stop spammers, harvesters, and comment spammers in their tracks. By utilizing the HTTP:BL API and making a DNS query to the PHP servers you are given information categorizing an IP from tracking records, identifying if that IP has been part of any suspicious or malicious activity.
This implementation does all this before serving any web pages, and then (if the visitor passes the thresholds you set via options) either redirects to a honey pot, or serves a blank page. Saving you traffic, and dramatically reducing annoying comment/content spammers.
Info/Demo/Download
