A Pipe and a Keyboard

Running a blog can take a lot of hard work unless some of the tasks are automated.

One of the biggest problems facing bloggers is the number of spam comments that are blatantly promoting everything from lawn-mowers to hard core pornography.

There are several ways of limiting spam comment.

You can allow all comments, and then spend your days going through them all, deleting the spam.  This is obviously not the best method.

You can install a Captcha to try to eliminated the automated spam.  This has two disadvantages – it doesn’t stop the hand-written spam, and it irritates the hell out of genuine commenters.

You can install software to filter all comments as they come in.  This is by far the best method.

When I install WordPress, the first plug-in I would normally install was Akismet.  This is such an essential plug-in that it is now incorporated in the core of the WordPress release.

Another plug-in I install is WP-Spamfree which is very easy to install, and is remarkably effective.

I have both the above installed on my main blog and in the last few months Akismet has trapped 63,975 comments and WP-Spamfree has stopped a further 2,152.  During that period, there were 22,476 legitimate comments, which nicely illustrates the bad ratio of spam to genuine.

Another headache for the blog owner is that of security.

Hackers are always on the lookout for sites they can compromise.  Sometimes they infiltrate the site and abuse it by changing the content.  Sometimes they will insert code to allow the site act as a portal for illegal software, or porn.  This site was compromised recently whereby search engine spiders were redirected to another site, resulting in this site disappearing off Golle and others.

Hackers love a site where they know they can depend on certain information.  For wxample, they know with 99% certainty that all WordPress database tables are going to start with “wp_”.  During installation, it is a very simple matter to change this option.  Few ever do so though.

Another certainty is that there is a user called “admin” which has full rights to the site.  Happily, WordPress have changed things in the soon to be released WordPress 3, in that the default user is no longer “admin”.

With this knowledge, a “brute force” attack on a site is much easier, and therefore one plug-in I like to install is Limit Login Attempts.  This virtually removes the chance of “brute force” attacks

One of the biggest problems though is file and directory permissions.  Frequently these need to be changed for some reason, and it is all too easy to forget to change them back.

WP Security Scan is a nice little plug-in that check through the installation and will highlight any potential security problems, including incorrectly set permissions.

If there ever is a problem with your site [God forbid] then reinstalling all the files should pose no major problem – you do have them backed up?  I hope?  However, the database is a constantly evolving animal, and last week’s backup is going to lose all this week’s posts, comments and other information.  A regular backup is essential therefore, An I find WordPress Database Backup the ideal plug-in for the job.  It can do scheduled or manual backups and will save them to the server, or can mail you the backup file.

Last, but not least, if you have a heavy duty site that gets a lot of traffic [and none of us knows when he or she is going to write the post that will set the world on fire?] it is a good idea to install caching software.  This not only speeds up downloads for the viewer, but also reduces the load on the server.  Probably the best plug-in for this is WP Super Cache.  This can be somewhat problematic to install, and may require a little technical expertise, but it is worth the effort.

With that lot under the bonnet [hood?] of your WordPress installation, you should be able to enjoy a little extra peace of mind.

Filed under: Blogging, Tech stuff on April 3rd, 2010 | 2 Comments »

I entered the world of blogging back in 2006, and my first site used self hosted WordPress.

Since then, I have started many other blogs, for myself but mostly for others.  In each case, WordPress was my preferred platform.

What I like about WordPress is its versatility.  It not only has thousands of free themes that you can use or even customise to suit the look and feel of your site, but there are also many thousand plug-ins which can add enormous functionality or just plain gimmickry.

I tend to classify plug-ins under several categories.

First of all, there are the essentials.  A site will work, and work well without these, but you can save yourself a lot of trouble and potential disaster if you use them.

Next are the very important ones.  These are the ones that enhance the site in some way to make the reading experience easier or provide functionality that is otherwise lacking.

Next are the mildly important ones.  Again, they provide some kind of added bonus to the site but are easy to live without.

Then there are the trivial ones that are there as pure decoration.

There are also two subgroups – those that are ‘free-standing’ in that they just add code to the site which performs a particular function, and the ‘non-free-standing’ ones which rely on a third party website to function properly.  These latter ones require some caution.

Plug-ins should be treated with some caution, as they can impact heavily on the site.  The essentials are essential, so I will leave them out of this argument, but even amongst the Very Important ones, there are some that may impact on a site’s performance.  The dangerous ones are the Very Important Non-Free-Standing plug-ins.  As an example, if a blog uses Google Analytics to track traffic (and who doesn’t like to know how their blog is faring?) then this requires coding that has to connect to the Google Analytics site.  If, for example, the Google site is slow or down, then this is going to cause problems with your blog.    Fortunately these events are extremely rare, but it is worth consideration.

Equally, some plug-ins set up additional fields in the site’s database.  Not only does this impact on the server response time, but can lead to fairly weighty databases.  One plug-in I had some unfortunate experiences with in the past is Firestats, which tracks statistics on a site.  It creates extra tables, and in a couple of instances I found these tables filled with tens of megabytes of additional information – the plug-in was recording details of every single hit on the site and storing those details!  I did not consider this information to be of such vital importance that I could tolerate not only the impact on the database server, but also the huge wastage of disk space, so I have removed it from all sites.

Next time around, I will delve into some of my favourite plug-ins; why I use them and how to get them.

Stay tuned.

Filed under: Blogging on March 30th, 2010 | No Comments »

I have been using Microsoft Office for many years now, through all its incarnations.

I know there are alternatives out there, but I like to stick to the things I am used to.

I had no problems at all with each upgrade, until I purchased my latest Laptop, which came with Office 2007 installed.  This is where things fell apart.

Office 2007 radically revamped the menu structure on all the applications, and while some people may find it better, I found it confusing.

Over the months, I have managed to find most of the functions and features that I required, but this frequently meant trips to the help area.  What was worse, there was no way in the application to call up the old menu system. 

In Windows, there is a backwards compatibility checkbox, to enable the Start Menu to revert to the old Classic Menu (as they call it) but there is no such facility in Office.

Last week, I came across a wee application – UBitMenu.  I downloaded it and installed it.  It’s a very small program, and running it seemed to have little effect on life.

Until, that is, I opened Office.

It has very nicely inserted a new tab in the menu bar, called, appropriately ‘Menu’.  This now exists in all Office’s applications.

Selecting that tab gives the old Classic Menu.

Brilliant.

It is available here.

Filed under: Tech stuff on March 21st, 2010 | No Comments »