It’s nice to have services such as Flickr where I can upload an image, then click a button to create an entry on my blog displaying and linking to the image. Unfortunately, there may come a time with I close my Flickr account or Flickr closes up shop. In that case my blog archives will have a bunch of broken images.

I’d like to have a Wordpress plugin that, nightly, copies all linked images to my server, and updates the blog entry so it displays the local image. That would ensure that even if I switched services my previous blog entries would remain intact. Perhaps the plugin should allow you to specify a whitelist of domains from which images should be copied, and it should probably write the original image URL in a comment.

Unfortunately I probably don’t have time to create this plugin, so here’s hoping someone will take up the gauntlet.

Update
Thanks to Garrett for pointing me toward this plugin: Post Filter, which is close to what I want.

I decided I didn’t want my del.ici.ous links fouling up my blog stream, so I hacked WordPress so it wouldn’t show posts tagged with mybookmarks unless you display the category page for that tag.

I still want to have del.icio.us post my daily bookmarks, because then I have an archive, plus it gives a little Google-juice to the bookmarked sites (and in the end that makes the web a better place, search-spammers notwithstanding).

After determining the Id of that category, here’s the code I added to skip it:

<?php if (in_category('57')) { continue; } ?>

Unfortunately, I also had to ditch my old template, so until I get a chance to redesign the site you’ll be stuck looking at the default WordPress template.

To make up for this disgrace, here’s a funny graphic.

p.s. I love the new AJAX category/tag selector in WordPress 2!

Spammers have determined that if they register for a message board account, they can leave a link to their webpage, and the link shows up on the message board user list. I’ll have to hack PHPBB to remove this back door for spammers.

I noticed the following interesting attempt: instead of leaving an obvious link to a spammer site, the link was something like the following:

studentloan.example.com/religious/

This URL looks relatively innocent – after all it has the word “religious” in it! But if you follow the link, you get a page that uses JavaScript to immediately redirect you to the spammer’s site.

After a bit more digging into the redirect page I found a JavaScript program that does the redirecting (heavily obfuscated to prevent Google from discovering the true purpose of the script), plus a bunch of computer-generated text to geared to increase their search results, a sample of which follows:

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Update 2006-03-14: This morning there were three message board spam posts, which I quickly eliminated when I saw them in my RSS feed. They wouldn’t have helped the spammer since the links were all marked as rel=”nofollow” after some changes I made to PHPBB. But I just don’t want to deal with it, so I changed the discussion boards to require registration before posting. Sigh… why do spammers have to ruin it for all of us.

It would be nice if PHPBB had the same “moderate once” system that WordPress uses.