Dan Grossman » Projects

Spam Filter For Your Twitter Followers

Dan — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:43:39 +0000

I’m tired of checking the profile of everyone that follows me on Twitter to decide whether to follow them back. At the same time, I don’t want to follow everyone, or I’ll add spammers, and I do want to know what most of the people that follow me have to say.

I created Follow Ham this morning to solve that problem. It looks up who’s following you that you’re not following back, computes a “spamminess” score for each of those people, then recommends which you should follow and which you should block. Check it out and let me know if you run into any problems — consider it in beta status with only me having used it so far.

If you’re interested in the machine learning techniques behind the spam classification, read the About Follow Ham page.

WP Calais Auto Tagger Updated (v1.3.1)

Dan — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:17:01 +0000

WP Calais Auto Tagger has been updated to version 1.3 and works on new versions of WordPress again. This is a complete rewrite of the tagging interface to hopefully make the plugin more resilient — it’s been breaking when WordPress releases new versions too often for my liking. Now it replaces the WordPress tag interface entirely with its own, which has the same functionality (add and remove tags) as well as the ability to suggest tags based on the post content.

Update: v1.3.1 fixes bugs with the visual editor and scheduled posts.

Leave a comment if you run into any bugs. I hope to fix up the archive tagger plugin soon as well.

WP Review Site 3.0

Dan — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 02:33:46 +0000

WP Review Site’s gotten a major version number increase to reflect a large number of substantial feature boosts, making it much more flexible and much easier to use without touching any code. Version 3 lets you add Amazon-style star ratings and user reviews to any WordPress site on a per-post, per-page and per-category basis. It lets you create different sets of rating dimensions for different categories, automatically adds Google Maps to local business listings, and tracks affiliate links and images for each post.

w3roi is live

Dan — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 23:52:05 +0000

I am writing up the announcement e-mails to send to my lists tonight announcing it: w3roi is open for business.

Even if you’re not looking for a new way to track your online advertising and get more sales out of your advertising spend, if you read my blog, you’re probably involved with online business in some way.

Check out the affiliate program for an opportunity to earn 25% recurring commissions — you get 25% of the monthly payment of any referral, every month, for as long as that person stays a customer.

WP Calais Auto Tagger Updated (v1.2)

Dan — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 03:56:45 +0000

I just updated the Calais Auto Tagger plugin for WordPress, which generates tag suggestions for your blog posts using the Calais semantic API. It now requests “social tags” (a new addition in their API) as well as the entity types it was picking up before, and should work with WordPress 2.8 once again.

Calais Class and Plugins Updated

Dan — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 07:22:02 +0000

I know this post is overdue, sorry about that.

I’ve just updated the Open Calais Tags PHP class, which allows you to automatically tag content with Open Calais’ free semantic analysis API. It now uses the v4 API’s REST URL and no longer adds a semicolon to the end of each tag. It’s also been updated to support new entity types added since the last release of the class.

I also updated the two WordPress plugins I released using this class, WP Calais Auto Tagger and WP Calais Archive Tagger, so they should be in working order again as well.

Product in a Day: FeedLines

Dan — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 06:53:40 +0000

This is my first attempt at building a simple product of my own to sell, rather than a service or subscription. I watch the SitePoint Marketplace on an almost daily basis, and I see so many simple, turnkey sites sold and resold on a consistent basis. While the scripts behind these sites may seem simple to a programmer like me, there seems to be a market out there for any type of unique site.

Today I fleshed out the script I wrote for Website Goodies’ Industry News page into something generic enough anyone could use it. FeedLines is the result — an RSS feed aggregator much like PopUrls or AllTop, two pretty high traffic sites. FeedLines serves as a demo of the site and links to a page where you can buy the script for $49.95. I am going to give selling copies of this as turnkey sites on the marketplace a try later this week.

WebsiteGoodies.com on WordPress

Dan — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:04:08 +0000

I just moved Website Goodies, my oldest site at 12 years, over to WordPress as its CMS, replacing dozens of poorly written, exploitably bad PHP files and even worse databases. Now I can manage everything from one place and, perhaps, even give the site some new content. It’s still popular as far as my sites go, and brings in the AdSense clicks consistently. I hope all the Google ads advertising Google aren’t a result of the move, since most of the URLs didn’t change.

Tagging Large Post Archives Automatically

Dan — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 20:55:25 +0000

First, I wrote a PHP class for passing content to Open Calais and getting back tags. Then, a WordPress plugin for tagging posts as you write them. Now, taking it one step further again, here’s a plugin for automatic tagging of your post archives.

I tried tagging for a while last year, but wasn’t consistent in my choice of tags or in tagging every post at all. That made the whole system not worth the work, so I removed the plugins I used to add tags in the first place. Now tags are as much a part of WordPress as categories, and I have almost 170 posts not tagged at all. I could edit every one and add them, manually or with the plugin, but that would take a lot of time. Instead, I wrote a plugin which goes through my entire archive of posts, sends the post title and content over to Calais and adds any tags it finds. If there were already tags on the post, only new ones found would be added.

It produces a pretty decent tag cloud, doesn’t it?

$tags = wp_tag_cloud(array('format' => ‘array’, ‘exclude’ => ’32′));
echo implode($tags, ‘, ‘);
?>

WP Calais Auto Tagger: Automatic Tag Suggestion For Your Posts

Dan — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 08:39:10 +0000

I just completed the WP Calais Auto Tagger plugin, the obvious first use of my Open Calais Tags class. It adds a tag suggestion box to your WordPress post writing screen which suggests tags based on your post content using the Open Calais API. The suggestions can be added to the post’s tag list with a single click, or manually added if you don’t want to use them all.

If you’ve been meaning to use WordPress’s new built-in tags, but are too lazy to come up with a good list every time you blog, give the plugin a try. Comments, suggestions and bug reports are appreciated.