Computer Tips -Tech Info

Category: Wordpress

  • IE 7 INCOMPATIBLE with WORDPRESS blogs using the stattraq plugin

    I’ve FINALLY tracked down what was causing the issue with displaying my page in Internet Explorer 7 (RC1). It turns out that the stattraq plugin in wordpress (stattraq site) is part of the problem. Now, I don’t understand exactly WHY… because I do have stattraq on each of the sites, but one… onlineradiotv.com carried this error at the bottom of the page (ONLY in IE7 by the way…) “Fatal error: Call to undefined function: () in /var/www/html/radiotv/wp-content/plugins/stattraq.php on line 90”

    The other pages just failed to display as though there was a network problem…. until…

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  • WordPress Category RSS feed links

    In working on the post related to software updates and making sure it was easy to find the category feed JUST for that led me on a “round the world” kind of quest to find a way to put the category feeds in the footer of pages in WordPress. The first thing I tried was this this category livebookmarks plugin, which gives some options to browsers that recognize feeds in the header of the page. It’s interesting, but I may wind up uninstalling. What I HAVE found is this solution which was EXACTLY what I was looking for.

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  • WordPress 2.0.4 Update

    It has been a few days now, but I noticed that WordPress 2.0.4 has now been released and is highly recommended due to the fixing of a few security issues. They also list a number of bugfixes as well. So, if you’re running a site based on wordpress it’s time to update. It’s really a fairly painless process. I do recall upgrading ONE site to 2.0.3 and it was quite painFUL…. things went quite wrong and I had to restore the database from a backup. BUT… I’ve now upgraded 5 or so installs to 2.0.4 without a hitch. (One was a 2.0.3 install and the others were (I believe) 2.0.2).

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  • Trackback and Comment Spam storms update

    Well it looks as though the storms of Trackback and Comment spam that I mentioned last week have just about tailed off now. About 6200-6300 posts were reported as junk by akismet and the “other” spam killing plugin probably got another couple hundred, so it’s been pretty deep. Anyway, the first few days, I was seeing spikes of about 200 or so junk comments/trackbacks happen for about an hour every 2-3 hours and today there’s just been a “spike” of a bit under 100 for an hour once in the day. I think there may have been one yesterday. Just not much to “write home about”.

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  • Trackback spam and countermeasures like Akismet and trackback validation

    As I’ve already commented today…. there has been a massive trackback spam swarm going on the last 24 hours. I’ve now racked up 1300 or so in the Akismet filter on this site and another 150 or so on another two sites. Akismet has been very impressive in defending this attack. Only 1% of the trackbacks slipped through, or about 14 or so across three sites. I’ve looked to see what other measures I can take against trackback spam and found one that looks like it should eliminate the 1% that got through.

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  • Another trackback spam storm overnight….

    All of the the swarms of trackback spam seemed to last an hour give or take a few minutes, so it does look kind of like “rent-a-bot” activity, lots of different IP addresses, trackback spam sites seem to have a common theme – the last batch was insurance type sites…. a sampling of about three or four found that they were all cloaked redirects for the same site/page …. http://www.finance-portal-online.com/insurance.php ALL are registered with moniker.com and all the insurance related domains being spammed (that I checked) redirect to the finance-portal-online.com site above which is registered to a “Bill Bilton” whose email is given as bill at top-support.net ….

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  • Speaking of botnets….

    I seem to be getting the second flood of trackback spam attempts on the day. LOT’s of ip addresses, from all corners of the globe – most seem to be casino-related trackback spam. I guess botnets are being used for comment spam? It sure looks like a “100 pcs for an hour to do your bidding” kind of thing going on… There have been literally hundreds today alone (which is the first time I’ve actually seen this heavy a spam-storm. By the way…. I haven’t yet seen one slip into the actual comments… I attribute that almost entirely to a very useful WordPress 2.x plugin…

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  • Wow, impressive comment spam storm

    But perhaps you are not as powerful as the emporer has foreseen…. I just skimmed the stats and saw an abornmal spike in traffic over the last hour, so being curious…. I checked the server logs and saw trackback post after trackback post, all different Internet Explorer versions. It doesn’t seem to be the same ip address repeating, but several. (Could it be a bot net?) Anyway, not much time here to investigate on that. Fortunately though, the trackback spam defending jedi akismet has been holding it’s own quite well with the onslaught. This is frankly the biggest trackback spam storm I’ve seen EVER which makes me curious as to why I came up on the radar…

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  • Cleaning out a few draft posts….

    I really like a lot of features about WordPress. One is the ability to start a draft post and hang on to it indefinitely. If you haven’t noticed, I’ve spent a good part of the afternoon cleaning out a batch of some of the many draft posts I’ve accumulated over the last few weeks. (Along with some items that are fresh in the last day or two.) What I like about it is an opportunity to do a quick link in a post with a title and be able to retrieve that from any web-accessible computer to follow up on. It acts as a neat reminder or post-it note system as well.

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  • WordPress plugin stattraq speedup

    I’ve made mention I think that I use the stattraq plugin for wordpress as one of the ways to see where traffic is coming from on the site, etc. etc. etc. I think I mentioned it as one of my stat tracking tools about the time Google Analytics limped out of the gate… Anyway.. one of the things that had bugged me about it for some time was that it was SOOOOO slow to pull up any information (maybe a minute to pull in the page?) I had noticed a performance tip from the author…

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