Update for QRZ Search and HF Solar WordPress widget plugins

After approximately 13 years, my HF solar WordPress widget stopped working, so I need to make some repairs. I learned the new Widget API and re-implemented the widget plugin. I’ve tried it out on my site, and it appears to be working. Overall, I think the new API made the implementation much easier. A new version of the plugin is available on the linked page.

Because the new Widget API seems simpler, I went ahead and re-implemented the QRZ Callsign Search widget too. A new version of the plugin is available from the linked page.

Azimuthal map generation is temporarily offline

Ruby Prawn logo
Ruby Prawn’s logo

My web hosting provider upgraded Ruby from 1.8 to 1.9. The upgrade is generally a good thing. However, the upgrade broke the Ruby PDF writer library that my azimuthal map generator uses, so the generator is temporarily offline. I’ve been meaning to upgrade to the new Ruby PDF generator called Prawn for a while, but I haven’t had enough motivation until now.

Right now, most of my energy is directed towards preparing for the ARRL November Sweepstakes SSB contest this weekend. I’ll be on the air from a friends station, so I’ll have a much better score than normal for me. I don’t know if I’ll have enough time to fix the site before this weekend or not.

Special thanks to Johannes (DK5II) for bringing the problem to my attention!

The amazing amount of comment spam

I’ve started to think about turning off commenting. Even with RECAPTCHA, I am getting tons of WordPress comment spam. For example, while I’ve been writing this paragraph, 5 more spam comments came in. For the sake of recording 117 legitimate comments, I’ve had to filter out 7,783 spam comments. A pretty poor signal to noise ratio.

If I decide to turn off commenting, amateur radio operators can find my email address from my call sign using any of the normal means. I may also try activating a second level of spam protection. It’s sad that i has to come to this.

Working on contest scoring software

Recently, I have been working with a team from the Northern California Contest Club to write software to score and report the results from the California QSO Party (CQP). This has been chewing up all my programming time, so I haven’t had time to make improvements to the azimuthal map program. I hope to get back to it again after the contest scoring software is done. Thanks for the suggestions.