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- December 4, 2004
Theory vs. Practice
December 4, 2004Read moreI scan the search keywords for my website periodically to see how people are finding it, and occassionally find people hitting an article or two to find the answer to a specific question. Sometimes I’ll annotate articles to be a little more helpful, especially if the question seems to be of universal interest to my fellow nerds.
Today, I saw something search terms that inspired an entire new article, related to this previous post on flea control:
Search Terms: can i wash my cat with 20 mule team borax My Helpful Answer: NO
Still, it’s a logical question…since the borax works by shrivelling up flea larvae like salt on a slug, I’m pretty sure you don’t want to do that to your cat, but ask your vet. While you’re at it, get the Advantage or Frontline stuff. It works waaaay better at nuking fleas than anything else I’ve tried.
- December 4, 2004
Paper Houses
December 4, 2004Read more
Concept: a house made of recycled cardboard that can be assembled like a piece of IKEA furniture. When you move, you can pack up your house and take it with you. Inexpensive, saves landfill, and stores rainwater as ballast so the wind doesn’t blow it away by accident. One of six environmentally friendly, pre-fab, and Austrialian Houses of the Future.
Via Slashdot.
- December 4, 2004
Beating the Syndicate
December 4, 2004Read moreIt’s interesting to see how art and commerce collude to make money in an eyeball-driven media marketplace, and just how territorial people can be about protecting those structures. What people forget is how fragile even the mightiest of institutions can be, once people realize they have a better choice, and that choice is freely accessible. Buggywhip and barrel makers may welcome the syndicated cartoonist to their club of outmoded artisans, as entrepreneurial web cartoonists assault the newspaper cartoon page with new business models.
The idea is that popular web cartoonists offer their strips for free to traditional newspapers, in exchange for advertising or exposure. The syndicated cartoonists, described in this WebSnark editorial, are naturally upset. Scott Kurtz kicked the controversy off at SDCC 2004, for those who want to delve back a bit deeper.
- December 3, 2004
ThreeStrikesSpam Mystery
December 3, 2004Read moreI’ve been trying to figure out where these extra escaped slashes were coming from in my comments… I finally tracked it down to some code in ThreeStrikesSpam, the plugin I used to block comment SPAM.
The code activates when a comment is being processed, before
wp-comment-post.phpactually executes and posts the comment into the WordPress database.The problem occurs because there’s some code that calls
add_magic_quotes()to make sure that everything is “parsed, cleaned, and stripped corrected” in ThreeStrikesSpam.php. The same function is called again inwp-comments-post.php, which double-encodes slashes and screws up single and double-quotes in the comments.My guess is that I should disable the
add_magic_quotes()call inwp-coments-post.php, since some of the function calls in 3SS probably depend on having escaped strings to work properly; I haven’t looked too closely at this yet. - December 3, 2004
