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Posts tagged wordpress
Stop Comment Spam
Oct 24th
Who cares about stopping comment spam? If you are a blogger, or the owner of a website that allows comments, reviews and posts by the general public, you should. Most notably, if your comments allow a website to be entered, you should care.
I’m going to talk about comment spam in WordPress blogs, because I run WordPress blogs and have experience with them. Here are some links for researching comment spam on other blogging platforms:
Dealing with comment spam in Blogger
Dealing with comment spam in Tumblr
Dealing with comment spam in SquareSpace
Dealing with comment spam in Posterous
COMMENT SPAM IN WORDPRESS
Comment spam in WordPress is insidious, lets use these recent examples from this blog:
Click To EnlargeWordPress Permalinks
Sep 15th
WordPress lets you choose the link structure for your URL’s for posts, which is really cool and handy. Here’s a permalink structure I use on a lot of blogs:
/%year%%monthnum%%post_id%/%postname%/
That lets me see at-a-glance the year and month of the post, then the post id, then the post title. The URL would look something like this:
http://example.com/201010/123/post-title-here/
The most important part for SEO is the post title, and the rest helps male a URL that is unique without getting URLs like:
http://example.com/tips-for-gmail
and…
http://example.com/tips-for-gmail-2
Imagine you have a post titled Tips for Gmail and you do 2 of them, and your permalinks do not insure unique URLs, then you end up with something like the 2 above.
MORE
Trying Mystique Theme for a Day
Aug 27th
UPDATE: Obviously the Mystique Theme is here for more than a day. I ran into all of these cool new features, and am now re-thinking what I want as I build my next modified WordPress theme, probably built off of Thematic… maybe.
I thought I’d try out a new theme for a bit, any feedback would be appreciated, and make sure to let me know if this is your first visit or not.
Mystique 2.4.2
Feature-packed theme with a solid design, built-in widgets and a intuitive theme settings interface… Designed by digitalnature.
Tags: light, white, two-columns, three-columns, one-column, fixed-width, flexible-width, right-sidebar, left-sidebar, theme-options, threaded-comments, translation-ready, custom-header, editor-style
So, drop any comments below…
Skinning WordPress with Child Themes – More Than Skin Deep
Oct 27th
Even though Darren Hoyt talked about it in his Exploring WordPress Frameworks and Child Themes post, I missed the point that you can override more than the CSS file using Child Themes. According to WordPresss.com’s Theme Development article you can go to your parent theme’s folder (at /wp-content/themes/yourparenttheme/) and copy any of those template files into your Child Theme’s folder and edit it, and that will override the parent theme’s file.
Additionally (as of WordPress 2.7), the child theme may contain template files, which can be selected in the admin panel as normal, and will override the parent’s template files where those possess the same name.
For example, if you want to edit the header and you are using Thematic (folder = /thematic) and your Child Theme is called My Theme (folder = /mytheme) you can copy /wp-content/themes/thematic/header.php to /wp-content/themes/mytheme/header.php and any edits you make will show up on your blog because WordPress (as of v2.7) will check for template files in your Child Theme folder before looking for your Parent Theme’s template files.
With WordPress Child Themes you can…
- build websites more quickly with more flexibility than “traditional” sites
- use WordPress as a CMS
- gives your clients the capability to edit their own sites
- more easily develop websites that are HTML and CSS compliant with less work than custom “traditional” sites
- re-design, skin or add different functionality to themes you like but are missing “something”
- make your own WordPress theme without starting from scratch
Skinning WordPress
Oct 24th
If you visit tonight or during the next couple of days, you may notice the layout of this blog changing – radically. I’m writing below about skinning and am practicing with Thematic. During this process you will see the blog in customized Thematic one moment and in devart the next. Have fun, I am!
Skinning WordPress, or using Child Themes is something I’ve just discovered at work, although its been a hot topic for some time now. I’ve kept a suspicious eye on using blogs to build websites because I didn’t want to have to learn how to make a WordPress theme myself to avoid endlessly re-uploading updates after new WordPress releases. In the past if you made customization to a theme, when you upgrade the theme you would lose your work. Or, you had to make sure to keep local copies and upload them after upgrading the theme so your customization would be in tact. WordPress Child Themes does away with that, and two products I’ve read about help you Skin your WordPress blog… safely.
The first is called Mimbo Pro which carries a price, although Mimbo is a free version. The second is Ian Stewart’s Thematic – a WordPress Theme Framework that makes it easy to implement WordPress Child Themes.
GoDaddy File Restore/Rollback
Oct 23rd
Recently I made a critical error editing one of my blog’s files – I forgot to download the file before editing it, then uploaded my changes and it took my entire blog down. Needless to say I was upset with myself because I knew better, but I called GoDaddy hoping they could restore my site or file for me, and hoping it wouldn’t cost much or take too much time.
The tech support operator ran me through their procedure on restoring a file or folder using the GoDaddy File Manager. I was able to select the day before I changed the file, and download it, back it up (this time), apply my edits and my blog was down for less than 20 minutes (about 10 minutes of that time was spent running around like a headless chicken while my wife and girls looked at me as if I had just landed on the planet).
So, if you delete a file or folder by accident, forget to download a file before editing it and permanently lose your work, remember GoDaddy’s File Restore and get your stuff back. Thanks GoDaddy!
WordPress, Turning off Fancy Quotes
Oct 22nd
NOTE: You will be editing your blog files directly, so if you are not comfortable with this, you may want to search for a plugin instead. If you move forward REMEMBER to backup the file before you edit it.
How do you get your blog to stop replacing your regular quotes (the HTML entity ") with fancy/curly quotes? Here’s what worked for me, with links below to 2 other posts where I started me out.
First, according to Otto42 in the WordPress community when you are writing posts the fancy/curly quotes are applied through a filter called “the_content”. So go to wp-includes/default-filters.php and make a backup before editing it! If you upload an older version of this file you may end up with a 500 Internal Server Error and have to call GoDaddy to fix it while your wife looks at you like you are from another planet.
Below is the code you want to change and what to replace it with…
REPLACE
add_filter(‘the_content’, ‘wptexturize’);WITH THIS
remove_filter(‘the_content’, ‘wptexturize’);
Upload your edited wp-includes/default-filters.php and you should not have any more fancy/curly quotes. There are plugins to do this, but I like to minimize using them and I am comfortable making edits like this.
While I was editing I decided it would be pretty useful if people adding code in comments could do the same so here’s another change to make that happen:
REPLACE
add_filter(‘comment_text’, ‘wptexturize’);WITH THIS
remove_filter(‘comment_text’, ‘wptexturize’);
MORE
Wordpress – What does wptexturize do?
RESOURCES
Blogmum – Turn off curly quotes in WordPress
Wordpress – Turn off smart quotes
New Social Site – Diddit; WordPress Glitch or OpenDNS blocking?
Feb 12th
WORDPRESS GLITCH UPDATE: WordPress responded rather quickly to this recent issue by apparently removing the reference to the stylesheet that was on a8c.com and are likely communicating (IMO) with OpenDNS to get a8c.com removed from blocking. According to WHOIS records I’ve seen a8c.com is hosted on WordPress servers, so I doubt they are taking this lightly.
Diddit – New Social Site
According to CWEBNEWS’ Ludic Labs Raises $5 Million; Launches Activity-Based Social Net ‘Diddit’ there is a new kid on the social block (launched Feb 11, 2009), looking for viral, sticky-site addictive fame ala Facebook. Diddit is a social site that at first blush I seemed to me to be aimed at risk-taking, social site addicted, techno geeks. Upon more thought it may also appeal to anyone who likes lists, teens, and… well just other people I can’t even think of. There’s also a blog section on Diddit – I wonder if it will stay a Diddit list or turn into a “who’s who” of blogs.
Let’s see where Diddit goes and who it attracts, time will tell.
WordPress Glitch?
I’ve checked several WordPress-hosted blogs tonight and there appears to be some sort of glitch with their CSS – as if the stylesheets were deleted. Of course, it could just be some errant firewall or other Internet setting on my side.
Oh, to the right is a screenshot of how I see the WordPress.com home page tonight, and I get similar for any other WordPress-hosted site I visit. The issue could be related to a8c.com which is being blocked by OpenDNS (a filter I use), so its entirely possible that WordPress blogs look fine to everyone but those of us using OpenDNS. I think OpwnDNS is better than other available Internet & Web filters (at least the ones I’ve seen), and is free.
OpenDNS blocking? WordPress glitch?
