Mark introduced me to AuctionAds (aff) soon after it was launched. AuctionAds by default is not contextual, but my article guides you through establishing just that.

WordPress 2.0 introduced a lot of additional features in the Write Post screen.

One was the Post Preview sceen which now loads the entire post as if it would look on your site and this is a major bandwidth hog.

Another addition was the Inline Uploading. I still use IImage Browser along with my Open Picture Window Plugin for adding images to my posts.

Few other things that you may want to remove are the Optional Excerpt, Trackbacks and Custom Fields and Post Author if you never use these.

Mark Jaquith‘s Clutter Free WordPress Plugin lets you hide everything but the post preview.

I like Mark’s plugin because it gives you an easy way to hide the things you don’t want and thus save space. However, it uses CSS to hide and doesn’t prevent their downloading.

If you are comfortable editting WordPress Core code, 24FightingChickens suggests a method to remove the Post Preview. It suggests using simple HTML Comment to prevent this display. Using the HTML comment tells the browser not to parse and display the text.

You can extend this even further to hide other things on the WordPress Post Screen.

I’ve written a short guide on how you go about doing this.

Read Cleaning Up the WordPress Post Screen.

And once again I get into the great dilema of deciding what do I use to run my photo album. The last time I was in a similar dilema was when I had to choose between Gallery2 or Coppermine.

I’ve always been toying with the idea of integrating the photo gallery within this blog itself. Everybody remembers this URL and it makes sense.

I can do this with both Gallery2 and Flickr, however with the current installation of G2 on a seperate domain is not possible.

This means hosting Gallery2 on this blog, which is something I am not very keen of doing just yet.

I had been looking at some of the features that Flickr has to offer and concluded that the free account will definitely not serve my purpose. However, the Pro seems promising.

So here is my comparison of the two:

Price:

Gallery2 is open source and hence free for use.
Flickr Pro works out to be for $24.95/yr or 47.99 for two years, which is about two bucks a month. Affordable!

Maintenance:

With Gallery2, I have to always keep track of updates, especially security releases. Also the bundle is really heavy and occupies a great deal of space on my account. The trouble is making full installations and upgrades which has been getting to me!

Flickr will be maintenance free for me. It is owned by Yahoo! which IMO is a good thing.
I also don’t have to bother about hosting the photos as well as downtime (this of course isn’t so much of an issue).

Integration:

Integration of Gallery2 in my blog would be via the WPG2 Plugin. I do believe it integrates even across subdomains or different domains, but I am not sure. Have you got this to work?

Integration of Flickr would be via FAlbum.
One plus point of this is I already have a release for FAlbum with Connections Reloaded and this will just give me an opportunity to properly test it myself.

Features:

Gallery2 has an amazing list of features. This was the main reason why I went in for it in the the first place.

Flickr too comes with a good deal of features. Having the pro account also gives me unlimited storage and unlimited sets, unmetered (they say unlimited, but I prefer the term unmetered) bandwidth.

I do have a good deal of storage for Gallery2 as I have my own hosting. And I have a decent amount of bandwidth which I don’t consume anyway. As for photosets, Gallery2 gives me unlimited on that front, so basically the Flickr Pro is just one up on Flickr Free.
Also, I don’t know if Flickr supports sub-photosets Flickr doesn’t support sub-photosets.
Gallery2 definitely lets me have subalbums.

Uploading:

This is one place that Gallery2 beats Flickr hands down. This was also one of the reasons I chose G2 over Coppermine.
Besides the web upload you can also upload zip files and unzip them automatically. The best is using the Gallery Remote which I have been using to date.

Flickr comes with its own collection of Uploading Tools. Their Uploadr looks neat, but it doesn’t seem as many features as Gallery Remote. However, jUploadr seems to makeup for it.

One thing working for Flickr is the huge collection of third party apps and services available.

As of now, I am pretty much divided on choosing which to go in for. Switching over means a great deal of work to be done in uploading all my pictures.
However, continuing with G2 also means that if later I decide to switch that would again be a great deal of work.

Switching over also means I will have one domain free for use, which could or maynot be a great thing

Are you using either of these? Would be great if you could help me decide.

And any kind soul like to gift me a Flickr Pro account?

While checking the Whois of my domains, a whois for this blog revealed a link from AboutUs.org.

I have mixed feelings about this one.

Here is why:

For those who are not aware, AboutUs.org is a wiki which hopes to capture information of all the domains in the world. I believe this “capturing” is done by a bot which gathers information about the domain from the site, its whois, alexa, technorati and possibly other places.

It seems rather good to have your website on a website whos popularity is rising sharply (the last week Alexa rank is around 4000)
However, doesn’t it also appear to be a breach of privacy, copyrights and more?

Copyright Infringement:

Text from you site is scraped by the bot and displayed on the wiki.
Text from my about page has been copied as is. If the text on your site is copyrighted (which is the case of many blogs today), then AboutUs.org directly infringes your copyright!

Privacy:

Your contact information is made public. My email address was publically visible (via a graphic). I also noticed that the entire contact information, including my phone number was visible for another of my sites. They have a page on how to protect your email address, but why does it get listed in the first place?

While many may debate that all this information was anyway available via a simple whois, I am of the opinion that I have willingly submitted my information while registering my domain. I have not submitted the information to AboutUs.org and hence it is not correct for them to display this information publically.
A private domain registration can protect your information, but it comes at an additional cost.

Freely Edittable Information:

AboutUs is a wiki. As a result anybody can edit / delete the information of your website. This means that you will have to continuously track your website details to ensure that nobody has put any false data about your website.
What is even worse is that you can edit the information without even signing up! :O
That means you can use a good proxy server, edit an article and not bother about being tracked for any incorrect changes!

Ray King’s (the man behind AboutUs) User Talk already has a few angry comments, and I am sure these will just increase with time.

What to do about it?

As of now, there isn’t any way to delete your website from the listing.

So, the best thing to do is create an account, login and edit the information of the pages. Remove all contact information that you don’t like.
I also suggest adding your other websites, which aren’t already listed and editting their information.
This will ensure that your contact information doesn’t suddenly turn up because the bot, or someone else decides to add your site.

Do tell me what are your opinions on this issue? Do you agree with the concept of AboutUs.org? Or are you against it? Or do you think we should just not bother?

Have you dugg this post?

Update 1: View Ray’s Reply

Update 2: You can now use robots.txt to block the bot (Thanks Daniel)

Add the following code to your robots.txt files. Read more about the AboutUsBot.

User-agent: AboutUsBot
Disallow: /

Update 3: Rays efforts are being appreciated. View Tazzy and Piggy’s Comments.

I haven’t been very active in the Indian Blogosphere and so missed the entire discussion over Kiruba being the No. 1 blogger in India (according to Blogstreet).

Patrix has expressed his opinion on Popularity in the Indian Blogosphere. He goes on to list several Indian blogs (including mine) according to their Technorati Ranking.

His post did get me thinking.

Popularity can be defined as the quality of being widely admired or accepted or sought after.

But, how does this translate in the WWW? How do we measure popularity? What are the various methods today? Are they reliable?

Technorati

Today, a lot of methods exist for measuring popularity. One, like Patrix pointed out is, to use Technorati’s Ranking.

Technorati ranks blogs based on the number of incoming links. This rank is updated several times a day and only considers active links from the past six months. As of today, Technorati tracks around 50.9 million blogs!
A point to note is that the incoming links don’t just belong to posts or blogrolls, but also from credit lines (e.g. like that of my Connections Reloaded Theme).

Alexa

Another method of gauging popularity is Alexa Traffic Rank.

Alexa’s ranking system has been online from as far as i can remember! Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users. They have a page detailing the process.

This is a stark difference from that of Technorati. Having a higher traffic rank is a more accurate sign of your sites popularity because it measures the number of users actually visiting your site.
However, Alexa ranks can be slightly inaccurate because it depends on users of their toolbar.

Topsites

Top Sites are often used to compare the popularity of blogs wrt one another. There are way too many top sites run by way too many people. A few well known ones are Blog Top Sites, Top100 Bloggers, RankingBlogs.com and Indian Bloggers.

While Top100 rates people on the number of votes they receive or the number of users visiting Top100 from the blog (which in my opinion is an highly inaccurate method of rating), the other three rate the blogs solely on the basis of unique visitors (i.e. traffic) which is how it should be!

Feed Subscriptions

A good way of ascertaining popularity is by looking at the number of feed subscriptions. e.g. Feedburner gives you buttons that let you display the number of subscribers to your feed.
This, however can’t be a sure-shot method because you may have a lot of subscribers but no readers. Yet again, this doesn’t track the actual traffic that the site receives.
Additionally, it only tracks those who have signed up for the service and put the code on their site.

No. of Comments

Visitor interactivity in terms of number of comments that the posts receive is another way to find out how popular a blog is. This can also be further used to determining visitor loyalty to understand how many repeat commenters are present.

And yet again, this isn’t the best way, because you could have a lot of visitors who love reading your blog but would not want to comment on it.

To conclude there are several ways to determine blog popularity.
However, all of these methods may not give the same results. So which method should we actually adopt?

Give me your opinion.

Which method would you use from the above?
Do you have still another way of measuring blog popularity?
Or have do you believe that since your blog is personal, you don’t really care about how popular it is?

Join the discussion below or blog about your opinion. And do remember to digg it.

And just a note to us Indian Bloggers. Let’s quit the squabble about who is No. 1 in the Indian blogosphere and look beyond. There is a whole world of bloggers out there.

Blog spam is something that every blogger fears. Spam appears in different forms. It can vary from trackback or pingback spam, comment spam, deliberate harsh comments to email harvesting and spam resulting from it.

Spam cannot be stopped. But by following a few good steps you can protect yourself from it.
This tutorial will teach you how to protect your WordPress blog from spam.

Before they hit you

This should be the first thing you do to prevent spam. I have found two very effective plugins which do the job very well. One is Bad Behavior and the other is Referrer Karma. I am currently using Bad Behavior on my blog. Optionally, you can add my Bad Behavior Stats Plugin to display the number of blocked attempts on your blog.

Yet another step to prevent bad bots and spam is to use your .htaccess file to block them. JavaScriptKit has a good tutorial on Blocking bad bots and site rippers (aka offline browsers). Simply copy-paste the code they give you into your .htaccess file and your ready.

As and when they hit you

Unfortunately the steps above alone will not protect you completely. Though the plugins above do an excellent job, I will admit that spammers are smart and they find a way to get through and you will suddenly see your blog filled with spam comments.

Some spammers do get through the above protection, and then you gotta take another step to protect you.

To prevent this one of the most effective plugins I have found to date is Spam Karma 2. It provides many checks and drastically reduces the amount of comment, trackback and pingback spam.

Once again, though SK2 effectively blocks most of the spam, it does struggle when a spammer personally enters the comment on your blog. On the surface it may appear rather innocent but infact is just another spammer in disguise pointing links to his site. And they rarely appear again on your site.

So, the next thing I did was install the Moderate Plugin for SK2. This plugin will ensure that new posters will land into moderation for your approval. So even if a person gets through Bad Behavior and Spam Karma 2, you can choose whether you want to approve this comment or not.
Remember though for this to effectively work you need to ensure that these two options are checked
1. “An administrator must approve the comment (regardless of any matches below)” (under Options ? Discussion)
2. “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” ( also under Options ? Discussion)

I have found by following the two steps above I have remained spam free for a long time now.

WordPress now comes bundled with an anti-spam plugin called Akismet. Akismet works in a different manner from SK2. Here, when a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down.

When the plugin catches something as spam it saves it in the database for 15 days in case you want to check it out manually and then automattically deletes it. In the unlikely event something gets incorrectly identified as spam you can correct it and it submits the “false positive” back to Akismet for analysis and improvement of our system. If a spam comment happens to get through and you mark it as spam within WordPress, it does the same thing. Akismet becomes more effective the more you use it.

Using Akismet is very easy. Download the plugin and enter your WordPress.com API Key.

You also have an Akismet Worst Offenders Extension that pre-processes the spam comments and identifies the worst offenders in terms of the domain that?s being advertised, or (perhaps more usefully) the IP Address of the spamming computer.

And to get the best of SK2 and Akismet get hold of the Spam Karm 2 Akismet Plugin. It is a plugin for SK2 that checks the comments with the Akismet web service and thus just making SK2 better.

Yet another plugin is WordPress Hashcash 3.0. Every four hours, your blog picks a random large number (close to 32 bits). Whenever a visitor visits your permalink pages, an ajax call is made which retrieves some javascript. This javascript first decrypts itself, then executes itself again to retrieve the secret value, which it sets in the form. Then it enables the submit button. If a comment does not have this value, it is rejected. If a comment is rejected more than four times, the user is blocked for a specified period of time.

Email Spam

In addition to protecting your blog from comment spam you can take one extra step and protect yourself from email spam from your blog.

The first and most important thing to remember is that putting a mailto: link on your website is an open invitation to spammers.

The best and highly recommended method to let visitors get in touch with you is to use a contact form.
Two popular contact forms for WordPress are PXS Mail and WP-Contact Form.

And if you really want to use your email address on the site then you can make use of either Transpose Email Plugin or EmailShroud Plugin. Both of these use javascript to obfuscate your email address thus prevent email harvesters from getting hold of it.

The former requires the user the manually enter in the code on their blog which is more work but won’t mess up your site.
The latter does this automatically but your links problems could be damaged.

Additional resources:

• Combating Comment Spam
• Spam Tools
• Tackling Comment Spam
• WikiPedia’s Spam in Blog

So what do you do to protect yourself from spam? If you have any suggestions or recommendations please do comment.

If you like this tutorial, please do digg it.

FeedBurner provides an excellent feed service that lets you track how many users are subscribed to your feed and more.

Users can still bypass your FeedBurner feed and continue to subscribe to your original blog feed.

While this is not a problem, your stats may not give you slightly inaccurate number of your feed subscribers.

A good option is the WordPress FeedBurner Plugin, which will redirect all your feeds to Feedburner.

If you do not wish to use another plugin or if, like me, you are redirecting a category feed, (I got one for Connections Reloaded), then you can redirect your users by adding the following code to your .htaccess file. Replace AAAAAA by that of your feedburner feed.


# Redirect /feed/ to Feedburner (if not Feedburner bot)
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner
RewriteRule ^feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/AAAAAA [R,L]
</IfModule>

Make sure you add this code before the section of the code added by WordPress. Otherwise your feed won’t be redirected.

The code explained:

The first line of the code is a comment.
The second line checks if mod_rewrite is installed. This is to ensure that your site doesn’t break.
The third line turns the RewriteEngine on. This is required before any rules are used.
The fourth line is extremely important. It ensures that the FeedBurner Bot is excluded from the redirection. If this line is missing your feed fetching will result in an infinite loop.
The fifth line redirects the /feed/ to your feedburner feed.
The last line is just a closing tag for the mod_rewrite check.

Was planning on getting this done by Jan 1, but was unable to do so.

Have been working slowly behind the scenes to change some things about this blog.

5 posts on index

For one, I have reduced the number of posts displayed on the index page in order to speed up initial loading time. (used the Custom Query String plugin for this). The archives still show the default ten posts per page.

AjayDSouza.com Support Forums

Secondly, the AjayDSouza.com Support Forums are now open. It is powered by Simple Machines.
These will be used exclusively for any support related issues for my plugins, themes and hacks.
I will not be answering any support related questions in the comments.

You will need to register at the forums in order to post.

Articles

Thirdly, I have added an Articles page. This is currently empty, but it will contain links to articles that I have written over time.
Additionally, I intend to write more articles on various topics. These will be updated here.

Quick Links

Fourthly, I have added a quick links section in the sidebar. This is to provide direct access to various pages.

Subscribe

Lastly, would just like to iterate that you can subscribe to the various RSS feeds offered by this site. Currently there are two feeds, one for all the posts on this blog and another exclusively for Connections Reloaded related posts.
I will also be adding an RSS Feed for the Support Forums in due course.

That’s about it for now.

Good news for those who use Falbum for displaying your Flickr Photos on your WordPress Blog and who use Connections Reloaded to power it.

Download falbum-wp.zip and upload falbum-wp.php included in it to the folder you have Connections Reloaded installed, usually /wp-content/olduploads/themes/connections-reloaded/

I don’t run FAlbum myself for now.
But I have plans for a demo blog which I shall install soon. Will have a live demo then.

The file uses code based on this post in Falbum forums.

Download: falbum-wp.zip

And for those who would like do, please do contribute a small amount for my development.
The amount is blank, so you can fill in whatever amount you choose.

Came across this nice article on avoiding registration on free websites, thereby reducing SPAM.

You can do this using BugMeNot.

Read the full article.