E-mail may often be considered a medium of communication that tends to be between two individuals. However, it has been made so that it can be a one-to-many communication medium in addition to being a one-to-one communication medium. Electronic mailing lists have been in existence for a long time, so e-mails have been sent in bulk without them being considered spam for a long time. Also, websites that are often updated tend to include the option for users to receive updates about them via e-mail. Some websites simply send e-mail alerts to users who have accounts set up on them by default. This type of e-mail gets sent out so often, the term “Bacn” was coined for it. Users can limit the amount of Bacn that they receive by not subscribing to e-mail lists, and by subscribing to RSS feeds instead whenever possible. However, e-mail updates can sometimes be necessary.

E-mails from mailing lists and websites tend to be characterized as being sent from the same sender, and these e-mails tend to have similar text in their subject lines. Therefore, users can easily set up filters in Gmail so that messages that match characteristics of Bacn that they receive can have appropriate labels applied to them. For example, I use a WordPress plugin named “WP-DB-Backup” to send myself backup copies of the database that this blog uses via e-mail. The e-mails sent by this plugin all list “WordPress” as the sender of them, and have “Jake Kasprzak Online Database Backup” in the subject lines of these e-mails. As these e-mails have these characteristics, I was able to set up a filter so that all messages that have these characteristics will have the label of “blog backup” applied to them. Therefore, any time I want to display only the backup copies of this blog that I have received via e-mail, I can select the appropriate label. There may also be times that I may not want to see my inbox cluttered with Bacn such as this. As I tend to label the Bacn that I receive, I display only unlabeled messages to filter out the Bacn in my inbox. There are Greasemonkey user scripts for displaying only unlabeled messages in Gmail, and I use those ones. One titled “Gmail Unlabelled” can be used with the older version of Gmail and the version of this script that can be used with the newer version of Gmail can be found here.

There are other reasons to use these labels. This is because e-mail account inboxes are sometimes used for purposes other than storage of messages from other people. When e-mail services offer large amounts of space for storing messages, users use these services for storing large files. The storage capacity offered to Gmail users is one of the reasons many Gmail users, myself included, use it to store files. In fact, GmailFS was created for storing files on Gmail accounts. However, Google’s terms of use prohibit the use of their services by any automated means or any means other than through the interface provided by Google, so GmailFS violates these terms. Nevertheless, Gmail can be useful for storing files, albeit through non-automated means. I sometimes store files there, and I sometimes perform searches through Gmail’s interface to find these files. I also create filters that apply labels to essentially save the searches that I perform most often.

In the time that I have spent blogging, I have sometimes found that I have needed to send notes to myself. I sometimes need to e-mail links to myself, and I annotate these links with information on them. I am often at different locations when I find interesting information on the web, and so I often have my information stored on and accessible from my Gmail account. As you may have surmised, sending myself many e-mails leads to clutter in my inbox. I have found that when I e-mail information such as links to myself, I tend to use similar subject lines. I often include the word “notes” in the subject lines of these e-mails that I send myself. Therefore, I can create a filter that looks for what I tend to include in the subject lines of these messages, and applies appropriate labels to them. I can also have these filters search for appropriate text within the messages that I may want to bring up at later times.

What I have mentioned here may certainly not be considered novel or innovative by those who already try to get the most out of Gmail. I do not plan on being one of those who will submit a video on how I organize my Gmail inbox. However, there may be many who may not be getting the most out of Gmail, and may find that it is even more useful than they thought it was. This blog entry is intended for those who have yet to see how useful Gmail can be. E-mail accounts may often be used for storing personal information, and Gmail seems to have been designed with that in mind. Gmail truly is an e-mail service that has been made better than users have previously imagined an e-mail service could be.

However, during this vacation, I have taken time to make one change to this blog. One change that might have previously been noticed is that there was a CAPTCHA installed here for a short period of time. After discovering how little the CAPTCHA was doing to prevent spam from being posted here, I installed Akismet. After installing Akismet, I was finally once again able to not be concerned about manually marking posts as spam. I was also able to disable the CAPTCHA, as it became redundant after the installation of Akismet. I apologize to those who would prefer not to solve CAPTCHAs to post comments, although installing a CAPTCHA seemed to be a good idea when I first installed it. I have also been working on my own WordPress plugin for bloggers who want information about who is trying to post spam on their blogs. I am not sure how much more work on WordPress plugins I will do in the future. However, I can tell you that this plugin will be released before long, now that I have returned from this vacation.

I have had some interest in writing a plugin for WordPress, although I was not sure what kind of plugin to write. I had not experienced much difficulty in working with WordPress in my time using it. And any time there was some functionality I wanted WordPress to have, I found that a plugin for including that functionality was available. However, after a certain amount of manual link checking that I had done, I wanted a plugin for automatically checking links in blog entries before these entries that contain these links are posted. Reading the section on link verification web bots in Michael Schrenk’s book on web bots titled “Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers” may have also inspired me to write this plugin. And after not finding that a plugin for automatically verifying links existed, I found that I had every reason I needed to write this plugin.

I decided to use the cURL library for checking the HTTP codes that would be returned after clicking each link in the window for editing posts, as cURL is useful for retrieving this kind of information. For this reason, the cURL module needs to be installed for this plugin to work. I needed to retrieve only the HTTP codes in this plugin, as these codes are all that is needed to determine if links are considered “broken” or not. Any time a page is found to return an error code, the link is considered broken. And in this plugin, a filter is set up to modify what is in the editor window to include the error code in the link. Perhaps there might be better ways to alert the individual who is posting the link that the link is broken than to add text to the link. This is one issue that I will consider when writing future versions of this plugin, and there are other ideas that I have for future versions as well.

This plugin may be useful for finding links that are broken. However, it cannot determine which links are links to incorrect pages. Sometimes when entering a URL incorrectly, the user is taken to a page that is not the correct one, although not one that will give an error code such as 404. For that reason, I have considered including functionality for checking valid links for information such as their titles, and returning this information. In addition, the plugin works only with absolute links, and not relative links. I personally always use absolute links in my posts, although in the future I might include functionality for checking relative links. Whether or not this functionality will be included may depend on how much demand there will be for the inclusion of this functionality.

The plugin can be downloaded if you click here. Feedback on what I write is always welcome, and I would be interested in hearing opinions on this plugin. This is the first WordPress plugin that I have ever written, and I decided to get it released at this time to meet a deadline that I have set for myself. However, I have found that it worked correctly in tests that I have run with it, and I would like to know if there are any bugs that it has so that I can correct them. This plugin is one that may not be considered very useful now, although future versions of it may be more useful. I know that I would prefer to have one less concern when I write posts to this blog. And hopefully, I will not need to be concerned about this plugin not working properly.

However, the idea for starting one occurred to me when I decided that, as a coder who enjoys working on various side projects, I could post what I find and create in a blog. I could also share my work and ideas among any others who might be interested in them. And starting a blog appeared to be a very good, if not ideal, way of going about sharing my ideas, products, and anything else I could put online.

My idea for starting a blog perhaps should have occurred to me sooner, when I could have published thoughts on other work I was doing at the time. After taking some time to come up with the idea, I knew it would take much time for me to finally start blogging. I have a tendency to spend much time thinking of what I should be doing, when I should spend more time doing what I should be doing. And in that time that I thought about how I should do this, many questions came to mind about how I should do this. I spent much time thinking about questions such as those that would come to mind when reading sections of the WordPress documentation, such as this section. I have also spent some time reading sections of books on blogging, and have visited blogs to get an idea of how I should go about blogging. But I eventually decided to try to make this blog a reflection of who I am, and not try to make it an imitation of another blog. I am sure that I will learn more about blogging as I continue doing so, and I look forward to finding out what happens during this time.

Although I consider this particular blog entry somewhat egocentric, I expect this blog to not be so much about me. I’m not sure if initial entries to blogs typically are introductory, or if they contain some information that would be in the “about” section of them. But as I mentioned earlier, I have decided to try doing this in a way that seems right to me, and to not try to “borrow” ideas from other blogs. I think that if I do, this will be easier for me, and blog entries here will practically write themselves. My lack of experience in doing this may likely become apparent, but I expect to enjoy blogging. Sharing the thoughts and ideas I have is something I would like to do, and I am already beginning to see why so many other people blog.