FrontPage magazine.com :: Piss Christ vs. Cartoon Jihad by Rocco DiPippo

Is their religion not strong enough to withstand the cartoon assault on it?

I guess today is pithy quote day.

Ok, brendoman.com authors, here's what you need to know about the upgrade.

1. Comments are now moderated. No comments appear on the site until a logged in user approves them. I don't like this, but I want to try it until we get a feel for how the other methods are working. To make sure that you know about new comments, log in and edit your settings to enable email notifications. You'll get an email for each new comment and you can go approve or delete it. If you want to turn off comment moderation for your blog, go ahead. Here's how. In the back office click on the blogs tab and then the advanced sub tab. For "default status of comments" change it from draft to published.

1b. While you're on that page, disable trackbacks and pingbacks if you don't use them or care about them. The same goes for the pinging stuff. Check the ones you want, but if you don't care, disable them.

2. There's a captcha image plugin installed, but I'd really rather not use it. I don't like them. It's not enabled now, but I'll probably experiment with it in the future.

3. There are some other antispam measures, too, but I don't want to tip our hand too much to the spammers.

4. Version 1.8 has a file manager built into it, but it's not working right now. So, there's no uploading images until I get that fixed.

5. There's a spell checker in the backoffice. Enjoy!

6. YouTube fans will find a little button just under the post writing area called "YouTube". Click on it a little toolbar appears above the posting area. Search for a video and click it to add it to your post. Now you don't have to muck around with code or even go hunting for the video.

7. The url of the backoffice is now http://www.brendoman.com/admin.php

8. I had to empty the stats table for the upgrade, but if you look in the stats tab you'll see that it now has charts.

9. There are some other user settings worth checking out like a different backoffice skin and the anti-bozo form validator. It warns you when you leave a page in the middle of writing a post without saving it.

There are some other things, but that should get you started. Have fun and let me know if you find anything broken.

I'm posting this from version 1.8. The upgrade seems to have gone ok.

Let's all give a shout out to our pal Luis, a brendoman.com staple since pretty much the beginning. Luis entertains me pretty much every day of the year in one form or another. Cheers!

I got tired of waiting for the new version of b2evolution to be released, so I'm upgrading brendoman.com to the latest developement snapshot. That's one of the good things about using open source software. The code is always available. After the upgrade we'll have much better measures against spam and a whole bunch of nice features that I'll highlight after the upgrade is finished.

What all the blog authors need to know is that their site may look a bit different after the upgrade. I've worked on all of the skins that the active blogs use, so I at least know that the sites will work. You may have some minor problems. Make a list of any little problems and send them to me after I give the all clear. Our first priority is to stop the spam in its tracks and deal with any major problems. If you have major problems, let me know about them as soon as you notice them.

I hope it all goes smoothly. I'll keep you posted.

I found another #^%$# selling blog spamming software, and this one is specifically targeted at b2evolution: b2eblogger.com Toward the bottom of their huge page of marketing BS I found this little gem:

With the power that B2Eblogger gives you comes responsibility. And we intend to ensure that every B2Eblogger Software user is responsible and understands that Common Sense and Courtesy equal more profits, more respect, more repeat posts being allowed!

Responsible? Courtesy? So, they'll spam you responsibly and politely. That's why I've been getting so much spam that says "Great site! Here are some other resources . . ." Wow, thanks for being so responsible and courteous, guys! Now I don't hope you get hit by a bus any more. Let's make it a car instead.

I guess there's a bit of comfort in knowing that the idiots doing this are out $247 dollars for the software. Wait, no, that's not comforting at all. What is comforting . . .

There Are Some Things In Life That Can Be Stopped... This Is Not One Of Them

That's where you're wrong, jerk. There is something that can stop your little racket. It's called b2evolution 1.8. Once that's installed on this blog we'll be done with spam.