Andrew Grant

I’m a great fan of your service. You have a growing number of competitors, but I find they often cast the net too wide and don’t match your signal-to-noise ratio.

But there’s a problem.

Nearly every frickin day my subscription to your RSS feed for “Media Center” contains several pieces of worthless spam with the title ‘Philippine Condo Hotels or Condotels “Open The Door To Lifestyle Real Estate”‘.

If you can’t block a piece of spam that has a consistent title, then what hope do you have when tag-spammers move from stuffing posts with tags to something a bit cleverer?

Please fix it.

Signed,

A Usually Happy User.

Since late last night the Technorati search feed I use for WordPress news has been filling up with hundreds of posts from sites. The vast majority of these posts have nothing to do with WordPress, and most don’t even include Technorati tags!

For example this is the site that’s currently at the top of the search feed; http://www.aggiegeeks.com/wordpress/?p=57

It seems clear something has become broken with the method Technorati uses to catalogue sites. This is backed up by the Technorati Graph that displays the number of posts that are tagged with WordPress. There’s a spike that begins on the 17th and has increased today.

I wonder if Technorati is attempting to catalogue posts based on their content, and as a result pulling in all sites that contain a “powered by WordPress” comment. Whatever the problem, it’s very annoying and my finger is hovering over the unsubscribe button

I’ve updated the latest version of Keyword Tags for WordPress to 0.80. The biggest two changes are that it’s now possible for users to specify their own format for tags and the tag group (previously it was only possible to select from several predefined formats and change the begin/end tags). Unfortunately there was no real way to migrate previous settings to the new format, anyone who modified these values will need to reapply their changes. I think you’ll find the benefits worth it though.

Another change is the addition of compatibility options for two other tagging packages. This was possible in previous versions via the advanced settings, but you would have needed to know the specifics to set them up. The final changes are a rewrite of the options menu to be a little more flexible, and a function names kwt_get_keyword_string that returns the formatted keyword string rather than displaying it.

The download is on the Keyword Tags page.

As someone pointed out to me the latest version of Windows Live Writer now has native support for tagging posts. I think this is a great feature for a lot of people, particularly those who’s blogs are not self-hosted, but for a lot of users I don’t see it replacing Keyword Tags or any of the other packages out there. My preference is to have tags stored as meta data that can be later processed, and while I’m a big fan of Windows Live Writer I don’t post exclusively from it. Having a tagging interface that works both from both client applications and the WordPress GUI is important to me.

After feedback from a few people, and more time using Windows Live Writer with WordPress, I’ve uploaded a new version of the Keyword Tags for WordPress plugin that features several changes;

• Static WordPress pages (e.g. ‘About’) can now be edited within Windows Live Writer and Ecto.
• Added a fix that stops Windows Live Writer from truncating posts that use the <!–more–> tag
• Added option that will always display drafts above normal posts when viewing a list of posts within Windows Live Writer/Ecto
• Added an option that will set the date and time of a post to the current date/time when a post is published after previously being saved as a draft via XMLRPC. By default there’s a bug in WordPress where posts are given the date/time they were first saved as a draft if edited via a tool such as Windows Live Writer/Ecto.

Get it here; Feedback welcome!

Update 

I’ve just uploaded a new version (0.75) that has has an option to turn tags into a meta-keyword statement in the header of single posts or pages. I’d had this functionality in my custom theme for a while, but thought I’d make it a global option