I've deleted a good amount of trackback spam from my Movable Type blogs, and until a few minutes ago I was feeling pretty good. But, there was one major thing I forgot, and I hope it hasn't done too much damage.

I searched for a name at lonewacko.com using Google's site: command, and what I was looking for came up first.

Yahoo has released their competitor to the Google Maps API. I'm not familiar with the latter, but the main difference appears to be that Yahoo's maps can't be embedded in your own pages: the closest you can get is with the much-reviled frames. However, the popup windows shown on the map have links so you can direct people to one or more web pages at your site. You can see sample maps here.

[NOTE: This page refers to the legacy Yahoo Maps API.

[SEE THE UPDATE BELOW]

By default, Mediawiki (the software that powers Wikipedia and other sites) adds the evil nofollow tag to outbound links. This page describes how to have that tag removed for a pre-defined set of trusted sites.

I recently encountered an issue that may or may not be well known: apparently Drupal modules and themes can't have the same names. If they do, there will be at least one naming collision.

Drupal's image module failed when I tried to use it to upload images to a Drupal installation at a Powweb.com hosting account.

After some digging and searching, it turns out that Powweb's base version of php.ini does not include setting the 'upload_tmp_dir' variable. Trying to set that using Drupal's settings.php or in .htaccess didn't work (discussion). Instead, I got the error described here.

Here's a very basic tutorial showing how to create two very basic Yahoo Pipes (pipes.yahoo.com). This isn't for programmers or those who've used similar visual programming systems before. However, those who aren't in that camp might find it interesting. The "script" is included in the extended entry.

The "nofollow" tag is (supposedly) designed to foil blog spammers. You can create links with that tag like so:

<a href="http://example.com" rel="nofollow">example.com</a>

The following is a Drupal 6 sample module showing how to encrypt a MySQL database column. Note that there are several cavaets:
1. This was only tested with 6.8; it might not work with other versions.
2. The sample table used only contains one row for simplicity; modifying the database code for your application is left up to you.
3. The secret key is saved in the module file; you will probably want to use a more secure method.
4. And, of course, ensuring that your MySQL installation and traffic are secure is up to you.