So we have not made it a secret on this blog that we are big fans of VaultPress as a product (Disclosure: They are advertisers on this blog). I have been using it on this blog (amongst others) for our protection and have happily paid for our privilege and peace of mind. It has been a little rocky to get started and we have offered and received help and feedback for the issues we ran into during the initial sync with VaultPress. The peace of mind is satisfying, the support is very reasonable, the product is a “set it and forget it” and as such, it runs on its own. I check the security area once in a while and marvel at the number of comments and other statistics that are mildly interesting but not all that helpful.
Then I noticed something last morning that made me think. I know that does not happen […]
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog, feed
If you run a social network or any kind of online publishing service, you will be hit by spam, if you haven’t been hit already, and Akismet wants to help.
When most people hear about Akismet, they often think about WordPress, but Akismet is actually available for over twenty additional systems and platforms, including Movable Type, Drupal, phpBB, PunBB, and libraries for PHP, Python, and .NET.
If you’re running, or planning to run, a social network or online publishing service, the Akismet team wants you to know that they can not only protect you from direct spam, but from parasite spam as well, as long as you can give them a way to contact you.
Akismet’s pattern and volume monitoring abilities make direct spam easy to filter, but ever since the dawn of forums, spammers have opened accounts for the sole purpose hosting their spam on your site. Thanks to Akismet’s pattern […]
Original post by James Huff
Technorati Tags: blog
If you know of someone, or are yourself a blogger on Vox, you should know already that Six Apart has announced plans for closing the service. Users have until the 30th of September to get their data our of Vox and into other blogging and/or CMS platforms if they so choose.
Mark Jaquith has a great suggestion on how to Import a Vox blog into WordPress or almost anything else. In short, he suggests that you import your Vox blog into a vanilla WordPress.com blog and then export it out as a WordPress export file. Then you actually have a bunch of choices of what to do with your blog. PS: Be sure to mark your WordPress.com blog as private before importing if you do not intend to make that your final destination.
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Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, feed
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog, blogger, blogging, feed
Mastering WordPress Shortcodes.: Smashing Magazine had a nice instructional writeup on mastering WordPress shortcodes and creating new ones to make one’s blogging life easier. Shortcodes are small peices of pre-determined code (viewable in the HTML version of a post) that are later expanded by WordPress when a post is published and subsequently displayed. Shortcodes are already used by WordPress for many internal functions such as albums. This tutorial goes into details of the shortcode API in WordPress and into some detail of creating advanced shortcodes to accomplish tasks such as
Send to Twitter (or consequently, send to Techmeme via Twitter)
Create an RSS feed link
Insert Adsense into a post
Insert an RSS reader into a post
Add shortcodes to sidebars
Please let us know if you have used any of these or know of/have created others that might be useful.
Design Trendsinspiration
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, rss, feed
New way to get on Techmeme: send tips to Techmeme via Twitter: Techmeme is now accepting tips via Twitter. They are using Twitter’s search API to look for incoming tips. Techmeme is my first read every morning and now that the site is partially human edited, there is the desire and the ability for readers to suggest news. Of particular interest is the Techmeme suggest button to add to your site or blog. Anyone know of a WordPress plugin that does this automagically yet? Read more of the discussion at Techmeme and story thanks to Blog Herald.
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Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog, news
easyComment Firefox Extension: “easyComment enables you to One-Click Comment on Wordpress Blogs which makes it an perfect tool for people who comment on a lot of different Weblogs and who don’t want to sign up on every single one. You’ll have to define your Personal Data once in the Preferences Dialog and every time you click the easyComment Button on the bottom Status Bar in your Firefox window, it searches the comment form on the current page and fills it with your data saving you a huge chunk of type-in work.” from the author’s post. Hat tip to Keith, found via the Weblog Tools Collection Crew LifeStream
Design Trendsinspiration
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog
WordPress 2.7 Keyboard Shortcuts in the WordPress Codex is a nice page to figure out the neat little tricks to make your job of administering a blog easier and more user friendly. WordPress 2.7 adds the ability to use keyboard shortcuts to browse and moderate comments. These keyboard shortcuts are designed to save time by allowing you to rapidly navigate and perform actions on comments. If your blog receives a lot of comments for moderation and/or spam, these shortcuts might come handy.
Speaking of new features added to WordPress 2.7, Demetris has written a post on the Ten New Features in WordPress 2.7 that strikes him as the most useful. I really like his illustrated style of writing. It is worthy of note that some of the features he mentions are dependant on compatibility with your theme.
Technorati Tags: blog, advertising
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog, advertising
Free links to your site: I admit that the title of this post is a little sensational but that is how Matt Cutts puts it. In the post linked above, he talks about the newly introduced feature of Google Webmaster Portal that allows users to find the pages that link to 404 pages on your site. In his words (emphasis his) “Some of the easiest links you’ll ever get are when people tried to link to you and just messed up.”
What was most useful for me in that post was a link to another post on the Google Webmaster Portal that helps you create better 404 pages using an experimental widget. Now I am sure there are ways to incorporate a Custom Search within the 404 without using the widget but I stuck with it because the output looked useful. Quick Online Tips had a post on the Google Custom […]
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog, google
Smart cache-busting for your Wordpress stylesheet.: If you frequently change your WordPress stylesheet or are working on it and would like your readers to pull the new stylesheet every time instead of using a cached version (which might display a borked page), this tutorial and the subsequent plugin might be for you. Alister explains the issue in detail, provides a tutorial on how to acheive the results and then with some prodding from Matt, comes up with a plugin the get the same result which does not require any modification of code.
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Original post by Mark Ghosh
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Google Trends: weblogtoolscollection.com provides (slightly) interesting facts on your blog. Though the product is free, signing in is required to see the number estimates. Not all sites seem to have a lot of data in Google Trends but it was fun to browse the various links. Most interesting to me were the “also visited” section and the “also searched” section. Matt Cutts had an interesting writeup on Google Trends for websites a little over a week ago.
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Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog, google
