Drinkable Chicken

(Or, (or spam (not spam)) in Scheme... :-)

This blog is powered by WordPress. Among other things, it notifies me when somebody posted a comment that needs to be moderated. Notifications go to my GMail address.

The other day, I found two notification mails in GMail's Spam section, that looked like this:

A new comment on the post #29 "Python vs Scheme: strings" is waiting for your approval
http://4.flowsnake.org/archives/29

Author : Xvyozvcu (IP: 206.53.55.5 , 206.53.55.5)
E-mail : yqufupiy@gmail.com
URL : http://blahblah.com/blah.html
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=206.53.55.5
Comment:
[...lots of bogus text with spammy URLs elided...]

The question is: from GMail's point of view, is this message spam or not?

My first reaction would be, no, it's not spam... it's a valid notification message with comment text that happens to contain spam. But there's a problem with that: the actual mail *does* contain spam, whether it's in the context of a WordPress comment or not, and marking it as non-spam might well give the spam filter the wrong idea.

On the other hand, if I do mark it as spam in GMail, then it might conclude that valid WordPress notifications are spam as well! (After all, they share the same header and structure.)

Hmm. Can't win for losing. Eventually I decided to leave them marked as non-spam, and deleted them manually. I'd rather get a few notifications that contain spam, than miss valid comments because they were mistakenly thrown in the spam bucket. Akismet should catch this kind of thing anyway (and usually does), so I should not get too many of those messages. Still, it's an odd problem.

This is the first time that I use a server-side blogging tool for my weblog. For Tao of the Machine I first used Kaa, then Firedrop. Efectos Especiales used Firedrop as well, and Interstellar Overdrive used a weird command line based tool that I never bothered to make available, called IV. (All of these generate static HTML, which is then uploaded via FTP.) And so now I'm using WordPress.Hey, Dreamhost makes it extremely easy to install it, so I'm using it. :-) Also, I don't use my horrible HughesNet connection anymore, so online editing suddenly is feasible.

So far I like it. Mostly. It has its problems, but overall, the experience has been relatively painless.

WordPress has a large number of plugins, most of which are easy to install and use (like wp-table). It's also more configurable than I expected it to be, and it's easy to make (small) changes to its PHP code even if you don't actually know much PHP.

Editing in a browser is not ideal, but IMHO it's still preferable to using a tool like e.g. MarsEdit, since the web-based editor has features that external editors don't have. And I definitely don't want to write straight HTML.

That said, the WordPress editor is not optimal for inserting or editing code (using <pre>), and a few times so far it has managed to mess up my formatting (esp. when switching between the "Visual" and "Code" tabs). It also has the annoying habit of replacing "neutral" quotes (both single and double) with left and right versions, which isn't much of a problem in regular text, but it is when I want to display e.g. Python code (where an apostrophe should not look like a backtick).

(Fortunately, there's a way to change that behavior... in wp-includes/default-filters.php, comment out the lines that say

add_filter('bloginfo', 'wptexturize');

and the quotes show up normally. (via.))

All in all, I like it, probably more so than I initially thought. It beats having to write your own blogging tool. :-) I sometimes miss the flexibility of my home-grown systems, but then again I didn't use my macros *that* much.

I've been wanting to display tables in my blog for a while, but the WordPress WYSIWYG editor isn't really suitable for that. Even if you write straight HTML, it will try to modify your table tags. :-(

Fortunately there's a cool plugin that makes it easy to create tables: wp-table. It adds a section to the WordPress admin where you can easily add and manage tables, then include them in your posts with [TABLE=ID].

Installing a WordPress plugin is easy too... Just stick the appropriate directory into wp-content/plugins, then activate the plugin in the admin. Sw33t.

Here's what such a table looks like: Quick Guide to SRFIs (very much a work in progress, by the way, and currently mostly for personal use -- I add SRFIs as I go).