I’ve tweaked a plugin that will disable the Windows Live Writer headers that appear in the html headers of pages generated by WordPress 2.31. More information and the download can be found at the WLW Disabler plugin page.
Spiders: How Often Is Too often?
Recently I have been paying closer than usual attention to my apache server logs, and noticed a few new services that are visiting much more frequently than I think they need to. It’s really not necessary to come every 30 minutes, is it? No, it’s not. A spider service should use a more intelligent method of checking a site. For example, maybe only come once per day. Then if the site regularly has multiple postings on a day, increase to checking more frequently. But starting out by checking every 30 minutes is overkill, and bordering on abuse. Another annoying thing is that the spider in question checked my robots.txt file once, and is now reading my feed (and not even my Feedburner feed) every 30 minutes. I’ve emailed them, if I don’t get a response by Friday evening, I’ll simply block their IP address range.
Evolving PlanetMike.com: Chapter 2 – Where will it go?
I’ve said the personal posts and content from PlanetMike.com will be moved to another site. What site would that be? I’m thinking now it will be MichaelClark.name. I also have registered both MichaelClark.org and MichaelClark.net, but .name will be my “official” personal site.
If you’d like to get a glimpse as to how I’ll be doing this, simply subscribe to my personal RSS feed at http://www.michaelclark.name/feed.
Evolving PlanetMike.com: Chapter 1 – What do I currently have?
So the first thing to do is figure out exactly what content I have to work with. For the WordPress portion of the site, that’s simple. I installed the Dagon Design Sitemap Plugin (warning – lots of spammy comments, so that site may not be managed any longer) and created a sitemap of the blog portion of PlanetMike.com.
I also simply eyeballed the site’s home page of PlanetMike.com to see how many sections of the site could be rolled over to my new personal site. It’s a lot to move over: photography, fractals, all of the Humor sections (jokes, optical illusions, and funny photographs (which may simply get deleted since I don’t think I own the copyright on any of them)). There are also a lot of my writings from before there were blogs that will be moved into the blog system. That will also make the site easier to navigate and maintain.
Ultimately my final goal is to have everything in the WordPress database. That may not be possible, but as far as I can do it I will. For example, my web traffic log reports output into shtml (server side include) files. I’d rather they were in my WordPress database. Can I copy and paste the tables and reports into a new page in WordPress? A little extra work, but that’s ok. Can I do the same thing with my Gallerie photo galleries? I think I’ll probably look around at the options available for photo management plugins for WordPress.
Evolving PlanetMike.com: Introduction
For years I’ve been using PlanetMike.com as my primary web site, and I post everything on it. The site started as a bunch of static web pages, then used (and still does in many places) server side includes. I’ve posted photos, jokes, other miscellaneous information. Then I started blogging, using Bloxsom, and then switched to WordPress. My category list is enormous.
Well, I am now getting ready for the next step in the evolution of the PlanetMike.com web site. I am going to move the personal stuff off of PlanetMike.com over to another domain. I want PlanetMike.com to be a site that a new blogger (or an experienced blogger) can come to to learn about technology and related issues. And obviously a lot of the content on the current site is a distraction and clutters the message that I am a professional who knows what he’s talking about. So I’m going to streamline the site, move content around (e.g. the blog will be the top level, the journal directory will be no more), and end up with two sites: one covering technology and blogging issues, and one covering me and my life.
I plan to start this process shortly after Christmas, and being finished up sometime in January. I’ll be writing about my experiences in a series of posts here on PlanetMike, since I’m sure I will learn things that others will need to learn as well. A key part of this is to not break old URLs and links, like I wrote about a few days ago in Help Your Users: Don’t Break Old URLs.
Help Your Users: Don’t Break Old URLs
Whenever you move content from one URL to another, you should have your web server return requests to the old URL with a response code of 301 and the updated URL. This allows the user to still get to the content they were looking for. Plus it tells web crawlers of all sorts about the updated location. For years I’ve been using Network Solutions only for Whois lookups by going to http://www.nsi.com/whois. Earlier tonight I tried that and received a 404, page doesn’t exist. Out of curiosity I looked at their home page for their new URL. It is still available from their web site, but at a much longer URL. So to heck with it, for now I’ll start using Whois.Net for my lookups. Unless you have a better resource I should use, I’m open to your suggestions. And NSI, farewell, I now have no reason at all to visit your web site.
Announcing Fix the P
The name of the blogging system WordPress is a trademark of Automattic, and they’ve chosen to spell it with an uppercase “W” and an uppercase “P.” It should not be with a lowercase p, such as Wordpress. The Fix The P WordPress plugin changes the lowercase p in “WordPress” to an uppercase P (essentially changing Wordpress to WordPress) in titles, posts, pages, excerpts and comments. This helps your reputation as a professional. How professional is it to blog about one of the world’s most popular blogging platforms, and spell it wrong? Fix the P gives you a safety net.
Complete information about Fix the P is on the Fix the P plugin page.
Many thanks to Lorelle VanFossen for the idea for this plugin.
Announcing WARP: WordPress Admin Reminder Plugin
I have just finished my first WordPress plugin, WARP, which stands for WordPress Admin Reminder Plugin. This plugin adds a reminder tip (in large red letters) in the top right corner of your WordPress admin pages. The text is a link to the appropriate page in the wp-admin area. Reminders include:
- Making a backup of your database (every Friday)
- Checking your spam for false positives (every Wednesday)
- Other tasks that are easy to forget (every third Monday)
Hopefully this will help you keep your WordPress blog in good working order.
Complete information about WARP is on the WARP plugin page.
New Splogger Tactic: Random Sentences
While going through my comment spam this morning, I have discovered a new trick the sploggers are using. Until this week, they would scrape the first paragraph and then (usually) link to the original post on my site. It seems they are now choosing a few random sentences to excerpt. One of the sploggers chose to mirror only my copyright statement.
I think they are trying to get away from the recent trend for bloggers to include a fingerprint of some sort in their posts. The fingerprint can be a unique odd phrase, such as “may I borrow your green pencil cold?” My fingerprint by the way is the hash 7b1d91231a87fb75e0054e886a0dea57. I’m using the Digital Fingerprint plugin.
Jack-O-Lantern User Agent Considered Harmful
While researching some of the spam comments submitted to blog, I ran across the Jack-O-Lantern user agent. Any comments submitted from my blog are run through a unique WordPress comment post script I wrote. The script allows me to track who is spidering my site and storing the comment form URL for later usage.
One of these comment spams tried to use a form generated by a specific IP address. I looked through my server logs and saw that the page was generated on December 4th, 2007, at 2:30pm. There was no referrer given, but the User Agent was “JACK-O`-LANTERN/1.1” (case and back-tick intact). The first spam comment came through two days later, on December 6th at 2:22 pm. Since then I’ve recorded 113 attempts to submit comment spam to my blog from that URL.