Tag Archives: plugin

Oops! Subscriber Feed Accidentally Turned Off

Posted on by
Comment

I accidentally turn off the subscription feature, halting the notifications about new posts.

I should have known I’d done this because I also did it on my Great Loop blog. I turned off a plug in back in April and that inadvertently turned off the blog subscription feature — except, apparently, for WordPress.com account holders. I’ve since fixed the problem. If you’re a blog subscriber who used the form in the sidebar to sign up, here are the posts you may have missed:

There aren’t many of them because, frankly, I’ve been enjoying life too much to stop and write about it. (Have I mentioned anywhere how awesome retirement is? I should blog about that.) What I do write these days has been mostly in my Great Loop blog.

Battling Comment Spam

Posted on by
1

An interesting — but unfortunate — statistic from this site.

One of the biggest challenges to bloggers who allow comments on their blogs — other than dealing with immature, know-it-all asses who can’t write a civil sentence — is comment spam. It generally comes from three sources:

  • Automated spambots that are programmed to post comments on blogs. This accounts for more than 90% of the comment spam out there.
  • Real people who manually post comments that promote their products, services, or websites.
  • Pingbacks from blogs built by scraping content from other blogs, primarily to attract hits to other links on their pages.

I wrote about comment spam extensively on my Maria’s Guides site when I was regularly providing fresh content about WordPress. If you’re a blogger, you might find the following posts there interesting:

Spam vs. Ham on An Eclectic MindWordPress’s anti-spam tool, Akismet, does an excellent job of catching and filtering out spam so I don’t really need to see it at all. It also provides statistics about comments. This morning, while looking at these stats, I discovered that a full 98% of all comments posted on this blog are spam — or about 4,000 to 10,000 spam comments a month — leaving only 2% as legitimate comments (or “ham,” a term used by Akismet).

If this percentage is about the same on all blogs, it’s easy to see why so many bloggers elect to either turn the commenting feature off or require registration for commenting. (Note that registration doesn’t always help; some spambots can also register an account and then manual intervention is required to identify and delete those accounts.)

Comments are moderated here for two reasons:

  • Aksimet doesn’t catch all spam. It misses, on average, about 10 spam comments a month.
  • Akismet can’t identify abusive comments.

I have a zero tolerance approach to spam and abusive commenters and don’t want to see any of it on this blog. So I manually review all the comments that Akismet approves before allowing them to appear on this blog.

June 30, 2014 Update
I’ve finally gotten around to writing up the site comment policy on a regular page (rather than post) on this site. You can find it here: Comment Policy.

(If you believe that deleting comments is censorship or somehow violates your freedom of speech, read this and this.)

Personally, I’d like to see a higher percentage (and number) of legitimate comments on this blog. I like when good conversations get going among readers. I can think of two posts offhand where reader comments have added real value to what I’ve written: “The Helicopter Job Market” and “Why Groupon is Bad for Business…and Consumers.” I write from experience and my experiences are limited. When readers share their own thoughts based on their experiences, they provide more information for other readers to draw upon. They help round out a discussion. And as long as they don’t get rude or abusive to me or other commenters — or are obviously commenting to promote their own product or service (i.e., spamming) — I don’t care if they disagree. Intelligent, civil debate based on facts is encouraged.

But while comment spam is obviously a serious problem for all bloggers that allow comments on their blogs, I have it well under control here.

Web Site Redesign: Fitting in My Photos

Posted on by
Comment

With 90+ photos appearing randomly in my old site’s header, I wasn’t about to leave them behind.

CutlineOne of the reasons I chose the Cutline 3 Column Right theme for my site’s redesign is because I wanted a three column layout that was wider than my old site. Studies — including stats from all of the sites/blogs I operate — showed that the vast majority of Web site visitors have their screen resolutions set to 1024×768 or wider. I even use that setting on my little 12″ PowerBook. So the old site’s redesign was throwing away 200+ pixels of screen real estate that could be better used providing content or navigation features.

How Do I Use Those Images?

The problem I faced was the header image. Since I built my blog in WordPress nearly two years ago, I had been displaying images that I’d taken during my travels. The images had to be cropped and fit into pre-established format. I used the Random Header plugin to randomize the display. Over 18 months, I’d added nearly 100 images to the header image collection. I’d even begun writing about them in the About the Photos topic. They had become an integral part of my site and I didn’t want to lose them.

So while I continued working on my Leopard book during the day, this little problem was in the back of my mind. For days. One option was to rework the CSS and change the header image so it only took up a portion of the width and use the space beside it for a Web site description. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough CSS to do this successfully without spending hours on trial and error. With a deadline approaching, I couldn’t afford to waste time experimenting. I had to have an answer and be ready to implement it.

About the Photos Images

Then I remembered the smaller images I use in About the Photos to show the images I’m discussing. What if I put three of them side by side and displayed them with some sort of randomizer? Would they fit? What would they look like?

Example ImageThe images in question were 324 pixels wide. The space I had to work with was 970 pixels. 3 x 324 = 972. My luck, sometimes.

I reduced the size of three images to 322 wide and began some quick experiments to replace the existing header image (the street scene you see in the screenshot above) with the three images. I could get them to fit and they didn’t look bad. But I couldn’t get the spacing between them just righ. And I didn’t like the way they fit right up against each other.

A Short Film History Lesson

Then I came up with the film sprocket idea.

For those of you who began using a camera in the digital age and aren’t familiar with 35mm film, let me explain. Before everyone started using digital cameras, serious photographers used 35mm film. The film comes on rolls and has tiny holes along each side. A camera has gears that line up with the holes. You feed the film into the camera and it grabs the holes with its gears. A mechanical lever pulls the next blank piece of film from the film canister to the place in front of the shutter for the next photo. When the roll was finished, the photographer (or his camera) would roll the film back into the canister and the photographer would drop it off for processing. When he picked it up, he’d get prints and negatives. The negatives are the actual film, with inverse (or negative) images on them.

If a photographer had his own darkroom, he’d likely make a contact sheet. This was created by putting the negatives right against a sheet of photographic paper in the dark, then exposing the paper to light for a short time and developing it. The resulting images were tiny (at least they were from 35mm film) and clearly displayed rows of black boxes on either side of the image with black lines between them — like you see here in the header of my redesigned site.

So anyone who has worked with film should recognize these little holes. Of course, my images are considerably larger and wider, so they’re not exact representations of contact strip images. They’re just borrowing the idea.

When I modified the three images to include the borders and fake sprocket holes, I liked what I saw. I created a Photoshop action to modify the 89 remaining images so they were smaller and included the tiny black boxes and borders.

Randomizing

On my old site, the random header image was randomized with a WordPress plugin named Random Header. But since I had three images to show in my header, I needed a different solution. So I turned to the software I used on Flying M Air’s Web site to randomize some of the images there: Random File.

Random File enables you to display random files anywhere on a template. (If you use a plugin like Exec-PHP, you can even display them within posts.) What’s neat about it is that you can tell it how many random files — well, in my case, images — to display and it will display that quantity without repeating them.

After some fiddling around with the CSS used in header.php — remember, I’m no expert — I added the following code in place of the existing header image code:

< ?php $files = array(); for ($i=1;$i<=3;$i++) { $file = c2c_random_file('/wp-content/foldername/foldername/', 'jpg png gif', 'url', $files);
echo 'Random image #' . $i . '';
$files[] = $file;
}
?>

The result is what you see here.

The Hard Part Was Done

With the tough design decision done, I was ready to put the new theme into place. I did that on Saturday, taking most of the day to get it 90% functional. I’m pleased with the results.

Comments? Questions? Use the Comments link or form for this post.

January 3, 2009 Update: I’ve since updated my site’s Web design again and adopted a new theme that does not include photos in the header. So although this information may still be useful to WordPress users, there’s no live example for you to see what it looks like. Sorry.

I Don’t Like Being Seriously Dugg

Posted on by
5

The activity finally winds down — I think.

In yesterday’s post, “Getting Seriously Dugg,” I reported the history of a blog post that rose quickly to stardom in the world of Digg users. But that report was done early in the day, before the shit hit the fan (so to speak).

The Heat is On

The Digg count continued to rise throughout the day. And the hits kept coming. All morning long, there were at least 100 visitors online at my site at once. This is not normal here. And it was rather frightening. I kept expecting something to break.

But it wasn’t just the popular Digg post that was getting hits. It was the post about getting Dugg, too. Soon, it had more hits than the dugg post — even though it wasn’t dug by anyone at all. I’m still trying to figure that one out.

Things came to a head at 11:15 AM when I got an e-mail message from my ISP:

Our Hosting Operations Admins have alerted us to an issue with your hosting account. The account has overutilized resources within the shared environment. As a result, the account has been moved to an isolated server for Terms of Service violators. You have 30 days to research and resolve this issue. After this time, the account will be evaluated again. If the issue is resolved, the account will be migrated back to the shared environment. If it persists, you will need to move to a full Dedicated server.

I got on the phone immediately and called my ISP. To my knowledge, I hadn’t violated any terms of service by getting hits. My plan allows 2,000 GB of bandwidth per month. The billing month starts on the third — that day. So far, in all the years I’ve hosted there, I’ve never exceeded 6% of my monthly allowance. Just because I was getting 30 times the usual number of hits I get in a day, it was still not much more than I’d get in a total month. So there was no way I’d even come close to 10% of the monthly allowance — let alone exceed it.

The guy who answered the phone was extremely polite but equally clueless. He had to talk to Advanced Hosting. He couldn’t let me talk to them. They gave him a song and dance about too many domain names pointing to the same site. He attempted to hand the same thing to me. I told him that that shouldn’t matter since none of those domain names were advertised anywhere. Besides, there were only about a dozen of them pointing to one site and maybe 15 pointing to another. I wasn’t aware of any limitation.

“I’ve been dugg,” I told him. When I got no answer, I asked, “Do you know what that means?”

“No,” he said.

I explained that it meant that one of my blog’s posts had become very popular and that people were flocking to my site to read it. I told him this was a temporary thing and that it should be back to normal by the end of the day. I hoped.

He told me that if I continued to get so many hits to my site, I’d have to get a dedicated server. I told him I’d evaluate after I’d seen my stats for the day. (My account is updated daily in the middle of the night.)

We hung up.

A Brief Intermission

I went flying. I took a couple from Virginia on an hour-long helicopter tour in the Wickenburg area. I showed them mine sites and canyons from the air. We saw a lot of cows, too. Afterward, I goofed off at the airport, chatting with two jet pilots who’d come in and were waiting for passengers. Then I went shopping for dinner. I got home and had a snack. Then I looked at Digg. It was 4 PM.

What Happened in Five Hours

The post that had started it all now had more than 1,200 diggs. It had been viewed almost 30,000 times. The post about that post, which hadn’t been dugg at all, had been viewed more than 40,000 times.

But thankfully, there were only 33 people online. So the flood had begun to subside.

On the Digg Technology page, my dugg post was listed near the bottom, under newly popular. (Ironically, on the same page, near the top, was a post about how Digg was losing popularity. That had more than 1,200 diggs, too.)

The Morning After

It’s the next day. I can now look back objectively on my blog’s day with a Digg Top 10 Tech post by studying some of the stats for the day and how the differ from other days.

My ISP reports that for the first day of my billing period — yesterday — I used up .55% (that’s just over half a percent, folks) of my monthly bandwidth. That means that if every day was like yesterday, I’d still come in at less than 20% allowable bandwidth. So I don’t know what “terms of service violation” they were whining about.

W3Counter, which I use to track page hits and visits, says I got just over 27,000 page hits yesterday. Look at the chart below; it makes my site look flat-line dead before yesterday. Honestly — it wasn’t that dead.

Hits

Today’s hits are about 3 times a normal day. Nice, but I’m willing to bet it drops down to normal within the next few days.

W3Counter also sent me an e-mail message warning me that their free service doesn’t cover sites that get more than 5,000 hits a day.They say I need to upgrade to a pro account for $4.95/month. We’ll see how long before they disable my current account — I’m not paying them to tell me how many hits I get when I can easily set up some stat software with a free WordPress plugin. (ShortStats, which we wrote about in our WordPress book, comes to mind.)

(I have not been able to reconcile page hits as reported by W3Counter with article reads as reported by a WordPress plugin. I have a sneaking suspicion that the WordPress plugin counts bots.)

Digg, as a source of hits, kicked Google out of the top spot on my site. Google used to account for 54% of my visitors. Now, for the 14-day period tracked by W3Counter, Digg is the big source. Google doesn’t even make the list any more, with all the different Digg URLs people used to find my site. So my sources stat is completely skewed and pretty much useless for the next 13 days. And 93% of the hits in the past 14 days have been to the 18-year-old mouse story.

Meanwhile, WP-UserOnline reports that yesterday saw the most users online at once on this site: 375. I don’t think this site will ever see that many concurrent users again.

My RSS feed subscriptions have more than doubled. That’s great. (If you’re a new subscriber, thanks for tuning in. And don’t worry — I don’t write about Digg every day.) It’ll be interesting to see if that number continues to climb or if I manage to scare all the new folks off by failing to provide more Diggable content on a daily basis.

My Google AdSense revenue for yesterday was right in line with an average high day. When you consider that I got about 20 times my normal number of page hits yesterday, you might think that I’d get 20 times the revenue. I didn’t. Obviously, Digg users don’t click Google ads.

The last I checked, the 18-year-old mouse story got just over 1,357 Diggs. I think that I actually encouraged the extra Diggs by placing the Digg icon at the top of the post. I’ve since taken it away from all posts.

I’ve realized that I don’t want to be seriously Dugg. Other than the surge in new RSS subscribers, there really isn’t any benefit to it.

What do you think?

Have you been slammed by being dugg? How did it affect your hosting account or other services? Use the Comments link or form to let the rest of us know.

Getting Seriously Dugg

Posted on by
Comment

Wow.

On Wednesday, I wrote a story about my friend Jo’s 18-year-old computer mouse. It got a bunch of hits.

On Thursday, I realized it might be of interest to Mac users, so I submitted it to MacSurfer’s Headline News, not sure if they’d pick it up since it was already about a day old. I’m not sure, but I think they did. Throughout the day, I the piece got another 2000 or so hits — which is pretty standard for my posts listed on MacSurfer.

Somewhere in the middle of the day, the story got Dugg. By the time I realized it, it had 17 Diggs. That is a huge amount for any of my posts. My site doesn’t usually attract the Digg crowd for reasons I can’t fully comprehend. (I’m not sure what the Digg crowd is looking for and assume I just don’t deliver it.) I mentioned it on Twitter and got a handful more Diggs. But certainly not enough to get it on Digg Home page or even anyplace it might be noticed. By the time I called it quits for the day, it had 34 Diggs and about 4,000 hits. Cool, I thought.

This morning, I sensed trouble when I attempted to check my Web site. I got a 503: Temporarily Unavailable error. I figured that my ISP must be doing some maintenance. I tried a few times more. On the third try, I got through.

And saw that according to the WP-UserOnline plugin, I had 225 people online. At once.

This was mind boggling. One of the limitations of my hosting account is 50 concurrent hits to my MySQL database at once. That database is shared between 3 sites. I’d had MySQL errors before during peak times. I have a sneaking suspicion that my ISP may have removed that limitation. Which would be a great thing.

I think.

I Made the Digg Home PageThe 18-year-old mouse post had 10,000+ hits and 485 Diggs at 5:35 AM MST. But by the time I got to the Digg Home page — and found my post at the very bottom of the page, as shown here — it had 500 Diggs. So that means 15 more Diggs in less than 5 minutes. And another 23 Diggs in the time it took to write this. Egads!

Meanwhile, W3Counter, which I use to get hit stats for the site, reports over 7,000 visitors for today. I’m assuming that they use GMT rather than my local time. That would make it 11 hours rather than just 6. I cannot imagine more than 1,000 hits an hour.

Now if you’re saying “What’s the big deal?” you obviously don’t find these numbers as impressive as I do. You need to understand that this is a relatively unknown, limited-interest site. On a good day, I’d get 1400 hits from 1200 visitors. Today is off the chart — and it has just started.

And I’m worried. Worried about bandwidth usage. I’ve never used more than 10% of my total monthly capacity, but I’ve also never had what could turn out to be a 20,000 hit day. Worried about people who want to visit the site and can’t because of those darn 503 Error messages (I just got one again). Or, worse yet, worried about people who want to visit additional pages on the site and can’t because of those darn 503 error messages. After all, the site’s got a lot more to it than a story about an 18-year-old computer mouse finally crapping out.

So it’ll be interesting to see how today plays out. I assume the post will fall off Digg’s home page sometime soon and the flood of visitors will stop. Things will get back to normal. But until then, I’ll need to worry just a little.

And wonder whether getting seriously Dugg is a good thing.