Rocking in Hakata

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Hey - sorry for the lack of activity yesterday. I meant to get a video of my students making fried rice, soup, and red bean sweets online - but I failed to do so. I had class preparations and then I fell asleep earlier than I had planned. Oh well - you’ll see it next week, I’m sure. In the meantime, I wanted to let you know about a few small updates to the site that won’t be super apparent to you.

First, the SABRE (Simple Anti Bot Registration Engine) plug-in put together by Didier Lorphelin is up and running on this site. So far, it kicks butt. You’ll only notice it if you try to register - because you’ll be asked to fill out an alphanumeric CAPTCHA field and answer a simple math question to prove you’re human. (And if you happen to be using an IP address that’s on a blacklist, you’ll be unable to register even if you can jump through the hoops.) It is highly recommended for those who need to kill registration spam. It has caught 5 spam registrations since I turned it on last night.

It might be worth noting that I am hoping to use the reCAPTCHA plug-in when it is updated to version 2.8. I put in a request for the ability to plop it onto the Wordpress User Registration page instead of in the comment fields of every post, and got a prompt response that it was not only added to the to do list for 2.8, but already done! Ha ha. Excellent.

Alright - the other cool thing is that my site has JUST been approved to participate in the closed Woopra beta. And man, it is looking cool. It is most definitely the “new hotness” so far as statistics go. I can’t wait to try out the live analytics client when I get home today. (Before I head to the bus stop, that is.) Ha ha. Just gotta count down now… Don’t worry, it does not violate your privacy or tell me anything about you that I can’t find out without using it. It’s just the slickest, most accessible way to access the useful information so that I can improve the site. Yay! If you run a site and you haven’t signed up yet, I recommend getting in line over there. I waited about 2.5 weeks for activation, and they plan on going through mass approvals within a few weeks as they update their infrastructure to handle it.

Anyhoo - I’ll see you when I’m back from Hiroshima and a Disney-filled weekend!