Pingback, Akismet and HTMLized modules

Hey all a bit more big update this time, taking on 3 totaly different things.

Pingback/XMLRPC

Since I'm working hard on my site and blog and getting more visitors. I started looking into a way to interact more with other sites, so I came across Pingbacks and Trackbacks. (Also this post on BlueJar.com is very interesting to get more comments on your Blog.) Pingback is a way of way of exchanging links between site/blog owners, with a not to hard specification based on XMLRPC. After reading this post (kinda lost that post so had to search for it and I came across this interesting post aswell) regarding the difference between Pingbacks and trackbacks I decided to go for Pingbacks first since they are harder to spam then Trackbacks. (Well ok created a simple script that shows simple HTML with a link to the page your pinging back, once the pingback has been done and the page your pinging shows the ping you let it redirect to the page to spam. But this is just a side track, one not many people like but must kept in mind aswell cause we would become naive if we don't .) Using XML-RPC for PHP it was very easy to set up a server for receiving pingbacks .

Akismet

Akismet is a free service (for personal use at least) to weed out spam and let the ham pass through. It requires a WordPress API key to work (wich is freely available) and a WordPress Blog. But since not every blogger uses WordPress there Akismet offers an API to develop an Akismet class/plugin/function for your self. Akismet has it own special algorithms to detect spam but it runs for a part on userinput aswell. They have a very interesting blog post about the pro's and con's about this way of work. Every Akismet user should read it. Implementing Akismet was very easy using this class .

HTMLized modules

Both the wow_screenshots (almost done) and wow_db modules are getting transformed from dynamic PHP driven pages to semi-static HTML pages. Things like rating, comments, adding tags still works normally but are not update on the page right away . The wow_screenshots is almost done (a few tiny bugs). wow_db is going to get a big redo aswell. The whole goal is to let wow_db support the wow_screenshots module and add an exiting new feature in the future (hopefully before WLK launches).