BloggingPro » WordPress Hacks

Creating a Shared Content Box Across All of Your WordPress Blogs

James Junior — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 05:40:36 +0000

More than five years ago, I was bit by the Autoblog bug. I don’t build them anymore, but I still build WordPress blogs in large numbers. One of my pet peeves when I was working with 100+ different blogs was that if I wanted to interlink them, or have the exact same links on the sidebar of each blog, I would have to add these links manually to each and every blog every time I built a new blog. For example, if I have 98 blogs, and I want every one of them to have a link to blog #99 that I just created, I would have to add that link to all 98 blogs manually. That is very time-consuming, so I knew there had to be a better way.

Of course, PHP can do just about anything if you know how to tell it to. I thought it would be awesome if I could have a shared links box on the sidebar of each WordPress blog, and have a form online that I could enter in the name and URL to each new blog as I built them, and then have PHP add that link to all 98 blogs instantly. Thankfully, I was able to set this up exactly how I needed it. This is what I am going to show you today, and you can use it however you see fit. One thing I want to remind you of is that even though I am using the shared content box for links, it technically can be used for anything, your imagination is the limit. Let’s get started.

Requirements

WordPress Blog(s)
Hosting with PHP and MySQL Database (this is a common setup, so your host should have it)
PHPMyAdmin Access

Step 1

Download the Samsarin PHP Widget to your WP blog; install and activate it. This plugin lets you create a widget that can execute any PHP code right in the widget. This is crucial for you because it allows you to connect to your PHP database and display the content right there on your blog.

Step 2

Open up your PHPMyAdmin dashboard, and create a new database called links_database. You do this by clicking on the “databases” tab from the PHPMyAdmin home page, then you can specify the name of the database you want to create. If you don’t have enough admin rights to create a database from PHPMyAdmin, then you have to create it from within your hosting panel (CPanel, etc.).

Step 3

Once you have the database created, you need to execute the following SQL code to create the table that will house the links. Do this by clicking on the SQL tab up top and pasting in and running the following SQL code:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `links` ( `site_name` varchar(50) NOT NULL, `url` varchar(100) NOT NULL ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

That SQL code will create a table named links inside the links_database database. Notice that it has two columns/fields: site_name is the anchor text, and url is the URL of the site that the anchor text will point to.

Step 4

Next we are going to create a PHP file named connect.php which will contain the login and password for the specific database that we want to hook up to in our other scripts. Go ahead and create connect.php with your text editor and insert the following code into it (be sure to change the username and password to your own):

# Type="MYSQL" # HTTP="true" $hostname_links = "localhost"; $database_links = "links_database"; $username_links = "DB_USERNAME"; $password_links = "DB_PASSWORD"; $conn = mysql_pconnect($hostname_links, $username_links, $password_links) or trigger_error(mysql_error(),E_USER_ERROR); ?>

Step 5

Now we create another simple PHP script called update.php, which will actually update the database every time we create and add a new link. Fill the update.php with the following code:

$site_name = $_POST['site_name']; $url = $_POST['url']; mysql_select_db("links_database", $jim); $query = "INSERT INTO links (site_name,url ) VALUES ('$_POST[site_name]','$_POST[url]')"; if (!mysql_query($query,$conn)) { die('Error: ' . mysql_error()); } echo "1 record added"; ?>

Step 6

Next we are going to create another PHP script called enterblog.php which will serve as the online web form that you will go to every time you want to add a new link to the list. Create enterblog.php with the following code in it:

Enter New Blog


















Enter name of new site:







Enter the url of the site:

Step 7

We now will create another PHP script called displayurls.php which will be the script we call from the widget in WordPress. This script simply pulls all of the rows from the links table in the links_database. Put the following code inside displayurls.php:

// Connects to your Database mysql_connect("localhost", "DB_USERNAME", "DB_PASSWORD") or die(mysql_error()); mysql_select_db("links_database") or die(mysql_error()); $data = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM links") or die(mysql_error()); $rt=mysql_query($data); while($nt=mysql_fetch_array($data)){ Print "

";

echo "

";

echo "

";

Print "

echo $nt['url'];
echo "\">";
echo $nt['site_name'];
echo "";
echo "

";

}

?>

Step 8

Okay almost done! Upload all of the PHP files we created here to the root directory of your site. Then change the file permissions on them to 755. Once you are done with that, it is time to bring up the web form and enter in a few links to the database. To do that, just type in the URL to your enterblog.php script, which should be something like http://www.yourblog.com/enterblog.php and you will see a two field web form. Enter in a few sites and URL’s, and hit enter after you type each one. It should tell you that 1 row was added if it went through successfully. Once that is done we can move on to the final step.

Step 9

Go into your WordPress admin and click on the Widgets option under the Appearance menu. In the widget selections you should see a widget titled something like “Samsarin PHP 1″, make sure you drag that widget somewhere onto your visible sidebar. When the widget pops up, enter in the title of the widget which might be something like “Links” and then in the body field type in the following PHP code:

Then hit Save. If you should run into an issue where you cannot see the links, try typing in your Absolute Server Path inside the above PHP include code (so instead of “displayurls.php” you might put something like “/var/www/displayurls.php” but the exact path is different for everyone’s server). You can get the absolute server path from your hosting company. When you bring up your blog, you should see the links box on any site you put that widget on. If you have this widget installed on every blog on your server, you can add a link to them all instantly just by entering the link info once into the web form and hitting enter! Pretty cool huh?!

Just a side note, I am not a PHP programmer. I know enough to modify some things and write simple scripts, but if you are a PHP guru and you see something that can be improved in these scripts, or see something wrong, feel free to voice your opinion in the comments and I will listen to all of your ideas. Good Luck!

Awesome WordPress Customizations That Don’t Require Plugins

Robyn-Dale Samuda — Fri, 07 May 2010 16:35:18 +0000

WordPress, being the most popular blogging / content management platform in existence, has a huge community of developers and designers worldwide who are constantly brainstorming new and improved ways of making this legendary system more extensible through the use of plugins. Thanks to these plugins (9,486 Plugins according to WordPress.org), the average user can add style and functionality to their blog or website
as easy as the click of a couple of buttons. No coding required.

However, adding tons of plugins can significantly slow the loading time and overall performance of your blog. Therefore, its really important to use those that are absolutely necessary and delete the ones you’re not using. So, for those of you who may want to go the extra mile to guarantee 100% loading efficiency and dabble in a little code, here are some unique customizations that can replace some plugins that you may have installed.

1. Add Author Bio Box Below Posts

Depending on your style and preference, having an author bio section below your posts can provide useful information about yourself and any other authors who may write for your blog. The code below will show you how to add this box for each of your posts.

Inside your WordPress dashboard, select Appearance, then Editor and select your single.php file to edit. Paste the following code below the_content code section. Ensure that the code is placed after the “?>” php tag.


		
		Article by 
		 
   has written  awesome articles for us.

You will then need to edit your style.css file by adding the code below to give your author bio box some style.

/* Author's Bio Box */
.postauthor { background: #F5F5F5; border-top: 1px solid #e1e1e0; border-bottom: 1px solid #e1e1e0; overflow: hidden; padding: 1.5em; }
.postauthor img { border: 5px solid #e2dede; float: left; margin-right: 1.5em; }
.postauthor h4 { color: #666; font-size: 2em; margin-bottom: 5px; }
.postauthor p { color: #515151; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 12px; }

That’s it. There really is no limit to how you can style your bio box. So have some fun.

2. Highlight Author’s Comments

You may want to differentiate your comments from others who comment on your blog. This is especially useful if you maintain a blog where you give advice and follow-up through replying to comments. This way your replys can be easily found. To do this copy the code below to your Style.css file. (Simply change the HEX color code to a color of your choice.)

.bypostauthor {
background-color: #7BB7E4 !important;
}

3. Add Tweet Meme Button Without a Plugin

Within your Single.php file enter the code below to add the twitter retweet button to your posts.

4. Use a Custom Page for your Home Page

We may not always want our WordPress sites to be all about blogging so the ability to create custom pages for your blog will give you the flexibility of adding any type of content in whichever format you choose. This is very useful if you would like to create flashy introductory or sales pages before visitors get lost in your blog.

i) First you will need to create a duplicate of your Page.php file within your theme’s directory and give it a name of your choice.

ii) Add the code below to the top of your new page, replacing “New Page Template” with a name of your choice.

iii) Create a new page and select the new page you created in the template selection drop down menu as shown below in figure 1.

iv) Once you have published your new page go to Settings then Reading in your dashboard and select your front page display as your new homepage in the drop down menu as shown in figure 2 above.

There you go! There are many customizations that can be done without the use of additional plugins that require more system resources. It’s really worth it to learn the basics in PHP coding as well as a little CSS which will allow you to have full control over your WordPress theme’s look and functionality

How many plugins are you currently using for your WordPress site? Have any useful tips that you would like to share? Please let us know.

10 WordPress Hacks

David Peralty — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 15:51:56 +0000

In my recent surge of interest in WordPress plugins I’ve stumbled on a lot of interesting things. Today instead of plugins, it’s a list of 10 WordPress hacks, from themeflash.com, to add some pretty cool features without needing a plugin.

They’re a little trickier than plugins to implement but can be well worth the final effect.

Hacks in the list include:

Create TinyURLs On The Fly
List Upcoming Posts
Create A Maintenance Page For Your WordPress Blog
Display Related Posts Without A Plug-In
Resize Images On The Fly
And 5 more…

They include detailed explanations of how to add the hacks that’s easy enough for anyone to follow, and none of them take more than a minute or so to setup (most will likely take just a few seconds).

WordPress Custom Field Tricks and Tips

David Peralty — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:15:49 +0000

Smashing Magazine has put up a list of different things that you can do to extend your WordPress blog, and how it functions through custom fields. I’ve heard that this is going to get easier to use in future versions of WordPress, but for now, this should inspire some great additions to your blog.

In this article, weâ€™ve compiled a list of 10 useful things that you can do with custom fields in WordPress. Among them are setting expiration time for posts, defining how blog posts are displayed on the front page, displaying your mood or music, embedding custom CSS styles, disabling search engine indexing for individual posts, inserting a â€œDigg thisâ€ button only when you need it and, of course, displaying thumbnails next to your posts

I can’t really think of anything that’d require expiring blog posts, but the others are very helpful. Check out the whole article on Smashing Magazine, and let me know what you think was most helpful.

WordPress Elite: 10 Awesome .htaccess Edits

David Peralty — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:46:30 +0000

There is one file that is barely understood by most WordPress users, and that is .htaccess. Most of us understand that it is what controls the pretty permalinks that most blogs take advantage of, but there are other amazing things that .htaccess can do, and if you dig deep enough, you can change how your WordPress blog behaves.

Cats Who Code has a great list of ten .htaccess hacks that will do interesting things. From redirecting your RSS feed to Feedburner, to banning spammers from your blog, .htaccess can be a powerful ally in making your blog the envy of the blogosphere.

Take some time and look at these .htaccess edits, and don’t stop there, as many people have been writing amazing edits for a long time now for all sorts of sites that could easily be applied to your WordPress blog.

Non-Traditional Uses of WordPress

David Peralty — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 17:48:48 +0000

I love to see WordPress extended, and manipulated in weird ways. My favourite post thus far has been Raj Dash’s 48 Unique Ways To Use WordPress, but DesignM.ag has released their own list of non-traditional uses for WordPress.

They cover some of the things we’ve seen before like the contact manager, but also show some cool things like using WordPress as a Membership directory.

If you are interested in extending WordPress in weird and wonderful ways, these two posts will probably give you some ideas of how far WordPress can be pushed, mostly through the use of plugins and themes.

Mastering WordPress Shortcodes

David Peralty — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 00:45:44 +0000

Shortcodes are a nice way of doing complex things within a post, without having to push PHP code through ExecPHP or one of those other plugins. Many plugins already make use of short codes allowing you to easily insert information into your posts.

Smashing Magazine has done a great job of explaining WordPress Shortcodes, how you can take advantage of them, and even write your own.

Introduced in WordPress 2.5, shortcodes are powerful but still yet quite unknown WordPress functions. Imagine you could just type â€œadsenseâ€ to display an AdSense ad or â€œpost_countâ€ to instantly find out the number of posts on your blog.

WordPress shortcodes can do this and more and will definitely make your blogging life easier. In this article, weâ€™ll show you how to create and use shortcodes, as well as provide killer ready-to-use WordPress shortcodes that will enhance your blogging experience.

Of course you can go too overboard with these sorts of things, so I recommend limiting your shortcodes to less than five items, but it can be a great way to speed up what could be otherwise monotonous work when blogging.

Hold-off on Tyner: If you’re using Podpress

jim — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:16:52 +0000

Updating your WordPress version to 2.6 may break your podcast.

If you’re using Podpress (the popular free podcasting add-on for WordPress) PLEASE hold-off on upgrading to WordPress 2.6 (Tyner).Â Read this article first, it may save your Podcast from the dreaded “off-air” state.

Today, I received a GoogleAlert saying that Tyner and Podpress isn’t fully compatible.Â Once you successfully install WordPress 2.6, ALL your Podpress based podcasts will not work.Â

Here’s a typical message from the PodPress Forum:

I installed WordPress 2.6 (the full version, not the Release Candidate) today but am having problems as soon as I activate Podpress. When I try to edit an existing post from the front page or from inside the Admin Panel, I get the error message â€œInternet Explorer canâ€™t open the page [address of page] Operation cancelled.â€ but I see it only with IE. With FF it works like a charm. I thought it was out since longer already..thatâ€™s what you get for upgrading without informing yourself in advance.

Already last time I swore that I will never install a WordPress or Podpress update in the 1st month they are released..always have problems with upgrades.

and a similar thread from the WordPress Forum:

I’ve just uploaded my latest podcast and the pod press will not display it nor attach it to the post. Everything I uploaded yesterday is there and playing but after the update it’s not working.

At this time there isn’t an available patchÂ from Podpress, but here’s a nifty tip from a user who may have stumbled upon a solution (WARNING:Â PLEASE note that this solution was not tested by anyone from bloggingpro.com,Â observe caution and care, we will not be held liable for any damage to your data, your person,Â or business.)

FROM JERD (a forum user/member of the WordPress Forum)

After spending hours digging through the code and looking at the database, I discovered that this is being caused by the new revisions in 2.6. To disable them, just add:

define (‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 0);

to your wp-config.php and the problem disappears.

Podpress patch will be released in 10 days, according to this pageÂ (Dan KuykendallÂ of MightySeek.com).

Mastering WordPress Theme Hacks and Techniques

David Peralty — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 16:42:12 +0000

Over on Noupe there is a great post that goes over some of the millions of ways you can effect major changes on your WordPress theme. Some are difficult, others are very easy, and almost all of them are powerful to bloggers looking to add customizations to their blogs.

It includes links to dozens of tutorials from all the great sites on the web that cover WordPress, and can help you answer some of those questions you’ve been interested in finding out more about. Covering things like the loop, conditional tags, post excerpts, and dozens of other things, the guide is a great starting point to those looking to dive deep into theme customization in WordPress.

This is the first article in the four-part series, “Powerful guide to master Your WordPress”. Throughout this article, weâ€™ll be focus on many WordPress Theme hacks, ideas, tips and useful tutorials you need to have ready in hand when developing WordPress websites.

Check it out on Noupe.

WordPress 2.5 Custom Admin Colors

David Peralty — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 22:06:51 +0000

Ozh has put up a tutorial on how everyone can change the colour schemes of the WordPress 2.5 administration panel. It seems to be relatively simple, if you understand how to make a plugin.

WordPress 2.5 introduces a neat option: per user Admin Color Scheme. This means that each user can select a stylesheet they like best for the whole admin area. Now onto the fun stuff: adding a per-user selectable custom stylesheet for your blog.

The new function behind this feature is wp_admin_css_color(),

I have to admit, I wish a build-a-colour-scheme tool was built right into WordPress 2.5. Here is hoping that someone comes up with a good plugin solution for it, but until then, this is a great tutorial on how to change the colours to your own preferences.

WordPress 2.5 Administration Theme: Fluency

David Peralty — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:05:14 +0000

WordPress 2.5 isn’t even out yet, and already we have a theme to replace the default WordPress administration panel theme that has taken a fair bit of flack.

The theme, Fluency, replaces many of the graphics and navigational item placements in the WordPress admin. It strips the colours back to a black, gray, and white mix, moving the main navigation over to the left hand side.

Despite the huge overhaul that the WordPress admin interface has received its still not quite what I would really like. I had grown quite attached to the Tiger Admin theme by Steve Smith and when I found that it didnâ€™t work with WP2.5 I was a little disappointed. But this gave me the opportunity to do something different, my own admin theme. Fluency is the result.

While this might make many people happy, I still believe that I will adjust to the upcoming WordPress administration panel, and am interested to see how long it will be before someone comes out with a “Retro” administration panel theme, reverting it back to looking closer to the WordPress 2.3 administration panel we have come to be familiar with.

Adding TinyMCE Editor to the Prologue Theme

David Peralty — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 18:31:22 +0000

Love the Prologue theme, but not the minimalist post box it includes? Raj Dash on Performancing has heard your cries and gone ahead and created a tutorial on adding the TinyMCE editor to the theme.

Twitter-like microbloggging functionality. But out of the box, the theme has a very plain edit area (see image below), and adding links, images, etc., is tedious.

Fortunately, there’s a really easy fix to this problem: TinyMCE editor. TinyMCE is a Javascript-based freeware editor. If you have a recent version of WordPress, it’s the default “visual” editor that you get in the admin panel. Thanks to its easy integration features, we can use this as a replacement to the default HTML message editor in the Prologue theme. And you won’t believe how incredibly easy it is to hack it. I think it took me about 2 minutes, not including download and installation. I’m actually surprised that Automattic didn’t do it themselves.

Definitely worth checking out if you want to add features and functions for users that aren’t familiar with HTML.

48 Unique Ways To Use WordPress

David Peralty — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 19:23:54 +0000

Over on Performancing there is a great post which discusses the many ways in which WordPress can be used as a starting platform for all sorts of different web based applications. This was also talked about at Northern Voice while I was there in a session called More than Cat Blogs.

It seems that there are many people looking to extend and manipulate WordPress in wild and wonderful ways.

Why Use WordPress?

Not everyone is for the idea of WordPress as a CMS. Some bloggers point out a variety of technical issues (which I’m not getting into here). True, WP is not a high-end CMS, but it can get the job done, especially for low-volume use. The point is that with WP, you don’t always need to pay $50,000+ for a proprietary, difficult to learn CMS. And that’s for starters. Many of high-end CMSes require “seat” licenses. That is, a fee for each person that MIGHT use the software. Add maintenances/ upgrade fees, support licenses, training, etc., and most small businesses or online publishers are spending more than they have/ is necessary.

WordPress can do the job, and as has been discussed here and elsewhere many times, has a lot of community support, free themes and plugins, and is relatively easy to customize or to find someone who can for a fair price. Below are some ways that WP can be used.

I’ve done many of the listed items, but I am always looking to extend it in new and interesting ways, in hopes of streamlining my workflow. I love the idea of changing WordPress into a contact manager, but will I be vigilant in adding people’s information to it? Definitely an article worth checking out on Performancing.com.

Adding Gravatars Without any Plugins

David Peralty — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:49:02 +0000

I am a little “anti-plugin”. I try to avoid adding plugins to my blog if I can avoid it. Mostly because I don’t always know what they are doing and you never know what people are doing to your blog once you click Activate, and so I really enjoyed a post I found thanks to Weblog Tools Collection that shows off how to add Gravatars to your blog without using any plugins.

The tutorial, by Connor Wilson requires a bit of theme editing knowhow, but isn’t all that difficult to do.

The basics are that you need to create a MD5 hash of the commenters e-mail address as the URL for the image that you want to pull. Very simple, and very impressive. I tip my hat to you Connor.

WordPress Tricks and Tips: Custom WordPress Login

David Peralty — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 19:18:31 +0000

Ben of Binary Moon has taken the custom WordPress login a step further as one of his series of WordPress Tricks and Tips.

He created a plugin as well as an image template for the custom WordPress login.

The plugin itself sits in the plugins folder alongside the images – which you can change as required. The footer image has been changed to a gif with a transparent middle which means you can use any images you like for the main background and they will fit seamlessly.

Because this is a plugin and the images are kept separately from the admin folder upgrades a nice and easy. Just upgrade as normal. This is particularly handy for client sites where they may not be aware of what you have done to customise things.

Check out this and other tricks and tips over on Binary Moon.

Customize Your WordPress Login

David Peralty — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 14:58:36 +0000

David Airey has a great little tutorial up on how to modify your WordPress login page, so that it fits more in line with the style of your site.

Even better, it is basically just the modification of two image files. So check it out. He seems to be using this as a way to remind his customers of the work he has done for them, by repeating his brand every time they need to log in. A very wise move for those trying to really get their name out there when it comes to customizing WordPress.

Slideshow Pro with PHP, CSS and JS

David Peralty — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 15:51:11 +0000

Before I say anything else, I wish that Chris J. Davis would make my life easier and roll this into a stand alone package for non-WordPress users to use and modify, as it would be perfect for a site I am working on, and I don’t want to try to make it work, I just want it to work.

What is it?

Well, Chris has gone and created a method of replacing flash when it comes to making a slideshow with transition effects. It is a beautiful example of what can be done with PHP, CSS and some JavaScript (I still hate JavaScript no matter how popular its becoming again).

So at work the new design we just launched called for a rotating, hyperlinked slideshow, with cross-fading.

Normally it would be â€œTo the Flash Cave!â€, but I was feeling extra crotchety so I decided to basically recreate Slideshow Pro in PHP, CSS and some JS-foo. Nothing to spectacular, but it is shiny. Be warned, this is a very long tutorialâ€¦ use at your own risk.

This is definetly something to try if you have some extra time. Chris has said he might not roll it up into a plugin, but maybe if you beg hard enough and throw money at him he will.

WordPress Comments System built with Yahoo! UI

David Peralty — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 19:29:58 +0000

Here is something completely different, Jack Slocum has gone ahead and used Yahoo UI and YAHOO.ext to modify how comments are handled in WordPress. While it is not all that practical for most people, it is still a very interesting modification.

For quite some time I have wanted to upgrade my WordPress comments system. I had some free time yesterday so I decided to go through the WordPress internals and figure out how some of it worked. Before I knew what had happened, it was 3:00am and I had a working prototype. It worked so well in my preliminary testing, I decided to deploy it to my blog and see what you guys thought.22

I think it turned out to be a perfect example of what can be done in a very small amount of time with Yahoo UI and YAHOO.ext. In a day’s worth of work, I have completely transformed the comments system on this site. Around half of that time was spent on the user interface, and the other half modifying WordPress to do the things it needed to do on the backend.

Basically you can comment on a single paragraph allowing you to pinpoint the exact section you want to make a remark on. I would love to have the changed files, and modifications done up in a nice package for people to install, but no doubt after extensive testing we might just see that.

WordPress Hacks: WordPress-to-WordPress Import

David Peralty — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 22:37:59 +0000

A feature that I have wanted for some time now is a way to merge some of my WordPress blogs into one super blog, as I have started a blog and stopped writing on a blog, and let it die. Its old entries could bolster my current blog a bit more, and make it a more interesting read, but as far as I knew there was no way to do it easily.

While this feature is said to be in the next major version of WordPress, some people just can’t wait that long, and Aaron Brazell is one of them.

I know there are quite a lot of folks who have wanted to merge WordPress blogs or in one way or another import from one blog into another. The feature is coming in the next major build of WordPress and is already in place on WordPress.com blog. Trust me. But for now, I have wrapped that code into a plugin. Iâ€™ve already merged two blogs and there are other reasons I need this as well. It works. I have not had a lot of other extensive testing, but for me it works.

Check it out at Technosailor.

Akismet Worst Offenders Extension

David Peralty — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 19:15:06 +0000

Now even plugins are getting plugins, as Richard Boakes adds onto Akismet, a powerful and popular anti-comment spam plugin for WordPress and other software.

The extension, allows for users to easily see and delete mass groupings of spam easily. It shows you the worst offenders, IP Addresses of computers sending you the most spam, and allows you to delete all their spam with one little click.

So I wrote a small addition to Akismet 1.15 (pictured above) that tries to help. It pre-processes the spam comments and identifies the worst offenders in terms of the domain thatâ€™s being advertised, or (perhaps more usefully) the IP Address of the spamming computer.

Itâ€™s not uncommon for me to get several hundred spam comments each day, so certain machines and websites are hitting my site many times. What the plugin does is make those worst offenders really obvious, so they can be removed en masse, reducing the ham-hunting to a smaller and more managable task.

Very interesting. He has also gone to the next level of blocking the computers that send him the most spam, and while it has been working well for him, I would be very careful in watching its effects when testing his htaccess extension to make sure it does not stop legitimate people from accessing your site.

Check out the Worst Offenders Extension and the htaccess extension.

WordPress Date Image Hack

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 22:56:35 +0000

Here’s a short tutorial on using dynamic images to replace the date entries in your WordPress 1.5 blog.

WordPress Plugin: Multiply

Fri, 10 Jun 2005 13:02:27 +0000

Multiply is a plugin for WordPress 1.5.x which allows multiple blogs from within the one administration interface. Includes one-click creation of new blogs, with per-blog user permissions, plugins, themes etc.

WordPress Navigation Bar Hack

Sat, 07 May 2005 19:34:45 +0000

This hack adds a top navigation bar to the default Kubrick theme.

Simple Hit Counter

Sat, 30 Apr 2005 15:02:49 +0000

This is a very simple hit counter that counts unique IP addresses and displays the total count on your page somewhere. This process requires you to create your own MySQL table so be aware.

WordPress Hack amd Tutorial: Creating A Dynamic Sticky

Mon, 25 Apr 2005 13:15:36 +0000

Have you ever needed to have certain articles stay at the top of your blog longer than others? Sometimes the good stuff you write gets bogged down and indistinguishable from the other stuff. This WordPress hack and tutorial shows you how to focus your front page to feature the good stuff, but not loose all the other stuff too.