Project52 is an interesting project to encourage bloggers to write meaningful entries, at least once a week. But, is this really a good idea? Will this serve as inspiration or just be another thing one “has to” do, thus contributing to stress and spurring tons of useless, not very thought through entries? We’ll see. I’ve signed up for now, but I doubt I’ll manage to actually do this.

Well, lately I’ve been attracting more visitors, mainly because I’ve started to build up a presence on the internet – most referrals are twitter URL collectors such as twitturls and twitturly, but some are from blogs I’ve commented on and similar things. However, this slight increase in popularity has, as you can see, come with a quite astonishing increase of spam. In about ten days the amount of spam caught every day by Akismet increased tenfold, going from 20 comments every day (which is quite a lot to start with) to a whopping 210 caught spam comments around December 31st.

I think the problem is solved now though, since I installed the reCAPTCHA plugin for WordPress – it’s a trade-off, of course, since you now have to enter more text when you comment, but overall it’s a pretty good idea because it means less false positives will be lost forever in an endless torrent of spam. On a side note, I think some spam bots might be using an IE5.5 user-agent header, because my stats script is picking up an awful lot of them. But I digress.

I know, I haven’t posted anything in ages – there hasn’t been much to write about. An obviuous lie; a lot of shit happened – I got my driver’s license and I scored 1.7 on Högskoleprovet, the swedish SAT equivalent. But other than that not much has happened.

I am, however, currently trying to redesign the blog again, partly because I’m bored but also because I’m sick of the current one. Unfortunately there’s a lot of other things to do, all of them relating to school and most of them being final exams in different subjects. Pressure is intense.

Also, I feel like I need to mention what good weather we’ve had here in Skåne this week – 15-20 °C all week with practically constant sunshine… it’s awesome.

Now, this might not seem like something worth reporting, but I have now perfected my breadcrumb code which I use on this blog. Now, most of it is simple but the thing I managed to do today was to include recursive sub-page listing in the breadcrumb. Since Wordpress doesn’t supply an is_subpage() function I had to use the code available on the codex (it’s there somewhere) and since you can’t select the parent of a parent easily I had to do some magic with $wp_query. Eventually it all worked out though.

<p id="navbar"><?php
            if(is_page('7') and $wp_query->get('page')) :
                echo "<a href=\"".get_bloginfo('url')."\">" . get_bloginfo('name') . "</a> » <a href=\"".get_bloginfo('url')."/archives/\">Archives</a> » " . $wp_query->get('page');
            elseif(is_page()) :
				if(get_the_title($post->post_parent) != the_title(' ' , ' ',false)) :
					echo "<a href=\"".get_bloginfo('url')."/\">" . get_bloginfo('name') . "</a>";
					$oldquery = $wp_query->get('pagename');
					while(get_the_title($post->post_parent) != the_title(' ' , ' ',false)) :
						$crumbs[] = " » <a href=\"".get_permalink($post->post_parent)."\">" . get_the_title($post->post_parent) . "</a>";
						$wp_query->query('page_id='.$post->post_parent);
						$wp_query->get_posts();
					endwhile;
					echo implode('', array_reverse($crumbs));
					$wp_query->query('pagename='.$oldquery);
					$wp_query->get_posts();
					echo " » " .wp_title('', false);
				else :
					echo "<a href=\"".get_bloginfo('url')."/\">" . get_bloginfo('name') . "</a> » " . wp_title('', false);
				endif;
            elseif(is_month()) :
                echo "<a href=\"".get_bloginfo('url')."/\">" . get_bloginfo('name') . "</a> » <a href=\"".get_bloginfo('url')."/archives/\">Archives</a> » <a href=\"" . get_year_link($wp_query->get('year')) . "\">" . $wp_query->get('year') . "</a> » " . date("F",mktime(0,0,0,$wp_query->get('monthnum')));
            elseif(is_day()) :
                echo "<a href=\"".get_bloginfo('url')."/\">" . get_bloginfo('name') . "</a> » <a href=\"".get_bloginfo('url')."/archives/\">Archives</a> » <a href=\"" . get_year_link($wp_query->get('year')) . "\">" . $wp_query->get('year') . "</a> » ";
                echo "<a href=\"" . get_month_link($wp_query->get('year'), $wp_query->get('monthnum')) . "\">" . date("F",mktime(0,0,0,$wp_query->get('monthnum'))) . "</a> » " . date("l jS",mktime(0,0,0,$wp_query->get('monthnum'),$wp_query->get('day'),$wp_query->get('year')));
            elseif(is_year()) :
                echo "<a href=\"".get_bloginfo('url')."/\">" . get_bloginfo('name') . "</a> » <a href=\"".get_bloginfo('url')."/archives/\">Archives</a> » " . $wp_query->get('year');
            elseif(is_404()) :
                echo "<a href=\"".get_bloginfo('url')."/\">" . get_bloginfo('name') . "</a> » File not found";
            elseif(is_category()) :
                echo "<a href=\"".get_bloginfo('url')."/\">" . get_bloginfo('name') . "</a> » <a href=\"".get_bloginfo('url')."/categories/\">Categories</a> » " . get_catname($wp_query->get('cat'));
            elseif(is_single()) :
                if($wp_query->get('page')) :
                    echo "<a href=\"".get_bloginfo('url')."/\">" . get_bloginfo('name') . "</a> » <a href=\"".get_bloginfo('url')."/archives/\">Archives</a> » <a href=\"" . get_year_link($wp_query->get('year')) . "\">" . $wp_query->get('year') . "</a> » ";
                    echo "<a href=\"" . get_month_link($wp_query->get('year'), $wp_query->get('monthnum')) . "\">" . date("F",mktime(0,0,0,$wp_query->get('monthnum'))) . "</a> » <a href=\"" . get_day_link($wp_query->get('year'), $wp_query->get('monthnum'), $wp_query->get('day')) . "\">";
                    echo date("l jS",mktime(0,0,0,$wp_query->get('monthnum'),$wp_query->get('day'),$wp_query->get('year'))) . "</a> » <a href=\"" . get_permalink($wp_query->get('id')) . "\">" . wp_title('', false) . "</a> » Page" . $wp_query->get('page');
                else :
                    echo "<a href=\"".get_bloginfo('url')."/\">" . get_bloginfo('name') . "</a> » <a href=\"".get_bloginfo('url')."/archives/\">Archives</a> » <a href=\"" . get_year_link($wp_query->get('year')) . "\">" . $wp_query->get('year') . "</a> » ";
                    echo "<a href=\"" . get_month_link($wp_query->get('year'), $wp_query->get('monthnum')) . "\">" . date("F",mktime(0,0,0,$wp_query->get('monthnum'))) . "</a> » <a href=\"" . get_day_link($wp_query->get('year'), $wp_query->get('monthnum'), $wp_query->get('day')) . "\">";
                    echo date("l jS",mktime(0,0,0,$wp_query->get('monthnum'),$wp_query->get('day'),$wp_query->get('year'))) . "</a> » " . wp_title('', false);
                endif;
            else :
                echo "<a href=\"".get_bloginfo('url')."/\">" . get_bloginfo('name') . "</a> » Home";
            endif;
        ?></p>

Feel free to use it however you like. Linking back is appreciated though.

Recently, and I mean 5-minutes-ago-recently, I was fixing a bug with this design concerning som floating failures. Namely, the sidebar kept jumping down below the last content <p>. After 2 hours of playing around with the WebDeveloper toolbar for firefox i found the solution: I forgot to unfloat the child elements of the sidebar. After a quick div#sidebar *{ float: none } the problem was fixed. So, take this as a warning: remember to undo your floating.

Wordpress 2.1 has a bug. Either that or the editor just hates me, because it insists on using <a HREF instead of <a href, which makes a huge difference since I’m using XHTML. Way to go!