OMNINOGGIN

Today I would like to announce the release of ‘WP Greet Box’ WordPress Plugin, a plugin that can help you increase your blog exposure and build loyal readership.

Description

This plugin lets you show a different greeting message to your new visitors depending on their referrer url. For example, when a Digg user clicks through from Digg, they will see a message reminding them to digg your post if they like it. Another example, when a visitor clicks through from Twitter, they will see a message suggesting them to twit the post and follow you on Twitter. You can also set a default greeting message for new visitors (not matching any referrer URLs) suggesting them to subscribe to your RSS feed. Professional bloggers know that having these targeted suggestions on their blog increases their blog exposure and loyal readership. Best of all, this plugin is compatible with various WordPress cache plugins so you do not have to sacrifice speed.  Even Smashing Magazine is using this plugin.  Take it from the pros and download it! Read on…

Weekend Links for the week ending on 07-18-08

• 21 Ways to Make Your Blog or Website Sticky: All of us bloggers have experienced traffic spikes before from social network sites like StumbleUpon or Digg, but how many of the visitors become regular readers? Here are some tips from ProBlogger, the authority on blogging, on how to make your blog sticky (retain visitors).
• 7 More Techniques to Make Your Blog Sticky: A follow up to the previous link.
• SSL and Cookies in WordPress 2.6: You probably have noticed that WordPress 2.6 has been released with a slew of features. This post explains in detail a couple security features and how to enable them on your WordPress blog.
• How To Turn Off Post Revision In WordPress 2.6: Lester Chan shows you how to turn of Post Revision in WordPress 2.6. In my opinion, the best new feature in WordPress 2.6 is Post Revision support. That said, some people do not like it because it creates full copies of your post on every save, thus leaving unneeded garbage behind.

Read on…

WordPress 2.6 was officially released yesterday so I upgraded this blog immediately. Here are some things you need to know about WordPress 2.6:

1. New features in WordPress 2.6
   
2. Plugin authors should read over PlanetOzh’s quick tutorial on how to make your WordPress plugins WordPress 2.6 compliant and upgrade their plugins. This shouldn’t take too long at all. I have already updated and released NowThen Photo Display and AJAX Force Comment Preview. As always, please notify me of any bugs that you run into via the comment form on these plugin pages.

Read on…

Weekend Links for the week ending on 07-11-08

• WordPress Template Tags Reference Guide: This is the best consolidated WordPress functions reference guide I’ve ever seen. Not only does it have a slick interface, the page shows available functions, its parameters descriptions, and example usage. This is a golden bookmark for anybody who works on WordPress, WordPress Themes, or WordPress plugins.
• How to Stop Being Invisible: Writing is a difficult task for most, but getting readers for your articles is even more difficult. This post gives insight on why readers read blogs and gives advice on how to make your content more noticeable.
• 7 Ways To Stay Informed And Up-To-Date Online: Do you ever run out of things to talk about on your blog? I’ve found that I get a lot of blogging inspirations from staying informed. These are a list of tools that you can use to help you stay informed of the latest happenings in your niche.
• PHP Speedy Turns WordPress Into Speed Demon: Looking for another way to uberize (read as optimize) your WordPress blog? This post talks about the benefits of PHP Speedy and also links you to other how-to-optimize-WordPress posts.

Read on…

If you are a regular visitor or commenter of this site, you wouldn’t have to worry about this post at all. I hope it didn’t have to come to this, but alas the day has come to post the all-mighty comment policy.
OMNINOGGIN is a do-follow comment blog. That being said, the do-follow is meant to reward only those people who contribute to the conversation. As this blog grows I’ve been getting a lot more comments that do not contribute to the conversation. Here are some examples of do-follow abuses I’ve seen on this blog:

1. I’ve seen comments from are people that go around to every WordPress plugin author’s page and comments something along the lines of:
   

   hi. great idea. Thank you for plugin, perfect…

   The person does not use these plugins and does not even know what they do. Other times, I get these comments on posts I’ve written as a review for a plugin that I did not develop myself.

Read on…

Today I would like to announce the release of “Project Honey Pot Http:BL” WordPress Plugin.

Description

This plugin allows you to verify all visitors’ IP address against the Project Honey Pot database. Using the Http:BL API, this plugin flags, logs, and blocks visitors with a high threat score, helping you prevent harvesters, spammers, or other suspicious bots from abusing your blog. I’ve been talking a lot about LoJack anti-spam measures lately and this is one of them.
This plugin requires you to sign up for a free account at Project Honey Pot so that you can use their Http:BL API to verify your visitors.
This plugin is based on Jan Stepien’s http:BL version 1.4 which is no longer being supported. This version of the plugin fixes a lot of database bugs and usability issues that the original plugin had. Here are the key benefits of having this plugin enabled.

1. LoJack anti-spam solution with collective intelligence
2. Easy Project Honey Pot integration. No need to mess with Apache mod_httpbl, which means that this will work on shared hosts.
3. Ability to redirect malicious bots to a bot trap.
4. Logging capabilities

Read on…

Previously I wrote a post about how to list poison email harvesters. Today I discovered that an unknown harvester/scraper bot has stumbled into my one of my traps. Here is the description of the bot:

IP:82.230.123.141
Host: bne75-7-82-230-123-141.fbx.proxad.net
User agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.1)

From the log snapshot (image), you can see that the bot had recursively crawl through 14464 pages, harvested anywhere between 5 – 20 fake email addresses per page (that’s about 12 * 14464 = 173,568 emails harvested), and wasted nearly 10 minutes on my site before deciding that it’s done. You can see that the last link the bot visited was something that looks like this:

http://omninoggin.com/suspicious/8864/1530/7374/527/3510/9061/8198/9981/3367/1751/5075/1765/7282/4842/1710/3655/614/9951/3183/3609/3731/9430/7682/6298/2287/683/3370/5633/4187/8842/1852/5984/7767/6037/7675/3984/4646/7823/8462/1793/6556/3054/1362/3111/3407/8182/7374/169/7738/158/2802/5438/7230/9552/1384/7538/index.php

Read on…

Social Homes Widget is a small but neat little plugin that lets you add links to your various social homepages in your sidebar. Of course you can do this manually, but it’s a lot nicer to be able to manage this in the widgets section in wp-admin instead of having to dive into your sidebar.php every time you want to modify the list.
The plugin supports 19 different social home links. This is more than enough for most people, but not me. Today I found that I needed to add my Plurk homepage to this list. So I found a quick hack to get this done fast, instead of submitting a request to the author. All I did was: Read on…

I’m sure everybody now knows that the iPhone 2 (3G) is going to be released on July 11th, 2008. I asked a buddy if he would prefer to wait for the gPhone over the iPhone 2 and he humorously responds:

“too unproven”
“too designed by committee”
“like open source”
“don’t want no open source microwave”
“don’t want no open source phone”
“try to make food in open source microwave you find out you need to compile the dependencies for popcorn separately first”

WordPress, being an open-source software, is the most popular blogging platform out there. Why is this? Because it addresses the average Joe’s concerns of open-source software.
Read on…

I apologize if you have visited earlier today and found the Maintenance-Mode screen. I was moving this blog from a self-hosted dedicated server to a shared-hosting server. In this post, I will discuss the reasons for my decision and the switching experience.
Here are some reasons why I made the switch (Pros):

1. I’ve been getting more readers lately so my bandwidth was almost reaching capacity. Shared-hosting is the cheapest way to get decent burstable bandwidth.
2. I wanted to start focusing more on WordPress and less on FreeBSD. Making this switch will alleviate me from having to maintain/troubleshoot low-level system things, leaving me with more time to focus on WordPress development & discussion.

Read on…