Just a tip I'm posting here, more as a reminder for myself when I publish my next plugin, maybe it can be useful to a few :

My actual wordpress plugins directory (wp-content/plugins) contains plugins I'm working on, and plugins I've published. Here is my way of creating in my download directory (download/plugins) a synched unprocessed .php highlighted copy of a plugin, as well as a .txt version. For example, my download directory contains a live non-working replica of my ip2nation plugin :

1. In my /download/plugins dir, I create a file with the same name as the plugin : wp_ozh_ip2nation.php
   < View plain text >

   php

   
   

   1. <?php
   2. $file = "/home/physical/path/to/wp-content/plugins/wp_ozh_ip2nation.php";
   3. highlight_file($file);
   4. ?>
2. Then the .txt version :
   < View plain text >

   code

   
   

   1. ln -s /home/path/to/wp-content/plugins/wp_ozh_ip2nation.php wp_ozh_ip2nation.txt

This way, changes I make to the real plugin are automatically duplicated to the non-working version anyone can see and download. Another way would be of course to use some file to show source like for example at Huddled Masses, but I wanted something more minimalistic (beware of his source.php, it's not compatible with most PHP installation and needs a few rewrite)

Woohoo, tonight was my first massive spam attack, with 75 blablas within a few minutes telling about things to make yours bigger & longer, you know the deal.

I'm not sure why I've been targetted by spammers. Maybe my blog is getting higher on page ranks, must mean I'm famous heh ? :) I don't understand either why my main site, French Frag Factory, which is mucho much more popular than this blog, has never been spammed. Maybe it's because it's run by a home made Perl engine, but even, a <form> is a <form>, no matter what language powers it.

The thing I know is I won't go at war against spammers, this is a waste of time. They have more keywords and more IP's than any blacklist you could set up. For the moment, I'll stick with only increasing the flood protection delay, from 10 seconds by default to 300 seconds now. I think no one needs posting twice in less than 5 minutes. For your information, this can be changed in wp-comments-post.php, around line 70 (WP version 1.2, look for "flood protection", the code is pretty obvious)

You have a blog. You have stats telling you how many people read it. You post links. But do you have something telling you how many people click on your links ?

Here is it : I'm releasing my latest plugin, Click Counter. Basically, it adds a click counter to links in your posts, as in these examples :
I love WordPress, WordPress and WordPress.
Click on one link and reload the page (hit counter displayed on mouseover link title, in plain text, or both)

Less basically, it comes with a real bunch of options you'll probably never need to tweak, but I wanted to do something as flexible and usable as I could.
Read More

I've finished (well, I guess so at least) my newest WordPress plugin. You'll notice on links mouseovers the number of clicks they have received : that's what my plugin does, keep track of link clicks.

I'm pretty happy about the result. The plugin is extremely configurable, is a real plugin and not a hack (install, activate, forget it : it works without further work, no need to edit your index.php or change anything to your posting habits), and I have learnt a lot about PHP and WordPress engine. Hey, I mean, I've even understood what preg_replace_callback is :)

I'll let the plugin roll for a few days, for final testing before I release it. I know I still have one bug to fix but the rest seems running smooth. Please let me know if you notice anything suspect :)