Blogging

There are a couple of apps which can post to Drupal as well as the majority of other popular blogging platforms straight from your iPhone: iBlogger and BlogPress. I'm writing this from BlogPress on my iPhone, but the app also supports the iPad for all you lucky folks out there. With BlogPress you can view previous posts, save drafts, upload images to Flickr or Picasa and upload movies to YouTube, all of which can then be embedded straight into the post. Drafts can be saved to the app and are stored on the iPhone or can be stored on your Drupal site. No more excuses for not having enough time to blog!

If you know of any other apps for blogging from the iPhone, especially to Drupal, please add them in the comments below. Happy remote blogging :)

I've noticed a recent influx of blog spam which seem, to some degree, relevant to the content it's posted on. I think spammers are composing comments targeted to specific subject areas and then searching the web for content on that subject so that when they post the comment it appears at first glance to be genuine. Of course the most telling part is the totally unrelated link to men's watches or postal degrees which seem somewhat out of place in a comment on a php web development framework. Nevertheless, if you're not careful the comments can slip through the net and appear on your blog. The other issue which has become more of a problem lately is the spammer's ability to evade CAPTCHA challenges. I've increased the level of noise and distortion for the CAPTCHA challenge on this blog but some still get through. It's as if there is a person actually typing in a response to the challenge, in which it won't be of much help. There are a few ways in which you can help fight, reduce and manage blog spam, because let's face it - it's not going to stop entirely. So let's have a look at some quick first pointers.

I've decided to give the web service, Mollom, a try since my CAPTCHA, which I kept tweaking to the point where I nearly couldn't read it, was letting me down. The problem with CAPTCHA is it logs how many form submissions it blocks, which is great, but this doesn't necessarily mean SPAM submissions; it could be frustrated people not being able to post a comment on your blog. Mollom works by analysing the form submission for SPAM patterns, then determining whether it is suitable or not. It's quite strange to see my forms without a CAPTCHA underneath, but I should know soon enough how well the service works as I have many form submissions blocked by CAPTCHA each day.

Mollom is available for Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla! and many more CMSs. It also has developer libraries for PHP, Java, Ruby, Python and many more.

A friend of mine recently told me about Feedburner's Socialize feature, where you can aggregate RSS feeds and post the links to Twitter automatically. This is quite a neat feature as Feedburner can also include some of your content in the tweet, create hashtags from the post categories and create inline hashtags from the categories and words in the title and post. Check out this feature by logging into your Feedburner account, selecting the feed you want to use, then go to the 'publicize' tab along the top then the 'socialize' tab along the side.

Here's how your tweet will appear: