In this post I will discuss some of the web design mistakes that I have done on this blog, and what I did to fix them.
A few months ago, I was fortunate enough to get free advice from a friend of mine, Emily Luong, who happens to be a professional graphics designer. Aside from being a graphics design geek, she’s put in good work on nice sites like Edelbio Skin Care Blog so I do not take her advice lightly. I asked her to review my blog and what do you know? It needs improving!
I’ve been quiet for the past week for many reasons, but the most important reason is that I’ve been working on WP Greet Box version 3.0. It turned out that there we so many positive responses (and feature requests) on the WP Greet Box plugin that all I could do is work on it whenever I get the chance (at coffee shops, during lunch breaks, before sleeping, etc). It sounds tiring, but it was all worth it!
I silently released version 2.0 after adding the ability to add your own custom greeting messages per referrer URL.
This release has cookies support so now we do not keep showing the same message to returning visitors. I also added a configurable default message to show when no referrer match is found.
Please visit the original plugin post.
Weekend Links for the week ending on 07-25-08
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.
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
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:
Weekend Links for the week ending on 07-11-08
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:
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.
Today I would like to announce the release of “Project Honey Pot Http:BL” WordPress Plugin.
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.
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