Themes
Chris J Davis unveils his third, fourth, fifth site design on 'Sillyness Werd' which looks absolutely superb. I'm not normally a fan of white text on black backgrounds but this single column theme simply looks stunning, The focus is on the content, the text is clear and readable and the layout is uncluttered.
Plugins
Owen Winkler wrote a useful plugin ('Share Draft') to privately share a draft prior to publishing. Useful if you find yourself writing contentious material that needs to be cleared by lawyers.
In addition to his site redesign, Chris J Davis created another useful plugin ('Author Feeds') for use on Habari blogs with multiple authors. The plugin provides the ability to get a feed by author so you can subscribe to my infinite byte stream but blissfully ignore Uncle Harry's inane drivel.
Finally, a word of thanks to Andrew da Silva who has saved my life on two separate occasions recently. Not directly, but by providing the Habari community with the wonderful 'autosave' plugin. Like all the best things in life, this plugin is blissfully simple, does not need any configuration but simply sits in the background saving your precious article every minute (whenever content has changed).
Mailing Lists
Things have been relatively quiet over on the Habari mailing lists but Geoffrey Sneddon produced a superb, thorough, detailed analysis and a comprehensive history of character sets through the ages to provide some clarity and enable issues with Unicode conversion to be corrected by Chris Meller.
Habari-sphere
Matt Read attempts to impress everyone by claiming he gets 'thousands of comment spams every week'. Matt then decides to preserve his sanity by taking decisive action by forcing all commenters to use OpenID which is an interesting, and seemingly very effective, strategy. To kill all comment spam. Dead.
When he's not hacking Habari themes and plugins, Chris J Davis spends most of his time on the recently launched Viewzi site search which looks very impressive. Imagine a powerful, innovative search that understands images and video content in addition to ordinary text. Viewzi is hard to describe effectively but just try searching for 'Habari' on Chris' site.
Unusually for a newly launched product, Viewzi is available for Habari from day one and Ali B has also installed Viewzi on his blog and has a positive review of the software.
Finally, it grieves me to report that Michael Heilemann has chosen to downgrade his blog from Habari to Wordpress.2.7. Obviously, Michael thought the Habari evangelism police hadn't noticed but we have. Seriously, Michael Heilemann was a leading light behind the design of the Habari administration interface ('Monolith') so, for that alone, he deserves our eternal gratitude and I sincerely hope he will observe from a distance, and hopefully continue to contribute, to the development of Habari.
Forcing OpenID to counter spam? That's an interesting idea.
I predict it won't take long for spammers to set up their own OpenID providers. ;)
I have just recently discovered Habari, and a site such as this that consolidates all information is greatly needed, thanks for your efforts!
@Marjolein Sadly, I suspect you are right. It would be interesting to compare and contrast the effectiveness of the various spam defence mechanisms available for Habari (builtin spam check, Defensio, Mollom, Honeypot, Disqus)
@Wesley Welcome. If you find one post on this blog that's helpful or informative, that'll be enough for me :-)
OpenID? nice idea, but has the same effect as required site registration - less comments, low accessibility of your blog.
there ARE other ways, like fake fill-out input fields which get hidden by CSS / JS code for real users. Works perfectly well for me, for any kind of site I'm running.
cu, w0lf.