The Knitting Fiend

I thought those of you who run blogs might want to know what I’ve installed to provide “blog functionality”. Of course, many have probably noticed I use wordpress, which seems to work splendidly. It also allows quite a bit of customization, through use of themes (for layout) and plug ins. So, for the “bloggarati” out there, here’s a list of things I’ve installed to solve some blog issues.

As I see it, the “issues” most people want to”solve” are: 1) How to layout and organize the blog so people can find older articles that interest them and 2) How to block the large variety of spam that bombards blog.

Most of the layout issues can be solved by finding a Word Press “theme” you like, although, in the end, I wrote my own which I call “blog-o-pedia”. But, I haven’t made packaged it to let other use it easily. Span control is a bit trickier. You really need to install a cascade of prevention tools. Although my solutions aren’t perfect, I’ll list what I did about spam, and what I did to improve my content a bit.

Here goes:

1. Referrer Karma.

   This plug-in is a tremendous aid in keeping referer spam off my site entirely. People using spammy IP addresses and spammy referrers are simply blocked. I never seem them, and I don’t need to do anything. The exact method used to ban spammers is described at “unknown genius’s” site. The plug-in is fairly easy to install. If you use WordPress, you’ll need to download a few files, edit them slightly, then upload them to your blog folder. Then, add one line of code to your index.php file. Referrers banned! I recommend this highly.

2. Hash Cash.

   This is terrific for keeping comment spam bots out of my comments files. Also highly recommended! Strictly speaking it has a few features some computer geeks don’t like, but I love it.

3. Moderate Trackbacks & Moderate Pingbacks.

   This plug ins place all trackbacks and pingbacks in a moderation queu.

   The down side is valid trackbacks and pingbacks don’t show until you approve them; the upside is the spammy ones don’t either. Since 99% of my trackbacks are spammy, and advertize. . ahem, stuff and, having trackbacks and pingbacks show instantly isn’t really that important, the upside greatly outweighs the downside.

   That said, I am looking for better trackback control, and I’m fiddling a bit. But, no matter what I find, I will never remove these two plug-ins. The are the ultimate “fail safe” plug ins to keep out spammy trackbacks and pingbacks. (Oh, and if you have trouble leaving a trackback or pingback, let me know. I may have done something. . . )

4. Referrer List.

   Some visitors will notice I now have links to web pages that referred people to my pages in the last 48 hours. I think listing these can be fun. However, if you do some research on spam, you’ll also learn you need to be careful when listing referrers. One of the reasons referrer spammers blast blogs is to drop a link in the blogs referrer listings! You don’t want them to succeed.

   Most bloggers use TrueFresco or Steven Downes’s service, which has advantages. It appears to me that those two services must do something to keep spammers out of the referrers and if I used them, I wouldn’t really need to worry about referrer spam showing up.

   However, I wanted to customize some features, so I downloaded Dr. Downes’s code, made changes that suit me and uploaded the code to my site. My changes include:

   • Not listing search engines because, let’s face it, blog visitors already know google, yahoo etc. send people here.
   • Not displaying referrers until I approve the domain name. This is to avoid displaying spammy referers that advertise “stuff”.
   • Changing the display format to run horizontally. I did this because the code that finds the referers has to run after the blog pages loads. To avoid slow loadng, it best not to display the referrers above any content. Displaying horizontally lets me put the referer list at the absolute end bottom of the page.
   • Removing the number of times the site has supposedly sent me visitors. I did this because the number is a bit deceptive.
   • Truncating titles to 30 letters and making sure the titles don’t contain any “dangerous” characters. In the past, I’d run True Fresco, and some really, really long titles came through. Sometimes, the titles caused serious display problems, as in: no blog content displayed! Sorry, but I don’t want to devote more than 30 characters to a referrer page title, and I certainly don’t want a referrer title to crash my site.

   There are still a few changes I want to make. I haven’t figured out how to get Xanga or Live Journal referrers to display properly. But, I will!

   By the way, I would not bother to run Downes’s code at your own site unless you also run Referrer Karma (to keep most referrer spammers off your site) and you are willing to spend time checking and approving the domain names of the referrer that do arrive. It’s not very time consuming to do this, but you have to do it. After all, running the program and not approving the good sites is pointless, right?

5. Java Script:

   Chances are none of my site visitors feel the need to imitate my generators and quizzes. But, if you do, and you want to do it the way I do it, you’ll need to install something similar to Text Control. This permits me to enter javascript into individual blog articles. That’s how I’m running the quizzes and the generators here at the blog. If you don’t use Text Control, the autoformatting of Word Press, which is wonderful when you enter text, will mess up the javascript.

Anyway, that’s about it! Except, I should mention, I am planning to install “Spell check!”