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The next major update of the Broken Link Checker plugin is almost done. I’ve added several new, oft-requested features and rewritten most existing functions to make them more secure and faster. However, as anyone who has at least dabbled in programming will know, lots of code changes equals lots of potential for new bugs. So […]

Readability metrics, also known as readability formulas, are a set of algorithms that estimate the readability of text. Most tests are fairly primitive as they only take into account things like sentence length and the average number of syllables per word, but ignore deeper factors like sentence structure and semantics. Still, readability metrics can be […]

Text classification is probably the most popular real-world application of machine learning and other AI techniques. This is because the adaptive spam filters that guard our inboxes, comment forms and guestbooks are basically specialized text classifiers that only deal with two categories – “spam” and “not spam”. Text categorization can also be used to detect […]

One of the reasons why WordPress can be slow is that it loads all active plugins on each and every page, even if some of those plugins aren’t actually used on that page. For example, an active anti-spam plugin will still be loaded even if the current page doesn’t contain a comment form (e.g. category […]

If you’ve ever tried to write a program that fetches search results from Google, you’ll no doubt be familiar with the excrutiating annoyances of parsing the results and getting blocked periodically. Run a couple hundred queries in a row and bam! – your script is banned until proven innocent by entering an captcha. Even that […]