46 and 47 » Website Development

Reduce Blog Comment Spam Using The Bad Behavior WordPress Plugin

47 — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:10:12 +0000

I don’t normally make recommendations until I’ve used a product or service for a couple of weeks. I’m making an exception with Bad Behavior. The creators label it as a supplement to your existing comment spam protection, Akismet in our case, and claim that it helps stop spam from ever reaching the filters on your website. So far, I agree with them because it’s doing a bang up job.

This website isn’t high profile but still had days where Akismet flagged 50+ blog comments as spam. Most of them actually were spam but I still had to go through occasionally looking for comments from a real person. It pissed me off that I had to waste time doing that so I started looking for something automated to help. That’s when I found the Bad Behavior plugin for WordPress.

Bad Behavior looks at a bunch of things (HTTP headers, website blacklists, etc) to determine if something is spam and then eats it up before reaching your other spam filters. It also keeps a log of what it’s doing for anyone who cares. It’s supposed to work on other content management systems (Drupal, Joomla, etc) but I’ve only tested it with WordPress. I started running it four days ago and just two comments made it into the existing filter so far. Both of those were actual spam, caught by Akismet, and it doesn’t look like any comments from real people got blocked to this point. Very cool.

One thing did come up while installing the plugin. Anyone using the caching plugins, like WP Super Cache, needs to add one line to the PHP code. That’s pretty simple but it’d be nice if the coders would work together to make it easier on people. It talks about making that change in the installation guide.

I’d definitely give this plugin a whirl to find out if it works for you.

47
Wondering if I just invited more comment spammers.

YARPP Is A Great WordPress Plugin For Showing Related Posts

47 — Tue, 26 May 2009 04:37:11 +0000

Would you like something that automatically finds all of the related posts on your WordPress site and adds links to them in the relevant articles for you? How about if it added links to the related posts in your RSS feed too? Well, there’s a nice little WordPress plugin that does just that called Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (or YARPP for short).

I’d been looking for something to do that for a while and decided to give this one a try. I first heard about the YARPP plugin on a podcast by Yaro Starak when he interviewed David Risley. David runs a very attractive blog about running an internet business and mentioned several plugins he uses on his website.

It seemed like a good way to make this website stickier by showing visitors content that was relevant to what they were already reading. I know linking to your other posts and self-pinging does that too but it isn’t automated. I also don’t like the self-ping “feature” of WordPress much at all.

I was skeptical about how well it would work but it actually does a pretty darn good job. In fact, it found a few related posts for some articles that I’d forgotten I’d even written. It didn’t always find what I wanted but overall it does great job. This was using the default settings for the most part too. I’m sure as I play with the options the results will get even better.

There was a note in the FAQs about performance issues but I haven’t seen any problems yet. The programmer suggested using a plugin to cache your site. I’m already doing that and YARPP does some caching of it’s own too.

Unless you’ve already got something you like, or have loads of time for doing it manually, give Yet Another Related Posts Plugin a try and let us know how it goes.

Do you already use this plugin or one like it? How well does it work for you?

47
Thinks magically finding related posts is super cool.

We Got A New Niche Website Out Of The Google Sandbox In A Week?

47 — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 01:06:34 +0000

One of our newer websites got traffic from Google after only being online for about a week. This boggles my mind. That website has no links to it, doesn’t have much content, and doesn’t sit on an aged domain. I kind of expect things like this to happen occasionally with MSN (and possibly Yahoo) but Google seems perfectly content to ignore newer websites until its good and ready. 3 to 6 months later. Have any of you ever heard of this happening?

This could be a complete and total fluke but I have a couple reasons to think (make that hope) it might be real and repeatable. I did quite a bit of research before choosing the main keywords, the domain name, and the content to add to this website. I don’t have any secrets to share really, I was just more methodical than I’d been with many of our other sites. I’ll probably write about that later in more detail but I’m doing that with all of our new websites now.

Anyway, the domain name closely matches the main keyword. All of the titles, URLs, and content closely match the main keywords too. The niche was chosen in part because isn’t uber competitive either.

Still though. That’s got to be the fastest ever for us. I’d planned to put up some content and forget about it for a month or two. I’m trying not to get too excited because we all know about the fickleness of Google.

I’ve watched the rankings for the main keywords since this website’s been live. Yes, I’m still only checking search engine rankings once per week in an attempt to be more productive. It bounced around a lot during the first couple of weeks but, all things considered, it ranks fairly high for its main keyword. All of that extra upfront research hopefully pays off in the long run.

What’s your record for getting search engine traffic from Google to a new website? Have you been able to repeat that feat?

47
Sort of wishes the Google sandbox was dead.

ImageWell – A Great Image Editor For Mac OS X

47 — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 07:28:56 +0000

I’ve done quite a lot of image manipulation in the last couple of months for one of our sites. Nothing fancy just a bit of cropping here, some resizing there, and changing the quality of gigantic pictures so it doesn’t take an hour to load the site. I found the perfect little program for doing those sorts of things.

It’s called ImageWell. It runs on Mac OS X. It rocks.

I normally just need to do simple stuff. Photoshop and Gimp would laugh at me and turn up their noses if I asked them for help. ImageWell is lightweight and just what the doctor ordered. You can even upload the edited images to your website.

47
Never thought photo editing could be so fun.

YARPP Is A Great WordPress Plugin For Showing Related Posts

Using Preview To Modify WordPress Themes Without Breaking Live Sites

47 — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 04:44:13 +0000

Did you know that WordPress lets you preview themes without switching to them? When you’re on the administration tab with your available themes, clicking on the big icons shows how your site would look using that theme. It’s probably in the documentation but I discovered it when I moved the mouse over an icon. The URL started with http://my-wordpress-site/?preview just like when you previewing an unpublished post or page.

I thought of a good use for it. You could use this feature to test changes to your current theme without potentially breaking a live site. What I do now when I want to tinker with a theme is make a copy of that theme, make some changes to the copy, and use the preview feature to navigate the site using that modified theme. When everything looks right then you can just switch to that theme.

47
Not breaking WordPress sites as much.