We get a fair amount of traffic over at FOSSwire. Like most of the WordPress installations I have a connection with, we have an Akismet installation running there to deal with comment spam.

To its credit, it’s pretty good, but recently I’ve been having to manually clean up a load of trackback spam that’s getting past the filter. It’s a real pain and irritates me immensely. Usually Akismet works so well…

Maybe it’s worth installing an additional spam comment solution such as Bad Behaviour. I really don’t know. Anyone else had any success with any other anti-spam solutions?

I’ve just finished rolling out an update to the site here, so you might have noticed a few changes. Here’s what’s happened:

• Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible integration. A nice red Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible banner appears at the top of every page with my latest tweet.
• New page – the portfolio. Admittedly, it’s not a true portfolio, but I couldn’t think of a better name. That page is all about raising my profile with potential employers. That’s the aim.
• New header image!
• Tweaks and optimisations to make things run better and more smoothly. For the time being, my Zooomr photos in the sidebar have been removed, as the Zooomr photo page RSS feeds no longer work since Mark III (apparently they will be reinstated shortly). Before the update, pages were taking longer than necessary to load because of the overhead of checking Zooomr for a non-existent feed URL every pageload (and the feed caching didn’t kick in because it was returning a 404).
• A few CSS hacks and alterations for better support at lower resolutions and in IE.

By the way, if you can’t see the new design tweaks and the Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible banner isn’t red, hit reload again to make sure you have the latest stylesheet cached.

Anyway, must now get back on with the Project, before I’m missed!

Incidentally, if you’re tracking version numbers this revision to the design could be called version 3.1 (I probably missed out minor revisions in the 2.x range as well):

• 1.0 – original Blogger template
• 2.0 – modified WP-Andreas09 in orange
• 3.0 – original revision of this design
• 3.1 – current revision

Left – MacBook with Firefox open, with the project I’m developing open and tabs with any other resources I need to hand.

Middle – IM and other random windows so I can stay in contact and stash stuff I want close. Only 1024×768, but ah well.

Right – code open in (one of) the world’s greatest web development IDE(s) – Quanta.

Please boycott Xandros. Giving in to the game is stupid.

Novell, Xandros, who is going to give in next? Isn’t this a fun game…

Roll on GPLv3 as quickly as possible. Please. Before we lose anyone else.

… to 200MB used on my primary Gmail account.

For those of you who don’t already know, I’m extremely pleased to announce that I won the PHP Classes Innovation Award of April 2007 for my latest free software release, SleekTabs.

I’d like to thank everyone who voted for me and everyone in the PHP Classes community. I am very proud to be recognised.

I may well get some time this weekend to work on the next version, which should improve some of the annoying quirks in the first release, add some new features and stabilise the code a bit.

Once again, thanks to everyone who supported me. I hope that in time SleekTabs can help out a lot of people and I of course welcome all suggestions and comments regarding it.