Archive for the ‘blogging’ Category
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010
I wanted to retire a WordPress-based site, converting everything to static HTML. My first idea was to mirror the site with wget (or any other web downloader), but I decided to search if a better solution was available. Not found, but instead a ready wget recipe was found: How to retire a WordPress blog (make WordPress a static site). My addition:
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Posted by olpa in blogging | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 16th, 2008
WordPress plugin “Subscribe to Comments 2.1” allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. I think it improves usability and encourages commenting.
Posted by olpa in blogging | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008
Trackbacks have built the blogosphere. The automatic backlinking was a great idea. The both parties — the original and the linking blogger — were making benefit out of a trackback link.
Unfortunately, the trackbacks are extremely vulnerable to spamming. Indeed, trackbacks must work without human intervention (by design). Automatic filters doesn’t work well for blogs. And adding manual force breaks the design of trackbacks.
Fortunately, there is a simple solution.
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Posted by olpa in blogging | No Comments »
Sunday, November 25th, 2007
I tried to setup a new wordpress blog. To my unpleasant surprise, I got a problem with cyrillic letters. They just didn’t work, being displayed as junk or as question marks. I spent some time to find out how to correctly setup WordPress for the utf8 environment. Actually, it’s very easy:
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Posted by olpa in blogging | No Comments »
Friday, September 28th, 2007
Some time ago I discovered that the WordPress blog sidebar can be
* completely dynamic and
* configured through the admin interface.
It’s very convenient, and I switched to the dynamic sidebar. Or, in another words, started to use widgets. Unfortunately, one important plugin, WPAds doesn’t support widgeting. Here is how to fix the issue:
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Posted by olpa in blogging | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 26th, 2007
My antispam blog passed 25+ posts, it was enough introduce the categories. But when I started to categorize the posts, I stuck with it. After inventing four topics, I had no more ideas. I though I’m not alone in such trouble, searched in Internet for advices what to do.
The best I found is “Blog Post Category Trauma: How To Help Bloggers With Useless Categories“. Unfortunately, this text explans only that bloggers have to have good categories, but doesn’t explain how to achieve this goal.
Finally, I invented an ultimate method. Inventing categories and tags (labels) is no more a problem.
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Posted by olpa in blogging | 2 Comments »
Sunday, August 19th, 2007
For my goals, the query “phpbb spam” should return Textual Confirmation and Links Rejector tools on the first page. No luck so far, but I managed a nice trick to get there indirectly:
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Posted by olpa in bbAntiSpam, blogging | No Comments »
Saturday, August 18th, 2007
Earlier, my AdSense ads were hardcoded into my WP template files. But now I want to experiment with other ads. I need to rotate the ads often, and the old solution isn’t satisfactory. Here is a short list of the requirements:
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Posted by olpa in blogging | No Comments »
Thursday, August 16th, 2007
The best place to analyze log files is the local computer, not the server:
1) Log files grow fast, taking all the server space
2) Queries might be CPU-intensite
If you like me, you prefer that the log files appear on the local computer automatically.
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Posted by olpa in blogging, python | No Comments »
Monday, August 13th, 2007
There might be a delay between the first visit and the desired action (subscirbing to RSS, purchasing software, etc). An usual web site log often isn’t enough to match the former and the latter. The webmaster needs cookies.
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Posted by olpa in blogging | No Comments »
Monday, August 13th, 2007
There is a lot of software to display statistics of a web site. But all that tables and graphics are of no use for me. I just don’t know what to do with this data. After some thinking, I realized what I really need:
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Posted by olpa in blogging | 3 Comments »
Thursday, August 9th, 2007
I’ve decided to get money from my sites. No, I don’t desperately need money. Actually, what I want to fix is the following. I see that my resources can bring some wealth, but currently they are wasted. Too bad.
The main source of income are
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Posted by olpa in blogging | No Comments »
Monday, July 30th, 2007
From “Poor Man’s Trackback“:
$ curl -d url=[my entry's URL] [trackback URL]
You can also specify the title, excerpt, and blog_name using additional -d parameters.
Posted by olpa in blogging, bookmarks | No Comments »
Monday, July 30th, 2007
All blogging tips recommend to have the full RSS feeds. To my unpleasant surprise, I found that my feeds are partial, disrespecting the option “Full text” is set. The explanation is simple.
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Posted by olpa in blogging | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 25th, 2007
Installation instructions of many WordPress plugin contains recommendation to add something like this to a theme:
<?php tla_ads(); ?>
Actually, the Right Way is:
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Posted by olpa in blogging | No Comments »
Friday, July 20th, 2007
Recently I started a new blog “Spam Bots and CAPTCHAs” (will be announced later). I plan to have many authors on this blog, therefore I disliked that the blog postings were not annotated by the author names. After some investigations, I found that it was the default WordPress behaviour. The fix was simple.
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Posted by olpa in blogging | No Comments »
Monday, March 19th, 2007
My blog is protected by Advanced Textual Confirmation.
* No more spam.
* No complains from the visitors.
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Posted by olpa in bbAntiSpam, blogging | 2 Comments »
Thursday, February 1st, 2007
I’ve upgraded wordpress to the version 2.1. It wasn’t very easy because the authors have broken incompatibility with older versions, therefore my tweaked theme stopped working. I hope I repaired everything. Also, I temporary switched off spam protection to see how active are the spammers now.
Posted by Administrator in blogging | 1 Comment »
Friday, June 2nd, 2006
WordPress blog engine automatically adds typography to postings. For example, it changes two dashes to the long dash, changes the usual quotes to different sorts of quotes. And yes, code listings are affected.
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Posted by olpa in blogging, PHP | No Comments »
Monday, May 2nd, 2005
WordPress, the current blogging system I use, doesn’t support keywords for pages. Although search engines now don’t believe in them, I still like to have them. Finally, I found the way. It’s Jerome’s Keywords Plugin which can do a lot.
Posted by olpa in blogging | No Comments »