Like just about every other blog there is one person who writes this blog – me. So why don’t theme creators have an option “If no-one else writes for this blog do you want “Posted by [your name]” on every single entry? I would bet that 99.99999999% of bloggers would say “No thanks” to that. And it saves us digging through numerous files trying to remove it from main view, single, cat, tag, page and whatever else. Please – make that conditional and let us decide. If not then at least tell us where to look so we can edit. Thanks.

Back in the mists of WordPress time – that’ll be 2005 – many people in the wordpress.org forums were mystified by trackbacks. (In 2004 it was ftp among others). So I created a blog in the /wordpress directory on my old domain and that served only for people to ping and trackback to. They got somewhere that was linked to a How To and that they could perfect their techniques on. Worked a treat. Had hundreds and hundreds of posts, many times that in the inevitable pings / trackbacks to those posts. Every so often I’d clear the db and reinstall WP, change the theme, check what was going on but otherwise I left it alone. Last few days though I’ve been getting a few ‘Please moderate this comment’ emails and today I went to look. Several spam posts but one in particular had 860 spam comments thrown at it. None got through of course but 860? So with that and the other spam I’ve killed the blog. It’s 4 years later and thanks to spammers everyone know what a trackback and a ping is anyway. The rest of that /wordpress directory will be nuked at some point. It mostly harks back to 2004/5 when WP help was embryonic. I can still remember writing 7 ftp guides in a day or so..

To create random gravatars for your comments so you have neither the default, empty spaces or the same one of your choice.

First get Matt’s script. I first used this when I wrote a couple of years ago how to get random headers on the blog and it’s come in handy again. Save that as it is.
Next go find your images and place them in a folder.
Put the script inside that folder.
Upload and link from your comments.php
Easy.

Here’s one I made earlier.
Download this folder, unzip.
It contains all the images I’m using here right now (127 of them) and the script
Upload to your site
Open comments.php and change the gravatar code to
<img src="< ?php gravatar("", 80 , "http://your-domain/your-folder/ctar.php"); ?/>
After saving the changes your comments should now have the same images that I am using. Once you see it working all you need to do is change the images in that folder.
If you want a long example, click the link in the top right to the “What makes you happy” post.

If you want to batch resize, I recommend ImageBadger on Windows.
If you want to batch rename – again on Windows – 1-4a Rename is excellent.

And should you want to keep the images in the download for some reason, not a problem.
Of course you don’t need to use all 127. Delete all but a couple. It’s there for testing. (It’s an 850kb folder to upload so deleting a few will speed things up).

An improvement would be to check for an author url and link the gravatar to that and if there is no author url to then link to a default of the blog owner’s choice.. The latter is easy – wrap the code above in a href – but the ‘if’ bit throws me. Plugin territory probably.

Yesterday was pretty cool. Matt had been in London for the Future of Web Apps conference and yesterday he popped up to our village to meet the family. We met up at the Castle Hotel when we spent ages chatting, had food then came back here so he could meet Winston – Matt was surprised to say the least at his size. P got to play with the iPhone and now wants one (at 900 quid for phone and contract a pop, that’s a no) and Matt saw Support Central – a couple of computers and monitors anyway. Jacq and the girls have finally met Matt and they all think he’s a very decent guy. Which he is. And he now has faces and voices to put to the names and initials I use here. A very pleasant evening.

I blogged the WP / meet Matt / Conference thing in London a while ago. It’s next week. So if you are planning on being there, are you aiming for Thursday or Friday? I’m not doing the conference so I’m just there to lounge around, take photos and imbibe large quantities of caffeine. I have T-shirts (the red ones), I have stickers if you like stickers and Matt and others will be around.
Mathew has proposed a couple of venues but we just need to know who and when. I’ll find an old sim card for my mobile and post that here just before too. So, are you there?

Ignore the above – go read Matt’s blog.

Stephen Fry not only has a blog, but it’s a WordPress blog. (src. Linkbunnies)
Did you see his programs on being bi-polar? Very very good.