The Knitting Fiend

Have you ever noticed I separate my non-knitting and knitting content? Well, I’m just going to report a few things about the blog. I’ll give a synopsis, then follow with details for those who might be interested.

Two weeks ago, I upgraded to WP 2.0. When you upgrade you always experience good and bad.

That’s really the main news. But, for those use WP and who have not yet upgraded, here are some details that might help you find and fix problems.

The RSS FEED problem

For some mysterious reason, when I upgraded, feeds didn’t display when accessed with URLs ending with /wp-rss2.php, wp-rss.php or wp-atom.php. Strangely enough, other URL showed the feeds just fine.

Unfortunately, I didn’t notice this. While I do subscribe to my own feed specifically to check for problems –but I’d subscribed to a feed address that was working! Last week, several readers who thought it odd I hadn’t published in weeks, visited, discovered the problem and emailed to let me know. (Thanks, readers!)

I visited the Word Press forum and discovered a fair number of other people had a similar problem when upgrading; this means it could happen to you! I tried several solutions suggested in the WordPress Forum; the first few I tried didn’t work. (This is probably because I didn’t really understand what they were saying.)

I think I resolved the problem by adding these redirect to the .htacess file at the top of my public folder. If your blog runs on Apache, you can add these. I just slapped them at the end of my already long .htaccess file.

RedirectMatch permanent ^/blog/wp-rss2.php$ http://www.thedietdiary.com/blog/feed/rss2/

RedirectMatch permanent ^/blog/wp-rss.php$ http://www.thedietdiary.com/blog/feed/rss/

RedirectMatch permanent ^/blog/wp-atom.php$ http://www.thedietdiary.com/blog/feed/atom/

(Note, when you add these to your .htaccess file, there are no breaks after the $. Obviously, you should also change ‘www.thedietdiary.com/blog’ to your blog address. )

Akismet and Spam

WordPress 2 includes Akismet as a default spam plugin. To get it to work, you first visit the “plugins” management page. Then, activate Akismet; you will be informed that you need an Akismet key. To get that, click the displayed link to WordPresses blog, and open a blog account. If you aren’t going to start a new blog, don’t worry what you call it! Once you open the account, you can click around to find your key. Copy that, and paste it into the box at your real blog! (Yes. This is a pain in the neck.)

Once Akismet is up an running, the Akismet plug in will compare each and every comment to a database listing current spam IPs, URLs etc. If the comment looks spammy, it will be marked as spam. What if it thinks a good comment is spam? You will be able to review the comments and accept them if they aren’t spam.

I’m pretty happy with Akismet especially during the past weeks. I’ve been being bombarded with spam for pharmaceuticals. By bombarded, I mean 500 a day. So, quite a few more than I want to appear in my comments list.

Is there a negative to Akismet? Well, maybe. One possible negative is it might slow down comment posting because every comment needs to be sent off site to let Akismet compare the contents to the information contained in its database. Then, Akismet has to send a message back to my blog. This is supposedly a problem for sites with heavy comment traffic. In other words, not mine! (Well, unless you count the spam comment traffic! Which, as far as this problem is concerned, does count.)

So, to avoid bogging things down for regular commenters, I thought I’d look around for solutions that might minimize the problem. The solution I found requires two plugins: “Spam Karma 2″supplemented by “Spam Karma Akismet Plug-in”.

What’s the combo do? The SK Akismet plugin supposedly lets Spam Karma evaluate comments first. If the comment is obviously spam or obviously not spam, the comment is not sent to Akismet. It’s just posted to the blog.

If Spam Karma can’t tell, it sends the comment to Akismet then waits for Akismet to answer. So, presumably, regular visitors will generally see their comments posted without having to wait for Akismet to send back it’s message. (Of course, if you enter a comment with lots of spammy words like “texas hold ‘em poker” or “viagra”, you may need to wait. Plus, you comment may not appear. )

My diagnosis so far? Akismet seems very effective. It catches spam from the new breed of “smart” bots. However, as I mentioned, I also added Spam Karma 2. I also still block site visits by “dumb”, yet relentless, bots using Bad Behavior; I still use Hashcash to prevent dumb bots from entering comments.

Spam bots are getting smarter and more relentless. So, I figure, including several methods of screening spam is good. If one method fails, maybe the other will still block the spam. With luck, I’ll make it to the end of the year with no spam showing on the blog itself!