A Contact Page to Avoid Spam
There are too many website owners displaying their email address in the “name [at] tld [dot] com” format, or something like that. Whatever happened to the good old mailto link with the email address being displayed how it’s supposed to? I’ll tell you what happened — spam happened.
Many site owners are afraid of displaying their email address, as it should be displayed, on their site. Since spammers can use scripts to scan websites, the same way google does, to look for email addresses. I’ve been seeing more and more contact forms and weirdly formatted addresses to combat the issue, but there’s a better way.
The robots.txt file in the root of your website is where you control what these bots can do and what they can’t. So if you’ve got your contact info on a certain page, then don’t allow bots to view that page. Bingo.
Now, the robots.txt file isn’t a standard and there’s nothing that guarantees that spam bots will follow the rules, but we can take this a step further.
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Published: January 31st, 2010 in Web | Tags: robots, Spam, Web
Blogroll Links Favicons
Awhile back I wrote that I was having issues with Blogroll Links Favicons plugin for WordPress. I came up with some code that better displayed the favicons and fixed my issue. I wrote the author and he agreed that this code made more sense. I hadn’t thought about it, but recently I checked to see if the updated code had been put into the plugin and it hadn’t.
Just yesterday I emailed John about getting added as a contributor to the plugin, as he’s recently switched his personal site over to Posterous. He agreed to add me and I put my code in right away.
In the future I’m also going to be looking for ways of optimizing the plugin even more than it already is. I have quite a few links on any given page of my site that use this plugin, especially the about page. It’s getting to the point that having to retrieve all these thumbnails slows down my site, so I’m going to look into making this as fast as possible.
Let me know if you’ve got any questions or suggestions.
Published: January 23rd, 2010 in Wordpress | Tags: Plugins, Wordpress
Problems Getting WordPress Emails
Are you having problems getting email sent from you WordPress blog?
One of the features that I really like is being able to get emails when new comments are posted. I also use the Contact Form 7 plugin which needs to send mail.
The Problem
I recently switched web hosts to Webfaction. They’ve been great — what I think you should be able to expect out of shared hosting. The only problem is that they don’t support PHP’s mail function. They claim it’s to reduce spam — mail() can be used to send email defining the from address as whatever you want without having to authenticate. It can be very convenient, but it’s really not the ideal way to send mail using PHP anyway. WordPress does it because it’s pretty rare to find a server that doesn’t support it and the alternatives are too commonly uninstalled.
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Published: January 11th, 2010 in Web | Tags: plugin, Wordpress
Google Apps
A little over a year ago I did a post about forwarding your godaddy email to gmail. This worked great for me for about a year, but I recently discovered that you can setup Google Apps for free on your domain and this is much easier to manage. I’m not going to document the process here, since their documentation is pretty easy to follow. It’s pretty much just a bunch of MX records to setup in your DNS.
Once you’re all setup, managing the whole system is super easy. Every account can have gmail, google calendar, google docs and google sites. Once you’ve got the email account setup you can forward to another email address if you want, or just use the inbox that they give you.
Published: January 5th, 2010 in Web | Tags: apps, email, google
Adding Tumblr
It sounds rediculous, but I think I’m going to start using tumblr. No, no, it’s not going to replace anything on this site. This will be in addition to the nothing that I already do here. Told ya it sounded ridiculous.
I think it was when I was on @garyvee‘s website one day when I decided to sign up for an account. The idea of different post-types is something that I tried to start on my blog awhile back with asides(which I’ve since ditched) and image galleries(which I’m currently working on), except on Tumblr it’s built in and not some crazy theme hack.
I’ve been curious about Tumblr for a long time. As soon as I saw the interface I loved it. As soon as I saw that you could set it up with a custom URL, for free, I was hooked. It’s ridiculously customizable with some good looking templates right off the line.
Integrating it.
I knew there had to be some way to integrate this into my site without imposing on the WordPress blog. I had no idea how I would generate enough content for my main blog and a tumbleblog, but now it seems quite obvious. Read the rest of this entry ›
Published: January 4th, 2010 in Web | Tags: social, tumblr