Tag Archives: WordPress

New Subscription Feature Delivers Full-Text Content from this Site

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Another way to get new content here.

A while back, I switched to summary post format for RSS feeds. I did this, in part, to stop the feed scraping activity that was violating my copyright to the contents of this site. This disappointed a lot of people. They apparently preferred reading content in their RSS reader application or via email instead of coming to this site.

While I understand the convenience of reading sites in a feedreader — I use a reader on my iPad to keep up with my favorite sites — I don’t have enough subscribers to justify putting my content at risk for scraping. And I figured that people who really wanted to read what’s new here would take the extra effort to follow the link in their feed reader or email notification to go to the site. Hell, it only takes one extra step.

In the meantime, the WordPress folks added a new subscription feature that makes this kind of moot — provided you like to read new content via email. They’ve added email subscription capabilities. Extremely easy for bloggers to configure, it adds a subscription widget to the sidebar. All the reader has to do is enter his/her email address and click a button. Moments later, an email confirmation message arrives in their inbox. Click the link in that message to start the subscription.

Sample MessageThe resulting email messages are nicely formatted to present the entire contents of the blog post. This is an example from earlier in the week; I subscribed to test it out. I chose the HTML format, but there’s also a plain text format. This even looks good in a mobile device like an iPad.

Links in each message give you easy access to settings and the ability to unsubscribe at any time. In addition, all of your subscriptions to WordPress sites are maintained in the same place, so it’s easy to modify settings for all of them at once. In addition to email format, you can also specify delivery frequency: immediate, daily, or weekly. The Delivery Frequency settings lets you specify what time of day or day or the week you prefer. You can even click a check box to temporarily turn off the email messages when you think you might be too busy to read them.

I think this is a great compromise between full-text RSS feeds and summary feeds. After all, if you want the convenience of new content delivered to your mailbox, you have it. My content is protected from feed scraping because it never appears in an RSS feed. But if you prefer to check in via RSS reader, you can continue to do so as you may already be doing — you’ll just need to take the extra step of clicking a link to read the full text of a post that interests you.

What do you think? Your comments are appreciated.

Battling Comment Spam

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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.

A New Look

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This site was long overdue for a facelift.

Last night, on impulse, I switched this site’s theme from a highly modified version of iNove to WordPress’s brand-new Twenty Eleven. Unless I’ve had an impulse to change it again since writing this, you’re probably looking at it right now.

The site was long overdue for the change. A while back, in an effort to show off more of my photos, I’d added a plugin to pull thumbnail images from my photo gallery and arrange them as clickable links in the header. I realized belatedly that this seriously slowed down the loading of the site. Some people even commented about it. Something had to be done.

There are several reasons it took so long to make the change:

  • I couldn’t find a theme I liked. Really. I have a terrible time imagining how I could modify a theme to meet my own needs.
  • Most themes I liked either looked too “bloggy” or too “magaziney.” I couldn’t find one in between that I could imagine changing.
  • I couldn’t find a theme that had built-in support for mobile devices.
  • I didn’t have the time to sit down and do the work necessary to make major modifications to a theme.
  • I actually liked the way my site looked with its current setup.

But after upgrading the site to WordPress 3.2, I noticed a brand new theme: Twenty Eleven. Like its predecessor, Twenty Ten, it had clean lines and a lot of built-in features. It also had the benefit of being created by the makers of WordPress, so I knew it would be compatible and show off WordPress features. Working with it would give me a good opportunity to dive into theme customization again. Even though I didn’t have time to play with it right away, there would be plenty of opportunities to tweak it over the coming weeks and months.

And if there’s something I really enjoy doing, it’s tweaking a WordPress theme to suit my needs.

So yesterday, I made the switch. And this morning, I dumped a few of my own images into the random header folder to personalize it enough for prime time.

I’ll be modifying it as time goes on. Would love to know what you think and am open to suggestions for changes. Use the comments link — well, “Reply” link right now; it’s on my list to change — to share your thoughts.

When Computers Reduce Your Productivity

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How many times has something like this happened to you?

By now, most of us who participate in social networking — Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, etc. — know firsthand how social networking can absolutely destroy productivity. The rest of us with Internet connections can see how having an email client or Web browser open at our desks can seriously reduce productivity. But have you ever stopped to consider how the computer applications we actually use to get our work done hurt our productivity?

For an example of this, I can draw upon something that happened to me last week.

WordPress LogoI manage a number of WordPress-based Web sites, including one for N&W Associates, which sells helicopter ground handling solutions. N&W is owned and operated by Walter, who is an older gentleman who builds wheels and tow bars from scratch in his workshop. He’s a very nice man but not exactly computer literate, so I manage every aspect of the site for him. Every once in a while, he sends me some new material for the site and I put it online.

About a month ago, I completed my move of all sites I manage from GoDaddy hosting (good riddance!) to Bluehost. N&W was one of the last sites I moved. After moving it, I tested it and it worked fine.

Last week, Walter sent me an email message asking if I’d add mention of R66 helicopters, since their skid configuration is the same as R44 helicopters, thus making his equipment compatible. No problem, I said. It was an easy fix. His site only has about 6 pages so adding references to the R66 should take about 10 minutes tops. I told him I’d do it right away.

And I did. Or at least I tried to.

Trouble is, when I went to log into WordPress on his site, I couldn’t log in. No error message — instead, the login screen kept reappearing, as if I hadn’t even tried to log in.

For about 10 minutes, I tried multiple password combinations. No luck.

For about 5 minutes, I used FTP software to examine the settings files for a password and tried that password. No luck.

For about 20 minutes, I researched the password problem on WordPress’s Support site.

For another 20 minutes, I tried three different techniques to reset the password. No luck.

For about 20 minutes, I researched the login problem on forums on WordPress’s Support site.

For another 15 minutes, I tried both of the solutions people in the forums claimed would work for them. No luck.

For 10 minutes, I went back to the WordPress support forums using a variety of different search phrases. In one forum post, someone mentioned, in passing, the .htaccess file. A lightbulb went off in my head.

For 5 minutes, I used a text editor to open the .htaccess file I’d created for N&W. There was some code I’d included that would automatically rewrite the site’s URL to www.helicopterwheels.com (in the address bar and site logs) no matter how the domain was reached. I pulled out those four lines of code, saved the file, and tried logging in.

It worked.

For those of you who care about the problem, here are the details. The N&W site can be reached through two domain names: helicopterwheels.com and r22bigwheels.com. When I moved the site, to ensure continuity during the move, I moved it using the r22bigwheels.com domain. That’s the domain that was set up in WordPress’s General settings for the moved site. I used DNS on Bluehost to point both domains to the same folder containing the site files and it worked fine. Trouble is, when I tried to log in as an administrator, WordPress wanted to give me administrative access on R22bigwheels.com but the .htaccess file kept directing it to helicopterwheels.com. I’d created a loop. Once I logged in, I changed General settings to www.helicopterwheels.com, saved them, and restored the lines of code I’d temporarily removed from .htaccess. It worked the way it was supposed to do.

That little fix took another 5 minutes.

So if you add up all the time I spent on this “10-minute” edit, you’ll see that I lost an hour and 40 minutes of my day.

I can’t blame the computer, of course. And I can’t blame WordPress. It was my configuration error that had caused the problem. But placing blame isn’t the point of this post. The point is, we rely on computers to make us more productive and get tasks done quickly and efficiently. But all too often, it’s computer problems that slow us down.

The problem could be something technical like this. Or it could be a computer malfunction, such as a bad hard disk or software bug. Or it could be the simple fact that we don’t know exactly how to perform a task and have to learn how to do it before we can get it done.

I’m not suggesting here that we work without computers. But I am suggesting that we keep in mind that the more we rely on computers, the more we’re setting ourselves up for the possibility of getting less work done.

And I’m also suggesting that we try hard to keep things simple. If I didn’t put that fancy code in N&W’s .htaccess file, I wouldn’t have lost an hour and 40 minutes of my day to troubleshooting.

Got examples of how your computer cost you time? Share them in the comments!

Protecting My Work

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Site changes to images, file links, and RSS feeds.

Well, I’ve had enough. Enough of people using my images on their sites or trying to pass them off as their own. Enough of people hot linking to content on my site, forcing me to host images and files for them. Enough of feed scrapers stealing entire blog posts and using them to fill their sites with content.

So I’ve made some changes to this blog:

  • Through the use of a WordPress plugin called No Right Click Images Plugin, you can no longer right click on an image to display a context menu and download it to your computer — or do anything else with it. As an added bonus, you can’t drag it off the Web page and onto your desktop to save it either.
  • Through the use of some new code in my .htaccess file, if you embed an image hosted on my server in a Web page or use it in a blog post, e-mail message, or other location, you’ll see a message like the one shown here, telling the viewer that the content must be viewed on this site.
  • Through the use of a WordPress Plugin called Download Protect, you can no longer use a direct link to PDF or other selected files on this site. To download the file, you must go to the page on which its link appears and use that link to download it. This prevents file leeching — folks linking directly to a file hosted on my site, sucking my bandwidth without visitors ever seeing the post related to the file.
  • And finally, after a long run with full RSS feeds, I’ve switched back to summary feeds. This means that instead of being able to read entire blog posts from this site in your feed reader, you can now only read the title and summary. You’ll have to click a link to read the post and see its images. Although I’ve been using one-line summaries for all blog posts for a very long time, I’ll do my best to expand those summaries so readers know what they’re missing by not visiting the site.

I do want to remind everyone that the contents of this blog are copyrighted. I have every right to protect my work.

Internet content theft is possibly the biggest problem that original content creators like me face every time we add content to our sites. While these measures won’t prevent all content theft, they will make it a bit harder for thieves to steal my work.

Hopefully, these measures will also encourage more site visitors to interact with me and other visitors, share feedback, and encourage me to produce more interesting content.

Your feedback is welcome; use the Comments link or form for this post.