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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.

Checklist for New WordPress Sites

47 — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 06:46:01 +0000

After installing WordPress as our blogging and content management system twice now, I have a few tips for new WordPress sites using shared hosting and addon domains.

Setup the addon domain. This could include purchasing a domain name, changing the name servers with your domain registrar, and creating the addon domain with your web host. The addon domain is often a subdirectory of the main domain. I’ve discovered it’s easier to manage when the main domain and the addon domain are in separate, sibling subdirectories inside a parent directory.
Create and configure your .htaccess files. You’ll need one to redirect your main domain to its subdirectory. I use another so the new domain doesn’t show up as a subdomain of the main domain. Using permalinks to make the site more search engine optimized modifies the .htaccess file too.
Create a database and install the WordPress software. Your web host might use Fantastico which makes this much easier.
Modify the WordPress options for how you want the site to operate (you can change things like receiving or not receiving email when someone comments a post).
Configure Akismet. It comes with WordPress by default and helps manage comment spam. You’ll need an API key to use it
Create a robots.txt to make the search engines happier by removing some of the duplicate content.
Install and configure an analytics tool to see how many visitors you get and what they do. WordPress.com stats and Google Analyticator are good choices depending on the level of detail you need. You’ll need an API key for WordPress.com stats.
Install and configure Search Everything unless you just plan to write posts. This lets visitors search pages, comments, attachments, and many other things depending on the options used.
Install and configure Google Sitemap Generator. It’s used by the search engines to better navigate your site.
Choose a theme. There are a ton of free themes and you can always modify them to your liking.
Check the permissions of your files and directories. Giving too much access is a security risk.

Once your blog or site makes it big consider adding WP-Cache for better performance and AdSense Manager for monetizing it.

WordPress Plugins

47 — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 08:56:16 +0000

I’m seeing more and more that using blogging software like WordPress to create and manage certain types of websites is a great idea. It isn’t right for a 10,000 page ecommerce site of course but rapidly putting up a niche information site as a blog works quite well. Especially if a few plugins are used. It has everything from comment spam blockers to Google sitemap generators to contact form creators to post rating inserters.