Unintentionally Blank

If you are looking at the front page of my blog, you will see the layout of the posts is quite different to most other blogs. The home page displays the latest post, then the latest article, then a few more posts. There are a number of posts out there showing how to display a sticky post, even displaying a news post as sticky for only a day or two but none of them quite did everything I wanted them to do. So, after a while looking through the codex article on the loop and scratching my head, I finally got down and worked it out myself, here’s how.

Continue reading “My New Front Page: Adventures With The Wordpress Loop” »

One of the biggest benefits of upgrading to Wordpress 2.1 has been the new version of the Akismet plugin. All the other tweaks are all very nice, but the automatic deletion of spam on posts over a month old has left my spam queue almost empty. Considering I was receiving more that 100 spam comments a day previous to that (sadly double my unique daily visitors and nothing compared to some blogs), this has been a miracle. To date, Akismet has stopped 11,670 spam comments and I couldn’t be happier that I no longer have to look at 99% of them.

I can’t give all the credit to the new Akismet though. I recently installed Bad Behaviour to try to stop spammers even reaching the blog. It is currently displaying that it has blocked 735 access attempts in the last 7 days, so it must be helping too.

Comment spam is the bane of blogging and the existence of fantastic plugins like Akismet, Bad Behaviour and, not forgetting, Spam Karma (which I haven’t used, but is spoken of in the same breath as the other two) makes thousands of lives easier. I can’t imagine what I would have done, had I been made to moderate or delete each and every one of those 11,000 comments! Maybe one day the spammers will give up, until then we have the above to thank. Plugin authors are amazing, but the ones who save this much trouble need extra thanks, maybe one day I’ll even drop a donation in a Paypal account. Yeah, I will, I think they’ll appreciate that.

It was bad enough that I have found it difficult to update this blog recently, but when I discovered that I was only giving out a partial feed I felt even worse that I couldn’t fix it. There is plenty of debate over whether feeds are better as full or partial, but I can’t stand only reading part of an article in my feed reader then having to visit the site. I subscribe to a feed so that I don’t have to visit a site, save for commenting. Still, this is a long running issue and my opinion lies on the side that full feeds are king.

Given that my own site was violating my own beliefs, I had to fix it. Since I upgraded to Wordpress 2.1 and found out that this is now intended behaviour when using the <!–more–> quicktag, though is also subject to a debate. Thankfully Ronald Heft came to the rescue and has released Full Text Feed, a plugin that exports the full article, whether you use the quicktag or not. This is now in action, so if you check my feed, you should now find the whole article available (can I take this opportunity to suggest subscribing too? I’ll be writing loads of great stuff soon!)

Continue reading “Save Your Wordpress Feed, Two Fantastic Plugins” »

So, I have been found amongst the last day’s submissions of ProBlogger’s group writing project again. But Internet or no Internet, when a group writing project comes along, who can resist. So, I rigged up my bluetooth dongle, my mobile phone and my laptop and violá, I’m posting again. This month’s theme is reviews and predictions. I haven’t been out of school long enough to write a decent review of this year (I’m still coming across blog posts from 2002 that are news to me) so I thought I would give my predictions for 2007 and the web. Then I read Read/Write Web’s predictions and knew I couldn’t beat that.

So in the end I thought I would comment on and ponder over what I thought was important from other people’s predictions as well as my own, and I would throw in some more personal reviews as well. The Internet and blogging is what you make of it, so I’m not following any rules here

Continue reading “Unintentionally Blank Predictions ‘07″ »

Google announced the Google Blog Search Pinging Service today. If you want to make sure your latest posts appear in Google’s Blog Search then, like other services including Technorati or Weblogs.com, you will want to ping them when you update. This can be done in two ways:

Continue reading “Pinging Google Blog Search With Wordpress” »