OMNINOGGIN

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…

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…

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…