IsMyBlogWorking.com has a new feature: status alert feeds in RSS format.

When you visit the status page for a blog you’ll see a feed icon and link like this:

Subscribe to that feed in your browser to receive status alerts. IsMyBlogWorking.com will regularly check your site, and the feed will be updated when something important changes. If your blog is always working, you won’t see any new items in the feed.

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WordPress includes several different tools for catching and filtering comment spam. There are several options built-in including a keyword blacklist; the Akismet plugin; and of course many other spam filtering plugins are available.

A problem I’ve recently discovered with this is that WordPress doesn’t show the reason each comment was considered spam. The comment just shows up on the Spam tab, and the blog administrator is left to wonder why. In many cases this leads users to conclude that their spam filtering plugin is inaccurate, when in fact the real cause was an item they added to their Comment Blacklist.

The tw-blacklight plugin is a simple proof-of-concept plugin designed to help reduce this ambiguity. When browsing comments in the wp-admin dashboard, keywords and addresses that match items in the blacklist are highlighted (or rather “blacklighted”) by the plugin, like this:

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Am I in Google? That’s a common question. Many people don’t know how to check. Others think they do, but use the wrong method and draw the wrong conclusions.

IsMyBlogWorking.com will now answer it for you.

I’ve also made a number of gradual improvements. In particular I’ve refactored the code a little to make some future additions possible. Stay tuned.

IsMyBlogWorking.com now tests whether or not your web pages and XML feeds are cacheable.

If they are, that’s great, you get an elephant stamp. Browsers that visit your blog have the opportunity to use their local caches and make your pages reload faster. If they’re not, you might¹ be wasting bandwidth — particularly on feeds.

The cache test supports both Last-Updated (If-Modified-Since) and Etag (If-None-Match) checks. It tests your front page and your feed separately to see if they can produce a 304 Not Modified response when appropriate. It doesn’t validate or interpret Cache-Control and other caching directives, so it can’t confirm whether or not those items will be cached — it checks only that your server and blog platform support the conditional requests that are necessary for caching to work.

Is your blog cacheable? A Threshold State is. So is Donncha’s blog Holy Shmoly!, thanks to the WP-Super-Cache plugin. Ma.tt supports feed caching but not web.

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IsMyBlogWorking.com has a new feature: it now displays boring technical details about the connection speed, transfer size, compression efficiency, and so on.

The boring disclaimer: those figures represent one way of measuring one connection at one point in time from one corner of the internet, so they shouldn’t be taken as absolute. But they might be useful as a second opinion when optimizing or debugging your blog. For a more complete test that takes CSS, javascript and image load times into account, I’d recommend using Firebug or Safari’s Network Timeline feature.

Donncha is using it to check the efficiency of his WP Super Cache plugin, which is impressively fast.