Akismet recently announced they now have a new competitor in the war against SPAM. Defensio have a similar approach, with a centralized API that gives a thumbs up or down for a comment, and some added information indicating “spamminess.”

In short (and in their own words) Defensio gives you:

• Stellar Accuracy

  You’ll deal with less spam on your blog, period.

• Easier Spam Management

  Managing your spambox will become dead simple.

• Personalized Filtering

  Your own habits will help make the filter better over time.

• Transparency Through Statistics

  Meaningful stats so that you’ll really know what’s going on.

I will be trying their service on my DEV blog, in the meanwhile - Best of luck, guys!

Matt recently announced the release of the first Beta for the 2.3 series/branch. I’ll give it a try on localhost first and probably wait for the first stable release before upgrading.

More info about features and changes in WordPress 2.3 are available at Wordpress’ developer blog.

From what I can tell it looks very promising, hopefully upgrading will be as easy as well…

I’m currently working on a brand new theme for WordPress, based on the popular Sandbox theme from plaintext.org. It’s still in the early stages but I’m hoping to provide a fast and useful 2-column theme for those that find my other theme a bit “wide”.

The theme will (when done) also serve as the design for my forthcoming development/project site. Here you will find (in the not so distant future) work samples and design/programming tips/tutorial.

Please have a look and let me know what you think. I would also greatly appreciate it if you would provide me with input on what you like to see (functions, widgets, plugins, design etc.).

Yesterday WordPress announced the immediate release of version 2.2.1 which besides fixing a few bugs also addresses several security issues which was discovered during the development process.

Unfortunately, 2.2.1 is not just a bug fix release. Some security issues came to light during 2.2.1 development, making 2.2.1 a required upgrade. 2.2.1 addresses the following vulnerabilities:

• Remote shell injection in PHPMailer
• Remote SQL injection in XML-RPC Discovered by Alexander Concha.
• Unescaped attribute in default theme

So if you haven’t done it already, now would be a good time to upgrade. Visit the download section to grab the latest code.

Following the Detailed Upgrade Instructions I spent less than 30 minutes getting everything up and running. It might take a little longer if you’ve made changes to the core files, but all in all it shouldn’t take that long and it’s definitely worth it in the long run.

Please don’t hesitate to ask should you encounter any incompatibilities with some of my Wordpress plugins or the Blogvaria WordPress theme.

When including anything but an image using the Lightbox Media (my Lightbox clone) you might have noticed that IE automatically adds a border around the content. I’ve tried numerous CSS modifications to get this disappear but not until today found a proper solution.

The ridiculously simple solution came about after some Googleing and it all comes down to the frameBorder attribute being case sensitive. As my code read frameborder IE simply ignored it.

Download Lightbox Media version 1.01