Bukan, ini bukan yet another story tentang para blog selebs and comment-whores who love ’em ™ Udah eneg aku. Tapi ini salah satu cerita kecil tentang pertempuran abadi abad informasi ini, perang melawan spam…

Salah satu konsekuensi mempunyai situs sendiri adalah kita harus melakukan segala sesuatunya sendiri, terhadap sistemnya dan terhadap kontennya juga. Beberapa waktu yang lalu, entah kenapa aku tiba-tiba niat untuk bersih2 instalasi WordPress-ku. Karena sejak pertama kali install lebih dari setahun yang lalu, hampir tak pernah aku tengok lagi dalemannya (hah? nengok daleman? :p) Dan benar saja, isinya sudah sedemikian amburadul. Susunan file-nya sudah mayan kacau, apalagi databasenya, sampai 8MB! Walah.. ternyata isinya cuma hasil filter plugin Spam Karma yang belum dihapus. Selain itu banyak table dan field tambahan yang aku sendiri juga sudah lupa, ini tuh dulu milik plugin yang mana. hehehe… Salah satu penyumbang kerumitan ini adalah Kiwi, sebuah hybrid plugin/themes yang dulu pernah aku pakai di WordPressku.
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Bored with regular WordPress layout? Do all blogs appear the same to you? Content on the left, sidebar on the right, and that’s it? Centered, narrow width that makes you regrets buying that brand new widescreen monitor? If that’s the case, maybe you should try Kiwi. Kiwi (i’m still confused whether to call it a plugin or a theme) was developed to break the old mold of blogging. Well, particularly blogging on wordpress. Basically Kiwi is a theme, but it does much more work than a regular theme. Kiwi packed with many plugins that makes blogging life easier and more enjoyable.

Some of the Kiwi’s highlight features are:

• Meta image post, means that you can have different banner image for every post you made.
• Randomized banner, self explaining, you know what it does.
• Featured Post, if you feel that some of your post are masterpieces and you don’t want it to be buried within your achieves, then this feature is exactly what you want.
• Del.icio.us plugin, you can list places where have you been to according to del.icio.us
• Latest comment plugin, well em…self explaining, it lists recent comment received by your blog.
• Category list and category menu, nothing really new here, but it is more nicely formatted.

Few months back there, installing Kiwi need lots of sweat and patience, you need to install separate WordPress plugins in order Kiwi to work. Although doing so is not that hard, but it was definitely not for everyone. I’ve tried the old Kiwi and it’s nice, but I never truly set it up on my blog. My wait for a better Kiwi is finally paid off with Kiwi 1.1 release (which is compatible with WordPress 2.0). All things are packed in one place, and activated just like any other regular theme. Really nice work! So what are you waiting for? Don’t continue to read this stupid blog, go get Kiwi now!

If you wanna go further, then the CSS file is there for you. You can find some of the CSS in Crystal site. I use Kiwi Peachy, by the way and tweak it my taste, but since I’m not a CSS guru at all, so I still used table tag here and there. I also striped some of Kiwi feature, especially things that generate random things, not only to reduce the load time but also because I thinks this blog is mine, so I decide 100% what I want to display :-) ) Well, at least for now. By the way, what made this Kiwi template is so special to me the sunflower picture on the left-top side, because it was actually shot by me, during my trip to Curug Sewu, two weeks days ago. :-)

FYI, Another promising Kiwi-like project I found on the net is Squible, but it is still in early development stage and has not released a full version yet. Currently what I like most about Squibble is their slogan: “Squible, as Stable as Donald Trump’s Hair!“. Eh, now how cool is that?

Ok, aku memang late bloomer di dunia blogging, jadi apa-apa mungkin juga terlambat, termasuk menyadari betapa annoying-nya serbuan spam. Selama ini dua tiga spam memang mampir ke situs ini tiap hari. OK bisa ditolerate, gak pa pa lah luangin waktu sebentar buat membunuhnya. Tapi akhir-akhir ini kok ya semakin menggila, jumlah perhari-nya semakin banyak 20-an perhari naik lagi 40-an perhari dan sampai 70-an perhari. Ampun…

Tadi searching plugin untuk wordpress kayaknya Spam Karma terkenal juga ya. Ya wis donlodlah aku, segera kupasang dan syukurlah semuanya lancar, semua spam langsung kedetect, termasuk spam-spam sebelumnya. Lucunya interface program ini nggak ada formil-formilnya blas. Bahkan berkesan main-main hehehe (liat aja contoh skrinsut-nya dibawah) tapi itu gak masalah, yang penting adalah kemampuan tempurnya! Ada satu yang mengganjal.. Gratis sih gratis, tapi kok lisensinya nggak GPL? Oh well!