Greg In The Desert

At the end of last year Google did something with its page rank algorithm that caused my site to loose most traffic from Google. I thought the problem was due to excessive load times on my site. I used Pingdom to narrow the load times to a javascirpt from a Wordpress contact form plugin. The javascript took about 4 seconds to load and was loading on every page, including pages that did not have the contact form.

Once disabled the load times were down to a more reasonable level, although they have crept back up according to Google Webmaster Tools. As far as I can tell it’s images causing the load times. It was a good exercise for me to understand load times but it was a change made completely on Google’s part that caused the loss in traffic. The site not only got the traffic back but it increased a little. Also, when the traffic did come back the site had a significant increase in comment spam, so much that I had to turn off comments for certain posts.

Meanwhile, I took a much need break from the blog and completely ignored everything (except approving comments) and missed that TechCrunch linked to one of my pages. Causing a nice spike in traffic.

As I try to get back into posting interesting iPhone applications, I am still surprised at the amount of crap that is available to the iPhone store. Mac users always complained that sure, Windows has a more software available to it but most of it is crap. I think that is true with the iPhone.

The Wordpress App is not one of those crap applications (that is, is you have a Wordpress installation you can use it with). I’m not sure why they created an all new iTunes entry for the 2.0 app when both the 1.0 and 2.0 apps are free.

Although I find the iPhone to difficult to write entire blog posts on, the Wordpress app is great for creating basic drafts that get me started, fixing existing posts and managing comments.

Wordpress 2 is available on the iTunes store for free.

WordPress 2 is the only iPhone app that lets you write posts, upload photos, edit pages, and manage comments on your blog from your iPhone or iPod Touch. With support for both WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress, users of all experience levels can get going in seconds.

What’s new in version 2.0:

- A new, more efficient user interface that makes it faster to switch between comments, posts, and pages.
- Various user interface refinements and bug fixes
- New Comments interface, with Gravatars and the author URL shown in the comment list
- Passwords are now stored in the keychain
- Posts are now automatically saved and restored if network connection is lost during publishing
- Added persistence, so the app re-opens in the blog you last used
- Added an interface for manually entering the XMLRPC endpoint for non-standard setups
- Fixed rotation-related visual glitches
- Fixed errors where malformed XML prevented access to XMLRPC endpoint
- Fixed edge case where local drafts were sometimes not saved
- Fixed the order of photos so that they’re displayed in the order they’re uploaded

For support, please visit our forums at http://iphone.forums.wordpress.org — we aren’t able to respond to support requests submitted in an iTunes review.

James at weblogtoolscollection.com is looking for Wordpress plugin ideas. I suggested a Haloscan comment importer.

I get over 150 comment spams a month and I have been using the highly effective akismet anti spam plug-in, which has identified 99% of the incoming spam. I’ve been getting some odd comment spam lately. All the comment has is a link to Google and a link to Yahoo. Perhaps they spammers scripts aren’t configured or they are testing for vulnerabilities. Because of this and site CPU optimization efforts, I thought I would try to keep spammer from even getting the opportunity to make a comment.

The first thing I stared doing was to turn off comments on posts which get the most spam. The “10 Interesting Links” posts are very popular with spammers, I assume due to the keyword density of the posts. There are also some very old posts which get spam comments. I turned off comments for those posts as I see comment spam appear but as soon as I do it seems there’s someone who makes a legitimate comment. With a small site such as mine, I would prefer to encourage comments where ever possible.

I started using the WP-Ban plug-in which allows me to ban IP addresses. This is a tool I wield carefully. I investigate IP addressees that I can see a pattern in the spam comments from. I do a whois check for that IP range and depending on where they IP is from.

I was surprised to find all most all of the comments are from a single network: Ripe Networks of Amsterdam. That doesn’t mean the spam is coming from Amsterdam, the IP itself is for some other country. Germany or Russia or somewhere not in the US. I then add the first two numbers of the IP address and wild card the last two.

In the last month that I’ve added IP addresses to the Ban plugin, It’s blocked about 160 IP addresses, most more than once (one 94 times). The Ban plugin allows me to include a custom message where I clearly state that the IP was banned due to spam and that they can contact me at my email address if it’s a mistake.

I continue to develop this blog as the central location of everything I do on the internet. I can integrate Flickr, Twitter, Delicious and so on but one thing missing are the comments I leave across the web.

Backtype is attempting to do that. It connects to a variety of services and can keep a record of comments that you have made. The services it can claim comments from currently include Digg, Disqus, Friend Feed, Gawker Media, Hacker News, Intense Debate, Live Journal, Mahalo Answers, Posterous, Reddit, Vox and Facebook.

I have accounts on a number of these services however I rarely leave comments on them. What about Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, TypePad and Wordpress.com or self hosted wordpress blogs?

Backtype does allow you to manually enter blogs where you comment, but does not find them. You must remember to enter them at Backtype. I found that when I entered a few blogs it pulled ALL of the comments I for the site. Not just the ones I made. Perhaps I was doing something wrong?

I am expecting Backtype to add capability and to support more websites over time so I’ve started using a Wordpress plugin to archive and display the comments i’ve made. My Comments Elsewhere is a Wordpress plugin that interfaces with BackType. It apparently works with CoComment as well but I can’t figure out how to configure that. It provides a user configurable digest mode and a widget. So far I’ve been happy with the few comments it’s displayed in the widget but haven’t tested the digest capability. This is one area where I expect a lot of growth so would easily change to other services.