What are spam comments?

From Wikipedia:

Spam in blogs (also called simply blog spam or comment spam) is a form of spamdexing. It is done by automatically posting random comments or promoting commercial services to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, or other publicly accessible online discussion boards. Any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks submitted by visitors may be a target.

Adding links that point to the spammer’s web site artificially increases the site’s search engine ranking. An increased ranking often results in the spammer’s commercial site being listed ahead of other sites for certain searches, increasing the number of potential visitors and paying customers.

Examples of en.grand-piano.org’s comment spam. Click image to see more examples of the unrelated posts they’ve been commenting on.

If you’re in the market for a new Grand Piano, please take their questionable tactics into consideration before making your final decision. If are willing to use such lowly methods to gain customers, can you really trust the way they handle other aspects of business?

Who engages in this practice, presumable to increase search engine prominence and thus sales?

http://www.en.grand-pianos.org/

I use JS-Kit to handle comments on my blog, and so have disabled Wordpress’ native commenting system. Yet everyday I receive emails informing me that “PianoGuy”, “GoPiano”, “PianoDraft”, “PianoTrade”, “PianoFan”, “LePiano” … found posts as unrelated to Pianos as: “Write Your Own Listener Interface (you know you want to)” or “Auto-Notification of Broken Links, Fantastic Pre-Written Anti-Spam .htaccess File!” (irony?) interesting and helpful.

Right.

Mr. PianoMan, this behaviour is not acceptable. We would like you to please leave our blogs never return. Or if you do insist on reading our posts, at least wait until we write something actually related to Pianos before leaving a advertisment comment.

Thanks.

Update: the spambot has attempted to comment on this post!

What what whaaat?!

Tags: Spam, Stupid

This really frustrated me. To ensure my next bout of teeth-gnashing isn’t caused by the same problem I’m documenting the solution here:

Create an .htaccess file in the base directory of the tree you wish to be “freed” from Wordpress.

In this file type:

RewriteEngine Off

Done. Thanks to Dave Child’s comments in his post about mod_rewrites, from which my solution was derived.

Tags: .htaccess, Wordpress

Jealous of people able to display their blog’s recent comments in the sidebar, I wrote this little script.

It reads recent posts from your site’s comment rss feed and prints n comments out in a nicely formatted div. Using it is as simple as changing one line, uploading the file, and pasting some code wherever you want the recent comments to be displayed.

I tried to make a javascript version, but I the cross-domain AJAX issue thwarted my attempts. Instead I wrote it in PHP – if you don’t have PHP enabled on your hosting then you won’t be able to use this script, sorry!

To use the script, first download it.

Open the file in a text editor. Change the ‘$commentsRSS’ value to your JS-Kit Comments RSS URL. This is the line:

4

$commentsRSS = 'http://rss.pagesofinterest.net/';	//change this to your comments rss feed

To find your RSS URL, look here: Customizing JS-Kit Comments. Scroll until you see “Setting up the RSS”.

Once you’ve changed that variable, rename the file to “recent-comments.php”, and upload it to your server.

Take note of where you uploaded it to.

Paste

< ?php include('PATH_TO/recent-comments.php') ?>

wherever you want your recent comments to be displayed.
Change “PATH_TO” to the path to the file, e.g. “http://pagesofinterest.net/code/download/recent-comments.php”. Remove the whitespace between < and ?.

Save, then load the page in your browser. You should see your recent comments displayed wherever you pasted the code.

If you see a strange error message instead, try pasting the contents of the recent-comments.phps file wherever you want the recent comments to be displayed, instead of the above “include” statement.

Any problems, leave a comment and I’ll try to help.

To learn more JS-Kit tricks, read the following posts:

JS-Kit Comments + Greybox on Any Page
Fancy Footer
JS-Kit Comments for Each Blog Entry
JS-Kit Comments: Correct Usage of the ‘Permalink’ and ‘Path’ Attributes
Styling JS-Kit Comments
JS-Kit Comments: Correct Usage of the ‘Permalink’ and ‘Path’ Attributes

Tags: Comments, JS-Kit, PHP, Tutorial – 教程

The days of staring jealously at the Wordpress crowd have ended. No more shall we scroll longingly down the lists of available Wordpress plugins, wishing they were ported to RapidWeaver.

WP-Blog has arrived.

Simple and effective integration with your Rapidweaver site and sparkling new Wordpress blog is swift and painless. In fact, there are so few steps, and those steps are so easy that I found myself convinced that wasn’t all, I had missed some vital option that would break my site as soon as my back was turned.

The only irritation has been the slow manual process of transferring past blog posts, and setting up Redirect 301s ✣ for each post. I think it’s worth it though!

I’ve been using it for about a week now though, and nothing’s broken. Quite the opposite, I’m delighted at my blog’s new ability to utilize some of the best blogging plugins available! Plugins that have made me seriously consider switching to Wordpress and loading it in an iFrame within my site.* So far none of the plugins I’ve tried have broken anything, and all of them have added something worthwhile to my site.

And it’s all thanks to Roger at Nilrog’s Place.

Thanks Roger!

Plugins I’m using:

• All in One SEO Pack 1.4.7 – offers various SEO related options.
• Exec-PHP 4.9 – allows one to insert php code within posts!
• Fancy Footer 1.0 – I’m working on porting this to Wordpress (I think it’s done, waiting for my wife to make some posts – she doesn’t know it but she’s the beta tester…)
• Feed Subscriber Stats 1.1.9 – displays RSS subscriber stats in one’s Wordpress dashboard.
• Global Translator 1.2 – gives visitors the option of reading your site in their native language.
• Google XML Sitemaps 3.1.2 – generates a Google-friendly XML sitemap for your blog.
• SRG Clean Archives 4.3 – creates an attractive and functional archives section in the sidebar.
• Twitter Tools 1.5.1a – allows placement of a “latest twitters” box in the sidebar.
• WordPress Database Backup 2.2.2 – VERY IMPORTANT!
• WP-Cumulus 1.18 – slightly modified to allow two tags. I’ll post on how to do this later.
• WP-Syntax 0.9.2 – allows rally attractive and functional syntax-highlighting for source code in posts.
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin 2.1.6 – places a list of related posts at the bottom of a post’s page. Really quite accurate.

I have tried more, but these are the ones I really couldn’t do without. I’m sure I’ll come across more in the future.

*Actually, that’s a lie. I hate iFrames. The plugins really are good though.
✣ Very helpful and important when changing the address of a page.
Redirect 301 /mikes/blog_of_interest_files/a_post.php http://pagesofinterest.net/blog/2008/08/a-post.php informs visitors that the page previously at the first address has permanently moved, and can now be found at the second address. Search engines use this information to stay up to date.

Tags: Plugins, Wordpress

While migrating my blog articles from Rapidweaver to Wordpress I stumbled across some rather odd behaviour. All posts in http://pagesofinterest.net/blog/2008/06/ were displaying a garbled version of a particular post in that directory. The bottom of each affected post had the following php error message:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function insert_comment() in /home/pagesofi/public_html/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/exec-php/includes/runtime.php(42) : eval()’d code on line 131

After much investigation, I narrowed it down to one thing – Exec-php and WP-Syntax battling for control.

Exec-php was attempting to execute the line below, when there was no whitespace between

<? and php

For example:

<? php insert_comment("","","http://pagesofinterest.net/mikes/blog_of_interest_files/fancy_footer.php","Fancy Footer - Usage and Tips","","Like these snippets?  Leave a comment!",""); ?>

Obviously, I can’t show you the code that causes the craziness.

Keep this in mind if you’re also using these plugins together. If you do run into this problem, open the post that is causing it for editing, and copy its entire contents into a text editor. Paste each line into the Wordpress edit text area, and press save, then view the post. Continue until you see the above error. Fix this line, then continue down the post. The point of this is to find each line that causes this error, and to fix it.

Tags: Exec-PHP, PHP, Programming - 编程, Wordpress, WP-Syntax