Archives

Categories

Social Media Sharing on Blogs

My last post was read directly (as opposed to reading through Planet feeds) a lot more than usual due to someone sharing it on lobste.rs. Presumably the people who read it that way benefited from reading it and I got a couple of unusually insightful comments from people who don’t usually comment on my blog. […]

wp-spamshield

Yesterday I installed the wp-spamshield plugin for WordPress [1]. It blocks automated comment spam systems by using JavaScript and cookies, apparently most spammers can’t handle that. Before I installed it I was getting hundreds of spam comments per day even with the block spam by math plugin enabled. Now I’ve had it running for 24 […]

Blog Comments

John Scalzi wrote an insightful post about the utility of blog comments with the way the Internet works nowadays [1]. He starts out focusing on hate comments that could reasonably be described as terrorism (death threats with the aim of preventing people writing about politics meet any reasonable definition of “terrorism”). Terrorists on the Internet […]

Creating WordPress Packages

deb http://www.coker.com.au wheezy wordpress

I maintain Debian packages of a number of WordPress themes and plugins for my personal use which I am not planning to upload to Debian due to the maintenance and security issues. Generally the way things work with WordPress packages (and apparently most things in PHP) is that new versions are […]

Targeted Advertising

Don Marti has written another blog post about targeted advertising [1]. His main point is that when a company uses the most targeted adverts (such as Google advertising) everyone knows that they are paying a small number of cents per click and nothing for the people who don’t click. This compares to TV adverts which […]

Guest/Link Post Spam

I’ve been getting a lot of spam recently from people wanting to write guest posts or have their site included in a future links post.

Guest Posts

For guest posts the social convention for the planets which aggregate my blog seems to be that random guest posts are unacceptable. I could change my blog feed […]

WordPress Maintainability

For a while I’ve been maintaining my own WordPress packages. I use quite a few plugins that weren’t included in Debian, some of them have unclear licenses so they can’t go in Debian while the rest would have to go in Volatile at best because they update regularly and often have little or no information […]

Link Within

Good Things about LinkWithin

For the last 10 weeks I’ve been using the LinkWithin.com service to show links to other blog posts at the end of each post (the links are only shown to visitors of my blog not in the RSS feed, so people who read my posts through RSS syndication will miss this). […]

Web Server Performance

We Have to Make Our Servers Faster

Google have just announced that they have made site speed part of their ranking criteria for search results [1]. This means that we now need to put a lot of effort into making our servers run faster.

I’ve just been using the Page Speed Firefox Plugin [2] (which […]

Why Comments?

Russ Albery has described why he doesn’t support comments on his blog [1].

I respect his opinion and I’m not going to try and convince him to do otherwise. But I think it’s worth describing why I want comments on my blog and feel that they are worth having for many (possibly most) other blogs.

[…]