Since upgrading to the new version of Windows Live Writer, and with some great help from Joe Cheng from the WLW team we found out that the Bad Behavior plugin for WordPress was causing some problems - mainly WLW not being able to connect to the xmlrpc.php files.

Once deactivated my posting goodness returned but it left a bit of a hole for spammers to do their nasty work. This meant I had to find a replacement for it pronto and maybe a couple of other tools to help in this never ending battle against the scum of the blogging world.

For the moment I have settled on two plugin’s to try

1. Spam Karma 2.3 - “Spam Karma 2 (SK2) is an anti-spam plugin for the WordPress blogging platform. It is meant to stop all forms of automated Blog spam effortlessly, while remaining as unobtrusive as possible to regular commenter’s. Spam Karma 2 is the proud successor to Spam Karma, with whom it shares most of the development ideas, but absolutely none of the code” - Plugin Page here
2.  Anti-Leech - to help piss off those blog scrapers who use your content to populate AdSense pages. Plugin Page here

Along with that I have decided to remove the “Buy me a beer PayPal donation link. In the beginning I thought it was a rather neat idea but something about it kinda bothered me. I generally don’t like asking for donations (ask the members of the WinExtra Forums and they’ll tell you all about that ).

The only reason I put them in place was primarily for folks to show their thanks for my software projects that I make freely available from here. while I may not charge for the software it is always nice to get some recognition for work done - not to mention that Ruby likes getting her treats on a regular basis. the problem I had to a certain extend with the “Buy me a beer” method was it gave me a feeling of always having my hand out looking for small change - yuck.

So from now on; and as soon as I can incorporate it in each of the software pages there will just be a simple option to make a PayPal donation for that specific program should you wish to show your support.

Now if you encounter any problems with these new plugin’s that have been installed please let me know as soon as possible either via the Contact page or by email as codenut @ winextra.com