I recently just finished a project called “Twitter Critter” It’s a simple program that works with Twitter to generate an avatar.  All you have to do is enter in your own username, or anyone’s username, and it will create an avatar based on your Tweets.

It searches through your latest 200 tweets and uses those words to determine what color, critter, and what accessories your Twitter Critter will have.  It also generates a cute bio for that Critter based on those choices.  There are thousands of possible combinations, and if you come back after doing some Tweeting your result will change!  You can also Tweet out a permalink to the specific Twitter Critter your generated, and with one click you can set it as you avatar on Twitter.

Click here to get started!  http://twitter-critter.contropa.com/

Related Blogs:

http://rakugakiman.blog6.fc2.com/blog-entry-2827.html

I’ve been getting dozens of e-mails with spam posts to this blog and it’s become far to annoying to ignore any further!  I’ve been using WordPress’s integrated blacklist tool, but it’s time consuming to maintain and only protects against past threats.  I took a look at the database and I’ve managed to collect over 3,000 spam comments that take up more than 20 mbs of database space…which is quite a lot IMO.

In the past the best prevention I’ve found against spammers is to use spam lists.  One I like in particular is FSpamlist.com.  You have to sign-up to get an API key, but after that using it is very straight forward.   Stop Forum Spam is a big one too, you don’t need an API key to check for spammers so it was even easier to add.  I put a simple WordPress plugin together to integrate the lists with my blog.

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<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Spamlist
Plugin URI: http://wannabe.contropa.com/fspamlist-and-wordpress/351/
Description: Uses spamlists to stop spammers
Version: 1.0
Author: Foxumon
Author URI: http://www.contropa.com
License: GPL2
*/
 
add_action('wp_blacklist_check', 'spamlist', 10 , 6);
 
function spamlist($author, $email, $url, $comment, $user_ip, $user_agent) {
    $username = $author;
    $email = $email;
    //$ip = $user_ip;
    
    $fspamcheck = file_get_contents('http://www.fspamlist.com/xml.php?key=######&spammer='.$email.','.$username.','.$ip);
    if (strpos($fspamcheck, '<isspammer>true</isspammer>') !== FALSE) {
        wp_die('Your e-mail address has been marked as spam.  You may request that it be removed here: http://www.temerc.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=72','spam');
    }
    
    $fspamcheck = file_get_contents('http://www.stopforumspam.com/api?email='.$email.'&username='.$username);
    if (strpos($fspamcheck, '<appears>yes</appears>') !== FALSE) {
        wp_die('Your e-mail address has been marked as spam.  You may request that it be removed here: http://stopforumspam.com/removal','spam');
    }
}
?>

I’m currently not planning on submitting it to the WordPress plugins directory or anything like that, but you want to try it out too you just save the code as “spamlist.php” add it to a “spamlist” folder in your plug-ins directory and then it ought to show up in your admin where you can active it.

It’s currently not set to report the spam that it blocks in any way…I’m not sure if I want it to or not.  I’m currently looking at over 3k of spam comments that are just sitting around taking up room in my database, but at the same time I don’t want to get any legitimate posters blocked without anyway of knowing.  Anyways, I’m going to test it out for now and see how it goes 🙂

This is a very simple spam prevention mod for phpBB2.  The idea is that you define specific words that come up often in spam and it will block messages containing those words.

There is already a “spam words” mod out there, but with this mod you don’t need to make any database changes and you can set how many times the words need to be matched before blocking the message as spam.  Although, there isn’t an admin panel to go with this mod so settings need to be changed in the code.

Features:

• Checks if a post includes any designated spam words
• Set how many times those words need to be found to mark as spam
• Set how many posts a user needs to have their post checked
• PM a designated account with details about the post

Click here to download the mod

Another mod for phpBB2 that I have just completed is the well sought after “Facebook Connect” mod.  It’s a very straightforward version and should be very simply to install, though I give no guarantee that it will work for you.

I used to JavaScript Api to get the job done.  In a nutshell what it does is it first adds in a column to your User’s table to store someone’s Facebook ID.  Then the first time a user clicks on the “facebook connect” button it will ask the user if they want to link to an existing account or create a new one.  It will then add in the facebook ID to th row for the selected account.  Then the next time a user clicks on the “Facebook Connect” button it will check the User’s table for the user’s facebook ID and automatically log them in.

So, like I said, pretty straight forward.  The forum account will still work independently from Facebook, but will give the user instant activation and a faster way to login.

Features:

• Instant account activation.
• Single click log in when user is already logged into Facebook.
• Allows for linking/unlinking for logged in users.
• Will add the user’s Facebook avatar if they don’t already have one.

Click here to download the mod

8/02/10 Minor edit needed: It reads “Please submit both an email and password” which should be changed to “Please submit both a username and password”

From my experience Photoshop’s “Save for web and devices” will give you the biggest bang for your buck.  It’ll give you the lowest file sizes with the least amount of artifacts.

However, one problem I had is that it’s difficult to resize a lot of images in bulk.  Especially if you want to compress images in sub directories.  After a lot of searching I came across this useful little snippet.  One thing – it’s only meant for .JPGs.  So any other format and you won’t be finding this so useful…but it might not be too hard to tweak.

To use this first download the script on your computer and open Photoshop.  Go to file>scripts>browse, select the script, then select the folder containing you .JPG images.

You can edit the file in notepad, dreamweaver, whatever.  To change to quality edit this line:
SaveForWeb(saveFile,90); // set quality to suit
Where 90 refers to the quality setting.

I also did some editing to this so it would also resize images before compressing them.  First find the line:
app.preferences.typeUnits = TypeUnits.PIXELS;
After it add:
doc.resizeImage(200, 133);
where 200,133 is the image size.  I think I did have some issues with stretching so check the aspect ratio beforehand.

Download the script here