Archive for the ‘Wordpress’ Category.
I’ve been using the NoSpamNX anti comment spam plugin for the last few months. It works very well. The best part is that it reduces the number of comment spams in my Akismet spam folder so dramatically that I’m able to look through the folder and rescue false positives.
Take a look at the image below. Spam comments are down from 300/day to 5/day. And now I rescue the occasional false positive.
Of course, as it becomes more popular, spammers will adapt. But it’s worked well for several months. I have noted that the Akismet chart above doesn’t track the number of false positives correctly. I’ve rescued more than the number of false positives that the chart claims.
Update 1-18-10: I have temporarily(?) disabled this plugin. Read the comments.
I just installed RSS Count Comments. Findable on Wordpress.
When you read my RSS feed, you’ll now see the number of comments in each post. So a title might read:
It Was on Fire When I Got Here (3 comments)
I installed this because comments are so very important but you’d easily miss them when reading just the RSS feed.
I encourage all my friends to install this very small plugin! It’s just 7 lines of code. :-)
I just installed the WP Ajax Edit Comments Wordpress plugin. Mainly what I was looking for in this plugin was a way for commenters to edit their posts after writing their comments. But it has a lot of other nice bells and whistles too.
Since I installed NoSpamNX, I get far fewer comment spams in my Akismet spam box… like 5 per day and they are all from the one spammer who has so far figured his way around the plugin. The plugin blocks about 100 comment spams per day.
Now there are so few spams in my comment spam box that it’s possible for me to review them by hand weekly. Today I found a false positive in the Akismet comment spam pile. This would have been impossible without NoSpamNX.
If you have a Wordpress blog, you should install NoSpamNX. No, wait. If everyone does it, then the spammers will all write smarter bots that get around this defense. So… umm, everyone use a different method! Don’t use NoSpamNX. This one will be used only on my site!
I’ve been using the Smart Archives plugin for a year to make a pretty and complete archive page for the site.
I just switched to Smart Archives Reloaded (author’s site). It works just as well and now updating my posts is much faster. The way the original Smart Archives plugin works, when you click “Publish” in Wordpress, the user has to wait until the new archives page is generated before continuing. Now it’s done in the background. A 20 second wait is now 5 seconds :-)
Thanks to the magic of open source, a really good plugin has been made even better :-)
I just installed the NoSpamNX comment spam plugin. Hopefully it will reduce the daily drudgery of me deleting all the inane comment spam I get. Each week I have to remove 5-20 spams that make it through Akismet. And I have 1,500 comment spams that Akismet caught from the last 15 days sitting in my spam box. Hopefully that number will decrease.
No really. Apparently I logged my one millionth visitor on the blog (according to Wordpress Stats) just last month or so.
Joyness
Phwew, there sure are a lot of social networking sites. I just installed Wordbook. Hopefully my friends on facebook will catch what’s up in my world with this plugin
WP-Super Cache has been giving me trouble. The trouble is, it keeps caching stuff but it doesn’t actually serve the cached files. I figured it out mostly because the hidden footer at the end of each page kept updating even when it should have been drawing from the existing cache file. And then there was the consistanly mediocre performance.
I had a previous version of WP-Super Cache that worked but after 5 revisions from the developer, I decided to upgrade. My mistake ;-(
So I’m trying hyper-cache. So far, so good.
I also installed DB-Cache via a suggestion from dbzero.com
I had this terribly annoying Google Adwords problem with my old Wordpress Theme. When displaying a Google Ad in Internet Explorer 7 (not, Chrome, not Firefix, just IE), the font color of the majority of text would change to white. If I resized the screen so that the lower ad couldn’t be seen, the font color would change back to black correctly. But… gah!
I stared at the source code for a while and couldn’t figure out what the frig… so I borrowed another theme and adapted it to Leeness. It’s called Fluid Blue by srinig. I’ve still got a tiny bit of cleanup to fully adopt the theme but it’ll be done shortly.
Enjoy.
I should say “Installing Wordpress 2.7.1″. It’s all going smoothly but I’ve got so many plugins to nudge.
My Tweeting friends might have noticed that I installed Twitter Tools. It allows my blog posts to be cross-posted to Twitter. And my tweets get cross-posted onto my blog weekly. I think that satisfies my desire to keep everything centrally located on the blog while still allowing for the quick silliness of Twitter.
I switched from WP Lightbox JS to WP FancyZoom. I’m pretty sure its the right decision. I really like the idea of having the lightbox plugin resize the image according to the size of the user’s screen. That way, I can post things in full resolution and not worry that when the user clicks on a thumbnail, the image will expand so much that they have no idea what they are looking at (like one of those Games Magazine Eyeball Bender). I’m trying to future-proof the blog. It would be a shame in a few years if someone looked back on this site and was disappointed that the only copy of an image I had was a reduced-resolution image.
Upon installing it, I notice that when you open images that have text in them, the text isn’t nessesarily legible; it depends on how large your browser window is (example). Hmmm.. hmmm.
I very much like that FancyZoom pre-loads the full-size image when the user mouses-over the image. It makes load-times pleasantly quicker without any fuss for the user :-)
I’ll leave FancyZoom up for a while and see how I feel about it.
In FancyZoom.js, I changed the defaults to make image display speedy like so:
var zoomSteps = 2; // Number of zoom animation frames
I hope the author isn’t too disappointed in my choices here. Setting it like so almost completely eliminates the “super sexy” zoom effect that he is proud of (read the docs, he’s really happy with it!). But it does what I want it to do and I am thankful! That single intermediary image that flashes in the window for just a few milliseconds hints at what’s going on very well without taking up too much time.
(image via)
After an annoying time (and 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) trying to voice my concerns with the image uploading interface in Wordpress, I’ve installed a test version of WP 2.7.
Pros:
- The Add New Post page is customizable so I can put items that I find useful near the top.
Cons:
- The add image functionality is a bit worse. No improvements and now when you choose to show an image as a “thumbnail”, it isn’t created as a clickable thumbnail, just a small image.
- There are always minor incompatibilities to fuss over
That’s a score of 1 to 2. The Cons win :-(
I installed the No Adverts for Friends plugin. It is specifically compatible with the WP Super Cache plugin which has worked very well.
With this plugin, if you have posted a comment on my blog, it’ll remember you and you won’t have to see the banner ads that I put at the bottom of every post.
I just downloaded and installed the No Adverts for Friends plugin (1 file). Then put this in my comments.php:
<?php if (function_exists('is_regular_user')) { ?>
<?php if( is_regular_user() == false ) { ?>
<center>
My Google ad here
</center>
<?php } ?>
<?php } ?>
W
ell, that was straightforward. I installed Gravatars in the blog comments.
So now if you want to put your mug shot next to any of your comments on any blog in the world that supports Gravatars, just sign up with Gravatar.com and give them your image.
Here’s how I installed Gravatars.
I added 1 line to my comments.php following this already existing line:
<cite><?php comment_author_link() ?></cite> Says:
<?php echo get_avatar( $comment, 50 ); ?>
And I added this to my style.css
.avatar {
float: right;
}
Done.
Apparently I’ve been stumbled-upon.
They sure like them funnies.
Super-Cache is working fine. Though I’ve gotten a few core dumps today. Figuring out what’s causing that will be a bother….
update 3pm: cores still dumping :-(. Just hit 30,000 views of “Motivational Posters” today. It’s funny how the rest of the site isn’t being visited at all; short attention span theater, eh?
update 9-23-08 10am: I upped the Super Cache settings to Garbage Collection every 5,000 requests, set a few pages to be Directly Cached files (Motivational Posters, The Amazing Power of Makeup, homepage). And there hasn’t been a core since last night. 41,000 hits to Motivational Posters so far today, 2,500 to The Amazing Power of Makeup.
update 9-24-08 2pm: I normally use about 1 gigabyte of web traffic per day. This Stumble-upon has brought that to 150 gigabytes/day and 150 thousand page requests/day for the last 2 days. Dreamhost allows me 7 terabytes/month so I should be fine for bandwidth. My Apache Analog stats says that I’ve had only a couple hundred failed file serves out of the approximately 6 million file requests in the last couple days, which is shows Dreamhost is handling the traffic fine.
Since upping the Super Cache Settings, I’ve gotten just 1 core dump at 23:59 last night. I’m guessing that garbage collection and bad luck conspire to cause a core dump every now and then.
To make search results on my blog prettier and more useful, I have installed 2 plugins and added a search.php to my theme. The two plugins are Search Excerpt and Search Reloaded.
All this was at the (very good) suggestion of this post.
Dave, the author of the terrific-fantastic-makes-blog-comments-possible-I’ve-donated-to Spam Karma has decided to call it quits on the project. He’s opened it up as GPL. I certainly hope that someone picks up the slack. Here is Spam Karma GPL edition.
