Hate, we do, all comment spam. They post, we delete, but I actively ban. Still, they come back for more. It must be economically worthwhile for these people to continually do this, because there seems to be no end in sight as to when they will stop. Comment spam is here to stay. Innovations are bound to happen, so I’ve logged what I have learned.
You will need to utilize your raw access log to see these techniques in action.
Air, you really cannot live without it. Literally. Dirty air gets into everything, especially PM2.5 sized. No household air cleaners or air conditioners can get rid of this pollution. I’m sure a house sized hepa filter could do it, but open a door and your air quality would quickly drop. What would life be if you could not go outside?
Anyway, I thought I’d add city air quality readings to my WordPress blog, but I’m only partially satisfied. I actually want 2 cities but can only get one at a time. There are instructions on aqicn.org Air Quality Widget – New Improved Feed
Spammers are never welcome, clutter up your comments and are a pain in the arse. They blow through your bandwidth, which then gets your ISP on your tail asking you to upgrade your account type. This costs you money. Here are some dual IP strategies that I found in analyzing my WordPress site’s comments.
As a WordPress developer you seem to be always looking for a new theme, something that will be fresh, new and novel. This is what brought me to use the EvoLve theme.
On the plus side the EvoLve theme is a free theme, available on WordPress.org, from a company called Theme4Press. The look is clean and uncluttered, something I can present and work with. I do like the home page slider options, which allow you to have up to 5 slider images. I also like the 3 front page content boxes that appear under the slider. They have large eye catching icons, some text and a call to action button for more info.
You could use a reciprocating saw (Sawsall) as a manual saw, but why would you? Turn the thing on and let it do all the work. There is no need to go to the expense of buying an electric saw, only to expend energy sawing the thing back and forth, in a manual fashion, off. You are penalized because you have spent money on the saw, the blade is too short for long cuts, and the thing is heavy and unwieldly. This same experience can, and does happen with WordPress, my favorite CMS development tool.
Simple I am, unless there is complexity required. Why mess with simple if it works and you need nothing else, I say. Such is the case with the WordPress theme “Default Enhanced”, now seemingly defunct. I still like it, so I changed it. Here are my documented changes.
Make a Child Theme: The first thing to do is to make a child theme. This is pretty easy, so research it. You really need only two files: style.css and functions.php. If the theme writer ever updates the theme for security or other reasons your changes will not be wiped out but overlayed on top of the update.
Overall the Pinboard 1.0.7 and 1.0.10 themes for WordPress is a really lovely theme. It has lots of features and nice functionality. However you really never know a theme until you put a site into production and stumble upon its features and flaws. For Pinboard, I struggled with formatting the top banner for hours, until I discovered it’s secrets. While there is a forum for Pinboard, their help was sparse.
Site Title and Tagline: I wanted an image banner the width of the screen, or close to it. Pinboard has an option of a small banner coupled with a text site name and tagline. Since my graphic banner would include my site name and tag line, I turned off this feature.
In my current contract I had the opportunity to work with optical character recognition (OCR). We had over 50 documents in paper format that were published before 1991 that needed to get digitized and published on the internet. While these documents were old, they have really in-depth knowledge that simply needed to be shared with the world. OCR, however, has its quirks and is not all that straight forward. Some are due to the age and handling of the original documents over the years, and some are due to the original typographical or layout decisions of the original publishers. No matter the reason, they are not to be found and you need these documents on the internet, so the monkey is now on your back.
Recently a personal web site of a friend of mine was hacked by Mr.Moro the Moroccan Hacker. He had a cheeky message up on the site, which was then indexed by Google. It took Google a couple of days to reindex his front page. You would think that I would be personally very angry with Mr.Moro, but you would be incorrect. Mr.Moro was the first step in the solution.
Upgrades to WordPress are important to keep hackers from destroying your site and your index status on Google Search. After upgrading to WordPress 3.5 there were some preexisting files that should also be deleted. These now unused files can be hijacked by hackers to damage your site. It is best to delete or move these files from your WP directories.
