Notice anything different about Weblog Tools Collection? The name of the post probably gave it away. This blog is rocking in speed and deliverability! How you ask? Thanks to the fine work of the people over at Cloudflare.com
CloudFlare is a free(mium) service that was recommended to me by our own James. He had heard about it in conversations with some folks over dinner and wanted us to try it out. While this blog has gotten loaded over the years with JavaScript from various sources and code cruft of years, it has also gotten quite slow as a result. It is not the server (though Spam storms never help) and MySql running on the same server does not help. I had added caching thanks to WP Super Cache and had tweaked most of the settings to be tolerable on the server. I had even tried a CDN at one point but […]
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog
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
Mac OS X Status Bar integeration
Wordpress Notifier for Mac OSX.: This is a freeware tool that sits in your Mac OS X status bar and displays the current unapproved comment count on your WordPress blog. WordPress notifier works with WordPress 2.7 and above and works for blogs on WordPress.com. The screenshots look pretty cool!
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
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
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I received a ping from Anil on their newly released beta product TypePad AntiSpam while I was on vacation. I told Anil that I would look into it and write a balanced article on it when I got back. I procrastinated on writing the post for quite a while but that also gave me the chance to think about the product quite a bit, have some conversations with Anil and others about the product and ruminate on the merits, usefulness and finally the viability of the service. It came as no surprise to me that Six Apart would come up with such a product and the choices made for the product are even lesser of a surprise. I had some initial thoughts on branding and the nature of the product that I communicated to Anil privately but the rest of the review of the technology and the service is my […]
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog, technology
Magnify.net has released a media search and upload tool in the form of a plugin for WordPress (and for Movable Type). The plugin requires WordPress 2.5 or above and the plugin lets the user search and embed video and images from a variety of networks into their posts. The plugin also provides the ability to shoot and publish videoblog posts using a webcam from within the WordPress and Movable Type platform and users can search and embed video from YouTube, AOL, Yahoo, BlipTV, Metacafe, DailyMotion, Clipsyndicate, Google Video, Veoh, Red Lasso, and more.
Install is relatively simple, though it involves more than just uploading one file. The plugin adds a small button to the post page and provides a search and embed interface for the various multimedia elements including a tab for webcam capture and embed. I would imagine a natural extension of this plugin in the form of enabling video […]
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog, yahoo, google
Asides from having one of the simplest looking websites on the net, Yougler is a newly launched service which aims to provide bloggers the ability to establish a professional looking profile along with other perks. Using Yougler which is pronounced (Yoo-Guh-Ler) users can create profiles that bloggers can link to for spam free contact information. One of the long standing problems that bloggers have faced is the way in which end user’s can communicate with the blog author. Usually, this would consist of typing out your email address as so ( blabla at blabla.com). Replacing @ with at was a very inexpensive way of defeating the spam bots which would scrape the content of websites looking for printed email addresses but this method creates a few caveats. The first, user’s need to manually type out your email address which is far less convenient than clicking a link. The second, the […]
Original post by Jeffro2pt0
Technorati Tags: blog, blogger, blogging
Over the weekend, I caught a glimpse of what was supposedly a new design for the WordPress Themes Repository. As was explained by Steven Hodson, the screen shots were taken from his browser when he visited the theme repository. The screen shots showcase a carousel view for browsing through […] Continue Reading…
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Original post by Mark Ghosh
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