Made a few small changes to Kottu, most under the hood. The only noticeable one is when you scroll down to the bottom of the page. There’s like 45 posts on the main page, but with so many people even that’s barely one day. Now when you scroll down the thing’ll say ‘getting more content’ and load a fresh batch. If you’re scrolling at a normal speed on a decent connection it should be pretty much invisible, the page’ll just go on forever. This is thanks to the genius Humanize History plugin by RadGeek who, incidentally, wrote the FeedWordpress plugin that drives Kottu. Besides that, I’ve upgraded WordPress, found and fixed this bullshit spam security exploit and cleaned up the database and implemented caching. Mobile Kottu is also enabled, but I can’t test it on my clock radio phone.

Uh, I guess not much more to explain besides that. The backend was completely horrid, the server host actually shut it down a few days ago if anyone noticed. Upgraded everything which should help. I also discovered that some security exploit had stuck like 18,000 spam links in the header and footer (invisible to users, but not Google). Cleaned that and secured the site as much as I know how. WordPress 2.5 should take care of most of these things.

Future Things

One other thing I’d like to do is tags. I can tag all the old posts automatically using this hook-in to the Reuters Semantic Engine (Calais). Pretty cool thing they’ve built, it picks out appropriate tags out of piles of stuff. Thing is that I’d have to tag new posts automatically. I need some php modifications to get it to simply tag everything automatically as its posted, with no human intervention. Any coders?

Other stuff would be auto-thumbnailing of images in posts, seems possible but I can’t get the Post Thumbs plugin to work. Dunno what else. Guess a contact form would be a good idea, but the main janitorial stuff is outta the way.

Posted on Saturday, June 21st, 2008 in blogging, kottu, Tech.