Of course, if you are a blog owner I assume you’re already dealing with comments that you know had to be hand written. Since there are so many options for comment spam protection: 5 Spam Blocking Posts

Footer Importance - Even though we tend to not put a lot of weight in what is in our footer, I would wager that the most basic of links you have down there are more important than someone’s praise to take up another 200 pixels of scrollable height on a post.

Proper Channels - If you like the post, use the contact form so it doesn’t look like you’re spamming your website URL. Also include more than “great post”. Google analytics can easily tell us what posts are “great” based on traffic. If its worth posting a comment, its worth emailing us with the exact reason of why it was so great. What did you do with the information? What were your results if it was a test or tutorial for something? This information WILL help the author. More often than not I will do follow up posts once I’ve accumulated responses and include your name& url in that! Not everyone does this and it might not happen for every posts. But if your results are unique, and if you summarize your own posts about them, I would link to that too! Also, I notice emails and respond to them with more weight more often than comments. Especially when its personal feedback.

What Is A Good Comment?

A good comment is:

• Coherent and thought out - Reread what you write before posting. I’m not great with grammar and spelling at times but if its horrendous, its going to rub off in a bad way on you. No matter how much of an expert you are at what you do.
• Spell check! (Firefox has built in functionality for this, no excuses). More info here: Firefox Spellchecker
• Is at least two sentences - Not that once sentence cant provide quality, but on average I find it to be rare that it does.
• Adds value to the initial posts by responding with your own results, adding to the post, or correcting/clarifying a part of the article.
• Asks a question about the post that is not so basic that you cant EASILY find it in Google. If you can, Google it, and use that as your comment! Coming to the table without any basic research at all can often make you look like a fool. That can reflect on your own blog if you leave a website URL with your comment.

Following these practices could open unforeseen doors when used on the right websites. The effort is greater but so is the prize. To many, that is a better wager than a limited and predictable outcome which will more than likely end with your comment being marked as spam and deleted. Which means zero price and an effect that lasts onto other blogs if they’re using something like Akismet.

Related posts:

• Blogging: The Importance of Post Momentum
• How Akismet And Defensio Create Another Line Of Spam Defense
• AntiSpam Bee vs Akismet & Spam Prevention Methods
• 5 Spam Blocking Posts - A Fight For Future Free Time
• Wrong Turn TLA - TinyURL Covering your Affiliate Links

I’ve been distracted from this blog for a bit. For a reason which now you’ll see. Gamegate2k.Com had its relaunch after a significant amount of custom coding in Wordpress. I started development in Wordpress 2.7. 2.8 came out shortly before the release. I was able to upgrade with only a 2 hour setback worth of bugs.

The most impressive features on the new site have to do with the way the menu’s dynamically generate on each type of template page.

Wordpress by nature lends itself to having expired content which is buried within its archives. Some users don’t even enable the archives in their sidebar.

I really don’t like that content model at all. So I set out to change it and I used the redesign of gamegate2k.com as a proof of concept.

By allowing sectioning and paging abilities on the combination of tag AND category pages you no longer have to rely on users finding old pages through a search engine. Something many bloggers notice after sometimes a few months of posting.

In some cases bringing in a new custom taxonomy can provide a further dimension of this. Combined with proper menu output, it is a powerful way to turn a blogging platform into a CMS with “real” website qualities.

Old vs New Design

The old design was a very simple php includes base design. The site had been around for close to 10 years without too many enhancements. There was no backend.

The new design in Wordpress 2.8.

Features List

Unique features that were customized specifically for this site:

• Intersection of tags and categories - http://gamegate2k.com/game/freelancer is a category page for freelancer and http://gamegate2k.com/category/guides/ is a list of all things tagged “guide”, then the “section” on both of those would result in a list of just freelancer guides. Like so: http://gamegate2k.com/game/freelancer/section/guides/ (Note: I renamed tags to be “categories”).
• SSO Forum - Single Sign On with bbPress.org Forum. Forum was converted from a vBulletin 3 forum which used to be here: http://virtualfragment.net (I’m repuposing this domain in the next few months). There is no way to quickly convert vBulletin to bbPress. I had to literally map each sql column with my own script and automate it from there.
• Alternating background colors on content bars - Rewriting function for the class tags that get output or completly calling a custom query/output for display.
• Super Cache with dynamic integration - This was necessary to make my custom captcha on every page work and for future features that need to be more dynamic.
• Category display with tag listing of which were only used in that particular category
  Custom plugin output - Usually accomplished with a custom query. Mainly done for performance improvements and modified layout from what was available out of the box.
• Jquery Sidebar Menu - Menu automatically expands the section you are in when on a single page/post.
• SEO Titles - On a per case basis the title will modify itself to include all category/tag/titles on posts or sections.
  Auto SEO Meta Tags - On single pages the title is analyzed and a dynamic list of meta keywords and description is created on the fly. It does this in conjunction with category and tag assignments on a post to automatically create long tail keywords.
• Seperate caching (outside of SuperCache or in addition to) for intense queries. For performance gains. The games list output with tag relations on a per category basis is using this for example.
• Captcha - This captcha is custom and an improved version of
  Enhanced Numbered Equation CAPTCHA - Killing Web Spam - Part 2 to work with (excluded from) cache properly.
• Dynamic menu generation - Based on current category, tag, or combination of the two.
• Dynamic video generation - If videos for that section exists, display the most recent, otherwise display a random selection of one of the 3 most recent videos added on the site in any category.
• Contributor setup - users can sign up and submit their own articles. They can also update their own articles. Each time they add/edit the page an admin needs to approve it for it to show up live.
• Unique Tagging - IE “video” or “sticky” tags are special in terms of what happens to posts that are tagged like that. They are excluded from output in the dynamic menu.

Plugin Based Features

These features were built on existing plugins but slightly modified in some cases:

• Post Revisions (modified for submitted content)
• Breadcrumbs
• Most Popular Pages
• Recent comments - Per category basis
• Ajax Login
• Thickbox for images in posts
• Custom Taxonomies
• Sitemaps
• Flash Gaming
• Comment highlighting (custom output)
• Registration enhancements
• Breadcrumbs
• Auto Backups
• D/L Management
• Role/admin modifications

Over the course of the next few months, I plan on taking some time to build some of the above features either as full plugins, or write a tutorial to explain how to do it. If you’re particularly interested in one of the features, comment on it here and it will increase the chances of me choosing to do that one next.

Future Functionality

A few upcoming functions I’m working on:

• Review type posts with multi-star ratings.
• Contributor ads/links.
• Top Contributors
• Automated Wallpaper/Screenshot sectional posts from a group of images. Lightbox/Thickbox enhanced.
• Additional auto SEO system based on incoming keywords
• Hit logging/tracking
• Google Analytics API integration
• Tips in a quick list style (short posts that show up from a random selection on the page).
• Pull quotes from other articles that are part of the tips quick list.
• Expansion of download sections layout and functionalities.

Related posts:

• Most Popular Posts By Category - Dynamic Wordpress Hack
• 10 Ways To Analyze AdSense Analytics To Make More Money
• Google Too Effective - Experiment Foiled
• Wordpress Optimizing - DB Cache Plugin Performance Review
• Hidden Form Fields To Prevent Bot Spam

The concept is great, however the Wordpress blogs that will benefit from this plugin are of a very slim margin. Which is why I’m shocked its being rated so highly on Wordpress.org.

A Common Complaint

It slows page load time down. Its been mentioned more than a few times on the Wordpress support thread.

The cause of this is because each query result is stored as a serialized chunk of data in a file. If you have an average blog (10-15 plugins installed) You’re probably pushing 40-60 queries per page (though it really depends what plugins). DB Cache seems to be able to cache about 95% of those 40-60 queries.

Each time an individual query is included back into the PHP script, it has to go through a process of checks:

• Checking to see if a file exists.
• Create a new one if not.
• Pull the existing one into place and unserialize the data so it can be used.

The flaw in this method of caching comes in the 3rd point (while reading the files). They can be just as expensive if not more expensive than most of the queries being sent to your database because each one is a separate request to the server.

By the time you open a file, read it, and then still have to run your code on the data provided… You might as well just used your database and had the results of your page fully up to date.

A simple SELECT statement is often quicker than sending another request to your server for a file. And, the majority of queries within the core of Wordpress are not all that taxing to a database. For example, when you use something like blog_info() in your header template, it is doing a simple select on the options table.

A Use for DB Cache

DB Cache is still a useful concept, but one that I would only use if you maintain a site that has a lot of “expensive” queries. And by expensive I mean the ones that are doing multiple table JOINS, Lengthy WHERE’s and ORDERBY calls in their syntax.

How do you know if your site needs it? WP Pear Debug is a great debug tool for this. Use that to take a look at some of the queries being executed on your pages.

Another case in which it might help is if your database server and web server are separate. If your database is taking a pounding from other applications, using DB cache will take stress off of it and instead. Keep in mind, this is just transferring the workload to your local machine.

To quote Otto42 in this support thread:

“Querying a database is probably going to be faster than looking for the same query in a filesystem manner. DB’s are optimized and efficent, filesystems have all sorts of caveats to cope with.”

An Additional Issue

If your site does warrant the use of DB cache from a couple expensive queries, your performance savings will probably just cancel out. Since a large portion of your queries are still going to be simplistic.

Ideally, this kind of caching is best ONLY on those expensive queries. If there was a way to specify what kind of queries were cached, this plugin would appeal to a lot more people. For now, It cant even help some of the more advanced Wordpress development I work on.

Conclusions & Responses

I haven’t tested this to the extent that I’d like to. I also haven’t loaded this onto heavily trafficked site. If you test it on a site that receives a few thousand visitors a day, let us know your results. Maybe I’d be more willing to test it out in production on my sites if someone has positive results on a massive scale. Till then, super cache pulls a single cache of a page and still allows me to have dynamic output where I specify it.

If you comment on your test results please include how many plugin’s you are using and approximately how much traffic you receive daily.

Related posts:

• Wordpress Theme Customization & Design - Creating Sidebars
• HowTo Recover Lost Website Content
• Custom/Advanced Wordpress CMS Modifications - GameGate2k.Com Relaunched
• WordPress Link Love - Follow On Plugins And Tweeks
• AdSense Speeds Up Search Engine Crawling & Indexing

Others use it to find out if their site gets hacked.

However, as an internet marketer, there are several other things you can do to make this tool worthwhile

Increase Traffic, Branding, And Income

I wouldn’t be the first to tell you that involving yourself in your niches community is how you’ll ultimately get ahead. Especially while building your brand. Gary Vaynerchuk preaches this in all of his keynotes.

If you’re familiar with the concept behind products like Fast Blog Finder (which has a pretty nice free version) then using Google alerts for the same sort of purpose is the same thing.

The biggest difference between using Fast Blog Finder and Google Alerts is that you’re tracking current blogs, groups, videos, and web content. Not an article that’s been sitting out there for the past 5+ years.

• Increase traffic to your blog - Leave a relevant comment about something that you talk about regularly. If you have a few series posts or a favorite category/subcategory that you’re always talking about, then who better than YOU to make a comment about it on another blog as soon as it appears on the internet.
• Branding - Associate your name in your niche. If you’re always the first one the comment on a new post for the topic you’re interested in then you must be an authority right?! Just make sure you’re leaving useful comments. Show off what you’re passions are!
• Eliminate competion - If you’re selling a product or service in a niche where you have 2 or 3 close competitors then this is perfect. Set an alert for their product name. As soon as someone posts about your competitors product, there you are. Showing up just in time to say “hey, have you tried XXX yet”?No one needs to know you own the product. Just mention it and contribute to the article accordingly. Try to avoid “pushing” your product. Especially if your site exemplifies front and center why your product is better than your competitors. All you need is the first link. If anyone is really in the market for your services, they’ll click through and do their own comparison.

Instant Results

If you’re starting to setup your alerts then you’ve probably missed some recent stories you could jump on right now.

Take a look at these pages:

• http://groups.google.com
• http://blogsearch.google.com
• http://news.google.com

Apply the following rules when running a search:

• Put your search in quotes
• Use the “Sort By Date” option to show most recent posts.
• Experiment with your search phrase. For example “World Of Warcraft Guides” Does not cover as many potential opportunities as “Warcraft Guides”.

Better to setup too many alerts and delete them later if you’re unhappy with results.

Setup Options

• Use 2 email addresses. Use one email address for testing and trial/error alerts.
• Use the other one for when you’re ready to sit down and focus on commenting.
• You can associate your Google account with two emails. Use the accounts page to add additional email accounts.

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Since the creators site is in German, its hard to tell exactly what you’re getting. Especially since the description of this plugin’s features tell you basic features without actually telling you how it works. So here’s to remedying that…

Post Check

The script checks that “wp-comments-post.php” is being requested properly. Checks if the method used is “POST”, and that $_POST isn’t empty.

Comment Box Switch

It creates a md5 hash string of your URL address, grabs the first 5 letters/numbers of that result, and uses it as your textarea’s box name. For example (and completely made up): name=”comment-x2nsk”. Working example:

<?php echo ‘comment-’ .substr(md5(get_bloginfo(’home’)), 0, 5); ?>

This is in addition to your old comment box, which still exists after the new text box is added in, the old one set with a css style to display:none;.

This means a regular browser cant see it. Thus if its filled out, Anti-Spam Bee knows that its spam. However, the plugin attaches this style directly to the old form, which to me, sounds like it would be very easy for a bot to detect. It would be better (not unbreakable, but better) if this was in an external style sheet somewhere.

If you want to understand this concept better check out this post: Hidden Form Fields To Prevent Bot Spam

Checks Pings & Trackbacks

For pings and trackbacks it checks the remote address, comment author URL, and comment contents were entered.

If they are filled out, it gets the hosts name that sent the pingback or trackback and compares it to the author comment URL

Pending the results of these actions it throws the results at a filter which then puts it in a spam or approved bucket.

Akismet VS Anti-Spam Bee

So, is this really better than Akismet? For me, no, but for you , that answer could be different. Here’s why:

Akismet is unique in the way that it works and learns on a continual basis. It blacklists IP’s and does a few other checks when the data gets processed through their servers. Any spam inevitably ends up in your database so that you can see it and unmark it as spam.

AntiSpam Bee has an option to “save” things marked as spam or to get rid of it so that it never shows up in your database. Using the methods of prevention in this plugin, this is probably somewhat warranted. However, it will never prevent someone from coming to your site and filling it with junk manually.

Since Akismet blacklists “bad doers” IP addresses, that last scenario would still be blocked by Akismet but not Anti-Spam Bee.

Using Both

The nice thing is, both of these plugins will work together. The Main thing I like about Anti-Spam Bee is how light weight it is. Its a ridiculously small plugin and very “out of the box” type of functionality.

Configuration:
If you use both, make sure you configure Anti-Spam Bee to “Mark as Spam, do not delete” in the settings panel.

You can also alternatively use Simple Trackback Validation. See my guide here: HowTo Eliminate Wordpress Trackback Comment And Pingback Spam. Which means you should check the box “Do not check trackbacks / pingbacks” in the Anti-Spam Bee settings.

Why I Wont Be Using Anti-Spam Bee

The SINGLE thing that Anti-Spam Bee does not provide that eliminates my need for it entirely is my Enhanced Numbered Equation CAPTCHA. This is because I would rather read through ANY spam that someone enters into the form manually which is NOT blacklisted by Akismet.

You can read up on that and a few other tactics that I posted on in this series: 5 Spam Blocking Posts - A Fight For Future Free Time

Conclusion

At the end of the day there are ways around everything. If you can find a way to use all these features at once, the more the better! Just avoid repetition of features and multiple spam admin panels. You want to save time, not create a workload of spam filters to sort through.

Make sure you understand how your spam filters work before implementing one and especially before using 2+ at once!

Spend some time and experiment with what’s out there. Comment below and let us know what combination(s) have worked for you.

Related posts:

• 5 Spam Blocking Posts - A Fight For Future Free Time
• How Akismet And Defensio Create Another Line Of Spam Defense
• HowTo Eliminate Wordpress Trackback Comment And Pingback Spam
• 5 Rules For Posting Quality Anti-Spammy Comments On Blogs
• Hidden Form Fields To Prevent Bot Spam

Single & Multi Page Widget Designs

If you find yourself switching around widgets on your home page (or any page you desire) you can use PHP Code Widget in combination with the tutorial/techniques I’ve described here: Wordpress Custom Home Page Design - Widgetized Front Page.

Those individual widgets can be further enhanced by wrapping them with the same conditional code anywhere else in your site. For example:

1. if (is_front_page()) {
2. widget_functions_or_any_code();
3. }
4. Download this code: 0201widgetconditions.txt

Design & Layout Planning

One of the important aspects of this is designing (sketching out) where you want predefined widgets to begin with. After that its just plug and play through the widget area. No need to be fancy.

• Get it down on paper to help you visual the process of what you’re trying to accomplish.

During this phase its also good to do a bit of research

• Surf similar sites in your own network
• Poke around on the websites you have in your own RSS reader.

What setup/layout do they have?

• What do you like?
• What fits functionally within your niche?
• What other widgets do they use that enhance user functionally and navigation through the site?

Your Wordpress blog probably doesn’t have all the functionality that theirs has. If that’s the case, search for it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

Create your list of blocks and then mock them in in your draft.

• Consider their placement and ordering (if in a sidebar).

Wordpress register_sidebar Functions

STEP 1: Inside your themes folder you should have (if not create it) a functions.php file. For Wordpress to recognize the new side bars, you have to define them. Adjust divs and add/delete new sidebars as needed. See the example functions.php content below.

1. <?php
2. if ( function_exists(‘register_sidebars’) ) {
3.  
4. //For a rightside box
5. register_sidebar(array(‘name’=>‘rightsidebar’,
6. ‘before_widget’ => ‘<div class="rightbox">’,
7. ‘after_widget’ => ‘</div></div>’,
8. ‘before_title’ => ‘<div class="rightboxtitle">’,
9. ‘after_title’ => ‘</div><div class="rightboxcontent">’,
10. ));
11.  
12. //For a leftside box
13. register_sidebar(array(‘name’=>‘leftsidebar’,
14. ‘before_widget’ => ‘<div class="leftbox">’,
15. ‘after_widget’ => ‘</div></div>’,
16. ‘before_title’ => ‘<div class="leftboxtitle">’,
17. ‘after_title’ => ‘</div><div class="leftboxcontent">’,
18. ));
19.  
20. //For topleft box
21. register_sidebar(array(‘name’=>‘topleft’,
22. ‘before_widget’ => ‘<div class="topleft">’,
23. ‘after_widget’ => ‘</div>’,
24. ‘before_title’ => ”,
25. ‘after_title’ => ”,
26. ));
27.  
28. //For topright box
29. register_sidebar(array(‘name’=>‘topright’,
30. ‘before_widget’ => ‘<div class="topright">’,
31. ‘after_widget’ => ‘</div>’,
32. ‘before_title’ => ”,
33. ‘after_title’ => ”,
34. ));
35.  
36. }
37. ?>
38. Download this code: 0201wigetfunctions.txt

Setting Up Multiple Dynamic Sidebars

STEP 2: You’ll need to create a sidebar file for each one that you’re adding. Every file should be named according to how you named the sidebars in your functions.php file. They should also always begin with “sidebar-”. For the topright file we named in the function above, the file name would be sidebar-topright.php. Make sure that file is saved/placed in your active themes directory: (/wp-content/themes/your_theme_name/)

Now you need to fill each of those sidebar files with a small amount of code. See below and choose one method or the other depending if you want something to be displayed by default. If this is your first time doing this, you might want to put something in there so you can debug a bit easier if something goes wrong. Having a default is generally a good idea incase that sidebar doesn’t exist later on (for whatever reason). Also make sure for each function call, you’re changing the name of the side bar you’re trying to call.

1. //Option 1 (with a default if sidebar isnt available)
2. <?php if (!function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’) || !dynamic_sidebar(‘topright’)) { ?>
3. <?php } else { ?>
4. Put something here if you want something to display by default.
5. <?php } ?>
6.  
7. //Option 2: It can look like this if you dont have a default:
8. <?php if (!function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’) || !dynamic_sidebar(‘topright’)) { ?>
9. <?php } ?>
10. Download this code: 0201widgetsidebarphp.txt

Setting Up Multiple Dynamic Sidebars

STEP 3: You’re going to have to edit your theme files.

Below is a mock up of a design/layout. Based on this, note how you would apply the code in the proper areas (likely within div tags, or td cells if its an older design) on your theme’s index.php file (/wp-content/themes/your_theme_name/index.php).

1. <?php
2. //this references a file in your theme folder named sidebar-topright.php
3. get_sidebar(‘topright’);
4. //sidebar-topleft.php
5. get_sidebar(‘topleft’);
6. //sidebar-rightsidebar.php
7. get_sidebar(‘rightsidebar’);
8. //sidebar-leftsidebar.php
9. get_sidebar(‘leftsidebar’);
10. ?>
11. Download this code: 0201widgetthemephp.txt

Working With Multiple Dynamic Sidebars

The whole point of doing all of this is so that you can easily and quickly swap out widgets in various areas from the Design >> Widgets area in Wordpress admin at anytime.

Technically you could skip all of this and directly edit each widgets function into your index.php file directly. In some cases this will be required if a plugin doesn’t have a built in widget. But, instead of editing index.php, you will now be editing the related sidebar in which you’d like the the widget to appear.

Theme Troubleshooting

If your new widget or sidebar only shows up on the front page you probably just need to add it to a few other template files. Such as the single.php , category.php. These do not need to exist by default, and if they don’t, will default to your index.php design setup. This is another reason why we go to the trouble to widgetize everything into sidebars. Once you have your sidebar areas setup, you don’t have to go into each of these files to make changes.

If you only want widgets to show up on certain pages, you can still do so within the sidebar-locationhere.php code manually. Referrer to all the conditional tags you can apply. There are a lot of options there, down to specifying widgets on a per page or article basis.

Performance

I use everything described above and then top it off with this plugin: Widget Cache

This allows me to cache the output of an individual widget for a period of time. This works really well for plugins that are non-unique on a per page basis. What I mean by this is they don’t have dynamic output based on the page you’re on, or do any kind of site/user logging.

That rules out using it with one of my favorite widgets: Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. If widget cache were to cache the output of this plugin on this post, it would also be displayed for another post. Which means irrelevant data.

Another favorite plug-in of mine, Simple Tags, adds a cloud widget of all your tags. Until you add a new post, this data is always going to be the same. A perfect candidate for Widget Cache.

If you need better performance in combination with all of this (on a page by page basis) WP Super Cache is the way to go.

Related posts:

• Wordpress Custom Home Page Design - Widgetized Front Page
• Making Flexible Content Websites Diversify Your Income
• HowTo Eliminate Wordpress Trackback Comment And Pingback Spam
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• Display And Hide Content Based On Date Or Age Of Posts - Wordpress Hack

Below you’ll find the bookmarklets that I find most useful as a Web Developer/Online Marketer (for use in FireFox and Internet Explorer). The original source of these come from squarefree.com. They have a ton more there.

Forms

Custom work on any website typically involves forms. Anything from the Administrative CMS config kind to collecting visitor information. As a website developer, its nice to have as many helpful shortcuts as you can when dealing with these forms.

• Form POST To GET - IE/FF - After activated it forces POST forms to submit as a GET. This will typically break the ability to use a form properly but allows you to see what variables are being passed.
• Toggle Checkboxes - IE/FF - Some forms (particularly CMS like ones) sometimes have a long list of rows with checkboxes next to them all. If there isn’t a “select all” option, you may be clicking for a while. Using this will automatically select all checkboxes on a page.
• Enlarge Textareas - IE/FF - It can be rather frustrating when a textarea box isn’t big enough for you to type or reread everything you’ve put into it. Use this to give yourself 5 extra rows of text (repeatable).
• Password Viewer - IE/FF - Shows the contents of password fields. Useful for obtaining a password that you’ve been letting FireFox remember.
• Remember Password - FF - Some forms tell FireFox not to use the “remember password” feature. This allows you to override that setting and use it anyways.

Links

Different ways to manage links to sort out the type of links there are.

• Links To Full URL’s - IE/FF - Converts all links on a page to the full URL’s that they link to.
• Hide Visited - IE/FF - Hide links you’ve already been to. A lot of sites dont use the “a .visited” CSS tag. This will help you sort through what you have and haven’t seen yet.
• Colorize By Internal/External Links - IE/FF - Colorizes all the links on a page. Internal Links = Red, External Links = Blue, In-Page links = Orange.

Design

• Topography With Borders - FF -Shows the nesting of div/tables by creating 3d borders around all elements. Great for troubleshooting where you might have missed a closing div.
• Topography With Colors - IE/FF - Same as above but works in IE and is less likly to break the page because it doesn’t add borders.
• View Cookies & Remove Cookies - Quickly view and remove cookies for the current site you’re viewing. Great for troubleshooting site functionality.

Social Bookmarking

• Digg All - Automatically diggs your friends submitted content when on that friends page.

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Data Example

Running each 1,000,000 times:
preg_match time: 2.01364398 seconds.
stristr time: 2.7015089989 seconds.
34% improvement when using preg_match.

You can test this out yourself with your own string and reoccurrence rate with the script below.

1. <?php
2. function timeStamp() {
3. list($usec, $sec) = explode(" ", microtime());
4. return ((float)$usec + (float)$sec);
5. }
6.  
7. $startTime = timeStamp();
8.  
9. for($i=1000000; $i > 1; $i–) {
10. $test = preg_match("/com/i", "PHP is the web scripting lan.comguage of choice.");
11. }
12.  
13. $splitTime = timeStamp();
14. $splitTimeecho = round($splitTime - $startTime,10);
15. echo "preg_match time: ".$splitTimeecho." seconds.";
16.  
17. // Do some more things here
18. for($i=1000000; $i > 1; $i–) {
19. $test2 = stristr("PHP is the web scripting lan.comguage of choice.", ‘com’);
20. }
21.  
22. $endTime = timeStamp();
23. $totalTime = round($endTime - $splitTime,10);
24. echo "<br>stristr time: ".$totalTime." seconds.<br>";
25. echo round(($totalTime / $splitTimeecho) * 100) - 100 . "% improvement.";
26. ?>
27. Download this code: 1222timertest.txt

Why This Matters In Your PHP scripts

I stumbled into this question for the first time when I was setting up an array of preg_match() functions to check the user agent of the current visitor. The idea was to only run an insert query when necessary. I didn’t want to log bots as it make up about 50%+ of web traffic on most sites. Google analytics filters these out.

For my own logging purposes I needed a filter that was more efficient than simply logging every hit that came to the site. A typical website might get hit about 1000+ times a day by search engine spiders and other various bots. Each one causing a INSERT to fire off if you’re doing your own logging. By running a preg_match on the user agent I was able to reduce server load significally because I was running less INSERTS (I’ll explain why you want to do your own logging and how to set it up in future posts).

MySQL Inserts Versus preg_match() & stristr()

When I ran an INSERT to my localhost xampp setup it took an average of .001 seconds. The data example I show above corresponds to running one million for a better test average. Thus the following ratio of executions resulted to an average of .001 or less:

• preg_match() - 120 executions.
• stristr() - 84 executions.

In smaller quantities results were mixed when using the script above. More often than not I got an improvement on preg_match, but not always which such small numbers. Technically it should have results exactly 0% using the number ratio above. Putting stristr at 120 should show the 30% improvement again. Based on an average of running each one million times, preg_match is the clear winner.

In Plain English

It is better to run a check on a string which you will later be deleting in a database up to 120 times using preg_match. Anotherwords, you can check for 120 different strings that would disqualify that string from appearing in the DB.

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I spend hours of time every month watching new plugins and features rolling into Official Wordpress Plugin page. This is a summary of the plugins that I’ve tested and see being useful to the majority of Wordpress users.

IntenseDebate Comments

IntenseDebate Comments enhance and encourage conversation on your blog or website. This service is gaining popularity and is free. Its a great way to jumpstart a blog by having your comments in more than one place. Comments made on your site appear on IntenseDebate and vice versa. Easy integration, Comment threading, reply-by-email, user accounts and reputations, comment voting, along with Twitter and friendfeed integrations is what makes this experience special.

Usage Tips: Enhanced comments and drive more traffic to your site!

• Download Plugin
• Official Website

Easy Paypal Payment or Donation Accept

Wordpress Easy Paypal Payment or Donation Accept Plugin allows you to put a simple donation button on your site, or provide a dropdown list of preselected fees. This allows for a very simplistic method of charging for services. Once a user pays you it will note the email they used. You can use that in correlation with a form if you don’t already have an ongoing discussion directly with the customer to know when they pay you.

Usage Tips: Best for simple solutions and predefined packages.

• Download Plugin
• Official Website & Examples

Custom Permalinks

Custom Permalinks allows you to change the URL of any page on your Wordpress site. The new ones will automatically redirect the the right page as well so you get the best of both worlds.

Usage Tips: Moving your site over to Wordpress? Instead of doing 302 redirects, you can simply change your new URL’s to the old ones.

• Download Plugin
• Official Website

Custom Widgets

This plugin allows you to specifically select which widgets appear on specific posts, pages, categories, authors posts and tag pages. You can also use conditional tags to display widgets on a per WP Template basis.

Usage Tip: Monetize your website on a per category basis.

• Download Plugin
• Official Website

Eventr

This plugin gives your Wordpress site an event management tool. Allow your visitors to signup for an event and display a list of attendees for people to see who’s coming. When the event is over, just deactivate it and it prevents further signups. The clip of the form above is only a portion of the input fields. Technically you could add as many fields as you want, but I like the built in image uploader so each person can associate a thumbnail picture with their entry when they register.

Usage Tips: You could repurpose this as a contests script.

• Download Plugin
• Official Website
• Form Example
• Attendance List Example

CMS Navigation

This allows you to easily implement typical CMS navigation elements into your templates for your Wordpress blog.

• Top navigation bar, listing the top-level pages and their children (as drop-down items).
• Breadcrumbs trail navigation that shows the path to the current page all the way from the home page.
• Left navigation that shows where the visitor is next to the page’s parent and nearby pages.

• Download Plugin
• Official Website

Surveys

Allows you to create and administer multiple survey’s on your blog through Wordpress admin. Allows you to see results as a whole or on a person by person basis. I like this better than polls in some cases because it allows a multipart answer.

• Download Plugin
• Official Website

Comment Approved Notifier

Comment Approved Notifier sends an e-mail to a commenter’s when you approve their comment. No settings to configure, ust activate it.

Usage Tips: Use this as a way to draw visitors back to your site and involve yourself more within your niche. Typically, when you approve comments, you also respond to them (or you should be if you want to effectively grow your website). Approving a users comment will prompt them to come back and see that response even if they never subscribed to the comments for that post.

• Download Plugin
• Official Website

Social Media Page

The Social Media Page plugin adds a list of links to your social media profiles. You can then display them on page, post, or sidebar using the built in widget.

Usage Tips: The screenshot examples show the 16×16 thumbnail, social network name, and keyword. You can remove those fairly easily and simply provide the list as thumbnails which takes up far less space if you have a lot of accounts.

• Download Plugin
• Official Website

WP Tuner

WP Tuner plugin for WordPress (and mu-Wordpress) allows you to find out what is causing your sites performance to degrade the most. Very useful if you just installed a handful of new plugins.

Usage Tip: Use this to enhance the user experience. No one wants to wait more than 10 seconds for a page to load these days. You can also use this in conjunction with Debug Queries to find problem areas on your blog

• Download Plugin
• Official Website

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Gone are the days that you throw up any old content to a website and find accuracy in “if you build they will come“. When I started putting up websites 10 years ago that was the case. With a new blog appearing every 3 seconds, you need to do something special to prove your worth.

Yaro Starak, and Gideon Shalwick produced the eBook:

• It contains highly accurate and current blogging strategies!
• It outlines 5 Milestones that outline a path to making money online.
• It Introduce the “X-Factor” - 13 strategies that will help with the popularity of your blog and grow your traffic

The “X-Factor” is the most informational part which points out unique tactics such as incorporating multimedia elements on your site. Its underutilized as a strategy on most blogs. Even I have started video blogging and recording guides.

Gideon Shalwick outlines the eBook in more detail below:

Myth: Video And Audio Blogging Is Hard

Apart from all the resources inside Roadmap To Become A Blogger its never been easier!

Take, for example, the Flip Video Camcorders that are available for less than an IPOD. Not bad for a $149 (now $129 at Amazon - See below).

Flip Video Quality

For such a small item and great price you’d think they’d lack quality. Not So. See the video example in the walkthrough video below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Documenting where you go or what you do while you’re doing it can mean a lot of extra content for your readers. If you spend anytime doing research for articles you write you know how tedious it is to try and retrace your steps and reinvent a situation artificially. Being on top of that, and using it in the way that Roadmap To Become A Blogger teaches can turn making money online into something that seamlessly happens while you’re having fun.

My buddy Todd at ToddRecommends.TV has a technology section on his blog. Video posts of “unboxings” like his recent t-mobile G1 enhances posts tremendiously.

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