WordPress

Akismet is an incredible spam preventer for WordPress sites. I'd say it does 95% of the work for us. A few issues though make me want to augment it with other tools:

1. Some spam still slips through
2. It doesn't prevent spam that seems easy to block
3. There are false-positives, so spam still needs to be checked

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I recently learned about a browser feature where, if you provide a special HTTP header, it will automatically post to a URL with a report of any non-HTTPS content. This would be a great thing to do when transitioning a site to HTTPS, for example, to root out any mixed content warnings. In this article, we'll implement this feature via a small WordPress plugin.

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I've only just been catching up with the news about Gutenberg, the name for a revamp of the WordPress editor. You can use it right now, as it's being built as a plugin first, with the idea that eventually it goes into core. The repo has better information.

It seems to me this is the most major change to the WordPress editor in WordPress history. It also seems particularly relevant here as we were just talking about content blocks and how different CMS's handle them. That's exactly what Gutenberg is: a content block editor.

Rather than the content area being a glorified <textarea></textarea> (perhaps one of the most valid criticisms of WordPress), the content area becomes a wrapper for whatever different "blocks" you want to put there. Blocks are things like headings, text, lists, and images. They are also more elaborate things like galleries and embeds. Crucially, blocks are extensible and really could be anything. Like a [shortcode], I imagine.

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As of WordPress 4.7 (December 2016), WordPress has shipped with a JSON API built right in. Wanna see? Hit up this URL right here on CSS-Tricks. There is loads of docs for it.

That JSON API can be used for all sorts of things. I think APIs are often thought about in terms of using externally, like making the data available to some other website. But it's equally interesting to think about digesting that API right on the site itself. That's how so many websites are built these days away, with "Moden JavaScript" and all.

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I recently came across an article by Rory Cellan-Jones about a new technology from Jigsaw, a development group at Google focused on making people safer online through technology. At the time they'd just released the first alpha version of what they call The Perspective API. It's a machine learning tool that is designed to rate a string of text (i.e. a comment) and provide you with a Toxicity Score, a number representing how toxic the text is.

The system learns by seeing how thousands of online conversations have been moderated and then scores new comments by assessing how "toxic" they are and whether similar language had led other people to leave conversations. What it's doing is trying to improve the quality of debate and make sure people aren't put off from joining in.

As the project is still in its infancy it doesn't do much more than that. Still, we can use it!

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