Then each went to his own home

Finally I moved my blog from Movabletype to Wordpress. This because we use blogs at the company where I work and we wanted a free open source blogger we could offer our customers. So to learn Wordpress I just moved my blog.. It was a bunch of work, the import of the posts was easy, but then to style up the site and integrate my tools (if you care: I created a separate page template for these pages, then in the post I put just the url of the PHP script I wanted to call and in the page template I did an include of that particular script) was a bunch of work..
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I want to share some experiences I gained from using the javascript wysiwyg editor Helene. The editor is quite cool. It supports php and smarty highlighting. It’s a pity that neither I can reach the creator of this editor nor I can write to the helene mailing list (the email doesn’t come through: user not found). So I share here with you (whoever) some dos and dont’s:

• Don’t try to run Helene directly (that is, without the <iframe> indirection). I thought it would be easier and the integration would be more seamless but that wasn’t the case
• Helene has to run on the same server as your script. That is, because helene runs in the <iframe>, you have to write to the editor (that is: textarea) after reading a file and reading from the editor when posting the form (that is, you do that via onsubmit parameter of <form>). If helene runs on a different server (that is, the src-parameter of <iframe> points to a different server), javascript suppresses that for security reasons
• Read the HOWTO of helene. It spares you some headache (it deals with removing some newline characters from the input file)
• Don’t try to use <object> instead of <iframe>. I don’t remember exactly but I think ie had problems with <object>
• After reading from $_POST I had to
  
$source = $_POST['helene']
$source = stripslashes($source);
$source = str_replace("\r\n", "\n", $source);


That’s it. I hope it helps someone. I surely hope that someone does some further improvements on this great editor.

On my “recent” two entries about comment spam I stated the actions I wanted to take against the comment spam.
The solution, at the moment:

• Changed the position of my comment-script (as suggested). Resulting to that actionIn the last two months I had 47 error hits (404) on /mt/mt-comments.cgi. That means that this action prevented 47 spams
• Installed Brad Choates MTDSBL Plugin. Since this plugin deletes comments coming from not trustworthy ips (that is: open proxies), I don’t have statistic info on that.
• Installed Jay Allens MT-Blacklist. And this plugin finally saves my days:
  
  Of the over 500 comment spams, 60 comments have been moderated because they contain too many links, I had to “despam” them (updates sent to the central MT-Blacklist server). On the first days, I had to despam quite a few comments but in the last two weeks, just one comment-spam wave hit me. About 3 comments finally came “through” so they appeared on my page.

So, in the end, I am content with these three techniques working together. Ok, I have to admit that I rather have any comments on my sites (3 so far) so the best action would have been to block all comments :-)