Hujambo!

Spam on the Internet is a reality. It’s all automated these days; computers crawl the net looking for places to post their garbage. Most of it is related to drugs. You usually see it in your e-mail or in the comments section of some blog articles you happen upon. I get a bit of spam on this blog but, thanks to Wordpress’ Akismet plugin, you guys never have to see it.

Every day I log into my blog’s administrator console and see a summary of what has happened. Who’s visited, who commented, which posts are popular, etc. This morning I cracked up when I saw this one in the spam queue:

Subject: Mexican valium….

Lethal dose of valium for dogs. Xanax valium. What is valium used for. Injectable valium. Valium patient advice including side effects. Buy valium online save wholesale price yep. Valium liquid form. Valium….

Are you kidding me? Dogs?! And Mexican valium, nonetheless! That’s hilarious! The spammers will try anything to get past the spam-detection filters. I wonder if a human helps them come up with those wacky ideas.

Also, I had three others in the queue regarding valium too. Do people really buy this crap online? Wow…

A few days ago I installed the Wordpress Mobile Edition plugin on this blog. It presents a “mobile” edition of my website. It looks pretty cool if you’re using an iPhone. If you don’t have an iPhone, don’t sweat… you can tell Firefox to pretend by changing the user agent. Type “about:config” in the address bar, and then find the general.useragent.extra.firefox setting. Take note of the current value and then replace it with this:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0
Now you can browse to my site again and you should see it as if you were on an iPhone. Cool, huh? Thanks to Crowd Favorite for making this plugin for Wordpress.

I upgraded this blog to the latest Wordpress version (2.7). The only change that you’ll notice is a new “threaded comment” functionality which allows you to reply to other comments. I had to make some small tweaks to the site’s theme to enable the new comment stuff. I suppose this would also be a good time to post a link to my theme files just in case you’re interested in using it on your blog.

The theme is called “Gray Gets Green,” and it is originally by Fred Banuelos. When Wordpress 2.3 came out I went to his website to see if he would be updating the theme to work with 2.3’s new widget features, but he was missing in action. I added the widget support myself. Same story with Wordpress 2.7’s comment features. There’s no problems because he licensed the theme under the General Public License, which says that I can make and release my own changes to the code as long as I keep it licensed under the GPL. So here you go:

• Gray Gets Green 1.0: Original version from Fred Banuelos
• Gray Gets Green 1.1: Modified by me to add Wordpress 2.3 widget support
• Gray Gets Green 1.2: Modified by me to add Worpdress 2.7 threaded comment support