I have been so busy with work lately that it has been very hard to keep up with non-work websites. Since most of the sites do not need much ongoing maintenance, this has not been a big problem, but Autiblogger has been needing some TLC for a while now. I had to shut down on-site registration a while back due to an insane number of splogs and anyone who wanted a blog had to contact me. Not ideal.
Autiblogger has now been updated to the latest version of WordPress MU! This new version includes security updates and more tools to regulate signups. This means that Autiblogger registration is open again!
I would like to extend a huge thank you to Andrea Rennick for doing the update! It went quite smoothly with a minimum of downtime. She also added some spammer protection above and beyond what the software itself provides. Andrea runs the WPMU Tutorials site.
In other exciting autistic community website news, aspieSocial has passed the 70 member mark and is becoming a nice community with quite a few regulars, interesting discussions, and some great bloggers.
I get very excited about the ever expanding network of autistic community websites. When I first came on the scene 3 years ago, there were just a handful, most notably Wrong Planet, a site started by 16 year old Alex Plank (now 21). Now there are many community sites, and thanks to Kevin Leitch, the Autism Hub, a network of autism related blogs.
I think these sites are very important for educating the general public about autism and especially for helping autistic people to find each other.
Autiblogger is a free blogging community for people on the autistic spectrum. Since its initial beta release last August, many new features, themes, and plugins have been added. We have moved from a very unreliable shared server to an excellent dedicated server thanks to donations from the community and lots of help from my family. Thanks everybody 
A couple of new measures have been taken to fight the continuous annoyance of splogs (spam blogs). Splogs are fake blogs that are created for the purpose of either displaying ads or creating search engine traffic and search engine ranking for another website to which the splog points. At one point, Autiblogger was getting about 30 new splogs per day!
I installed an anti-splog script to block users from signing-up if thier IP address is blacklisted at spamhaus.org. That helped quite a bit, dropping the number of splogs per day to around three. Finally, I gave in and added an image captcha (challenge response test to verify that a user is human) to the sign-up page. I was really trying to avoid that due to accessibility issues, but it was hard to keep up with even a few splogs per day. I added a link to the sign-up page for users to contact me if they could not view the captcha image. At this time, splogs are down to just one every few days.
With the splog problem under control, I was finally able to add some new features and update some old ones. Today I added a flickr post bar plugin which adds thumbnails of the most recent photos from a user’s flickr account to the post-writing page, making it very easy to insert a flickr image into a blog post. I also added a LiveJournal cross-posting plugin which automatically copies new posts to a specified LiveJournal. Editing and deleting cross-posted entries causes the same changes to be made on the LiveJournal.
Other changes include an update to the Friends List feature which fixes a few bugs and an update to the admin bar that appears at the top of a user’s site when they are logged in, providing easy access to their blog administration. Unlogged users will see a link to Autiblogger and a ‘Get a Blog’ link. A Random Blog link was also added. Click on it and guess what…
If anyone would like a blog, click here to sign up. If you are interested in helping to support Autiblogger and other Autistic Planet sites, please visit the Support Autiblogger page.
Why Autiblogger 1.2.1? I was almost going to call it Autiblogger 2.0, but the changes didn’t seem large enough to warrant a whole new version number. 1.2.1 is also the current stable version of WordPress MU, which is the excellent open source application that powers Autiblogger.
I am working on a new project to provide free blogs to the [tag]autism[/tag] community. Autiblogger.com is now in the first public testing phase. It is powered by [tag]WordPress MU[/tag], and so far all is going very well.
I have been wanting to set this up for a while and am very glad to finally have it working. There were a few problems with the [tag]wordpress[/tag] mu install, but that was because I didn’t have a wildcard DNS entry set up for the domain. It is set up now and everything is working as it should. I wish I would have known to do that the first million times I tried to set up wpmu!
If anyone wants to set up a blog and help me test the site, just go to autiblogger.com and sign up! Please read the Terms of Service first! All feedback is appreciated
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