A Modest Construct

The last two days have seen a couple of changes under the hood here, none of which are staggering but all of which I’m rather pleased with.

Akismet

Akismet is nothing new, of course, having debuted last year as a centralized spam-catching service for Wordpress blogs (and now MT, too, and a growing number of other services), the theory being that a heuristic neural network can do a better job that a monolithic filter. Having been enamored of Spam Karma for as long as I can remember, I never bothered to make the switch. Spam Karma, after all, did a pretty damn good job.

However, yesterday’s little (still baffling) problem with CPU usage prompted me to try the service. I already had an API key (because I used an Akismet plugin for SK2), and the idea of a service that did all the work for me (rather than having the CPU on my own server used to diagnose the admittedly high amount of spam I’ve gotten lately) appealed to me.

Everything seems to be working fine so far. I think perhaps this was a good move on my part: disabling SK2 also had the added benefit of removing a fairly large amount of data from my database.

Blockquotes

For some time now, I’ve been trying to add citation info to my blockquotes (which I use frequently). Generally, my code goes something like this:

<blockquote>
 
<p>Lorem Ipsum</p>
 
<cite> <a href="http://heliologue.com/"> My Source </a></cite>
 
</blockquote>

Which creates the following:

Lorem Ipsum

My Source

This is a decent method, but unfortunately it ignores the recommended spec for blockquote citation. Technically speaking, <cite></cite> is used to italicize (by default) the names of books, movies, &c. It’s somewhat semantic to use it as a blockquote source, but the true-to-W3C implementation goes something like this:

<blockquote cite="http://heliologue.com" title="My Source">
 
<p>Lorem Ipsum</p>
 
</blockquote>

This is good for things like search engines, but not so useful to the user, as this meta information isn’t visible to the user without some tricks.

Enter this nifty javascript from 1976 Design, which will take the cite and title attributes and display them underneath the blockquote text. Chyetanya Kunte turned it into a Wordpress plugin, and suddenly I’ve got an easy, user-friendly solution that also adheres to standards¹.

The result?

Lorem Ipsum

Now I just have to go back through my archives and fix all my previous blockquotes.

1. I did have to hack the javascript a bit to remove a prepended hyphen that I didn’t care for[↩]