Confused you? Okay, let me explain. Here in the UK there is a television programme called Dragon's Den. Simply put, the Dragons are very rich business owners who like investing in up and coming businesses, and each week they show a handful of people with ideas or small businesses going before the Dragons, giving a speech about their idea or product and asking for investment for X% in return. Usually on each program about one person/business gets their investment.

There are a lot of wierd and wacky ideas and products seen on this program and most usually get shot down in flames. However this week's show had one product on that was shot down when it really shouldn't have been. Shuc is a portable shower holder, doesn't require drilling or nails, it simply grips (via suction) to the tiles on your wall and allows you to put a shower head up to any height that it can manage.

The Dragons, at first, were impressed by the owner's presentation but none of them could understand why anyone would want one. The minute I heard what it was I sat there running through the amount of times I could have done with one!! My comment was however, the Dragons wouldn't see the need for one as they'd probably never stayed in a cheap hotel or bed and breakfast, or had to rent a flat or house with no shower! Afterall, why would they? I'm sure they live in the Hilton when away from their mansions

It's such a shame that they didn't offer any investment and to be honest gave comments such as 'this product is a waste of time'. Perhaps the projected figures and the expense already laid out were not good, but to reject the investment due to the project was a daft move. I certainly hope that this business gets some or all of the investment it needs or perhaps it already has (who knows how long ago these programmes were filmed). It's definitely a worthwhile product to have regardless of whether you rent or not (think about sitting in the bath and being able to bring the shower head down to the right height to wash your hair properly), or whether you stay in the Hilton or a cheap bed and breakfast

And yes, I'll be buying one at some point I'm sure!

I first started looking at reducing the amount of spam left on my blogs back in March this year. At the time I put a few trials in place. I figured it would be a good time to revisit this and let you know how the past 7.5 months have fared.

I made 3 major changes to the way this site worked.

1. Change the Comment script filename
2. Change one of the required form field's ID/name
3. Remove the ability for trackbacks

All 3 made a difference however now I only have the first method in place. Details of how to do this can be found on my original post – Zero Comment Spam. I'll also mention, it hasn't stayed at Zero but it's not done too badly! First of all, my reasons for dropping changes 2 and 3. Changing the form field's name for say the Author field is all very well and good, until you upgrade and forget to change the new comment posting script file! I kept having a habit of doing this so I figured that the first change cut down a reasonable enough amount. Point 3, well despite turning the plugin off for disabling trackbacks (I never used it properly in the first place!), I've still not managed to fix my pingbacks/trackbacks. If you're not concerned over displaying these then it's worthwhile to have in place, however from my experience, if you change your mind later on, don't expect to get them working again!

Change the Comment Script Filename!

So back to method 1. Changing the comment script filename. This has worked exceptionally well. To give you an example, in May I changed domains and the server for this site. Because of the way I've stored the database I had a few problems copying my AIS site over, so I had to use the import function via a fresh WordPress install instead of using the database backup (it's a long story!). So my Akismet spam count was reset. Since May (so 5.5 months ago) Akismet has had to catch just 73 spam. Less than 15 per day. Compared to up to 100 per day before I started to use the file rename method, I don't think that's too bad going

Whilst slightly busier, spam comments have still slowed down a lot on this blog as well. Perhaps 150-200 since March. At first it killed them dead but of course as time has gone on, spam bots are recoded to know which file to post to, and numbers can start to creep up again. Of course, you can easily combat this by changing the filename to a different one that you've used. If you changed it every so often I doubt the bots would have time to keep up.

How and Why?

I know I explained this before but I will again as it really is pretty straightforward and such a great way to combat spam. A spam bot is often programmed to send a Post header to a specified file (in the case of WordPress it would be the wp-comments-post.php file). It knows the fields to send (author, email, url, message) and where to send it. So by simply changing the filename and ensuring your site now posts to the new filename, the spam bots will still be looking for the old filename and get a 404 error or whatever error you set via .htaccess.

Some people at this point may say 'well Akismet takes care of all of my spam', or 'Spam Karma traps everything, I never see it!', but that wasn't and isn't my reason for using this method. Imagine if you used Outlook or Thunderbird to regulate your email spam. Everytime you download emails, the software is checked for signs of spam and filters it off into the junk mail. Sure, you don't see it, but it's still there. Even after deleting it, it's been on your system, and something somewhere knows it was there. For a start off your bandwidth usage would be higher due to the extra spam you've downloaded. Wouldn't it make more sense to log into your email account on the server, and nuke it before it even gets to your own computer? Or use MailWasher, which allows you to view and remove emails directly on the server before downloading them to your offline software.

So it's the same in this instance. Why even let spam be entered into your database table? Sure, after X days Akismet will automatically delete anything it's caught, but there is still bandwidth being wasted for a spam bot to submit a comment, for that comment to be saved into the comments table and for Akismet to determine that it's spam by contacting the central database on WordPress (why else would you have an API key for it?). Okay I could be wrong on the last bit but that's what I'd imagine happens. Regardless, that's still too much going on when you could maybe prevent it. Plus, wouldn't you rather not have comment IDs of 94570 and higher?! Especially when you know less than 1% of those were real! (Just to add on the site I just linked to, in just over 12 hours there were almost 200 spam comments/trackbacks submitted – imagine 400 spams a day going through your site!).

Of course, nothing is 100% certain as I've mentioned. I still get a small amount of spam, some bots/scripts are programmed to complete the form so of course it will submit to what ever file you've set it to submit to. I've also had a few manual spams, clearly people with nothing better to do (although I did tell one guy off for spamming my site and he wrote back with an apology!). However this one simple step will help reduce the load on your server just that little bit extra, and maybe give Akismet a night off once in a while

Just don't forget to change the comment script filename (wp-comments-post.php in WordPress) with a new upgrade!!

Some of you may still come to this site via http://ais.sarahfreelance.co.uk/ however as I've had to move the domain the subdomain redirect isn't working for me at present. So if you go to this address and get a 404 then you know why. Can I recommend just updating to http://www.stuffbysarah.net/ais/ for your bookmarks, and if anyone who still links to the old domain is feeling kind, maybe update to my new domain (as I know there are a fair few still pointing to the old site) nnMany Thanks

To cover the final basics of using WordPress we need to look at the final 3 menus in the admin area.

Presentation

This area allows you to control the look of your WordPress site. Under Presentation – Themes you'll see all of the themes you've uploaded to your site. Themes are stored under the /wp-content/themes directory, each in their own individual directory. Simply click the theme you want to run on your site.

Presentation – Widgets is the section that allows you to drag and drop widgets into your sidebar and easily control the order in which your widgets are displayed all by simple drag and drop methods. This is great for non technical users, just make sure the plugins you add are widgetised and not standard plugins.

Finally, the Theme Editor found under Presentation – Theme Editor, is where you can edit your theme files online. However before this works you may need to change the permissions on your theme files to be writable by the server. This means going into your FTP program, open up the theme directory, highlighting all of the files and changing the permissions (chmod) to 766. Personally, I don't really recommend this for the simple reason is that you update something online, you don't have a backup copy. If something happened to your online version you would lose those changes. Also, I've often made minor updates to the online files and then made a major change via my offline file and uploaded it, losing my changes! So now I try to ensure I only ever update the offline files.

Plugins

Plugins allow you to extend and improve your WordPress site with ease. A plugin is very easy to add to your site. You simply upload the file or files (usually contained within a directory) to the /wp-content/plugins/. Then when you go to the Plugins page it should be listed as a plugin awaiting activation. On clicking 'Activate' the plugin will install itself. Usually plugins will come with extra instructions for adding it into your site. If your site is widgetised then you should just be able to find it under Presentation – Widgets and drag the widget into your sidebar. If your site doesn't use widgets then you'll need to copy the code given if needed.

To look for plugins the best place to go is the WordPress Plugins section from WordPress. I've also listed my handy WordPress plugins and of course there's also my own WordPress Plugin.

Most plugins will also come with an options page for you to change some of the options for that plugin. This page, if it exists, will appear under the Options menu. The latest version of WordPress also has a handy utility that tells you when your plugins have a new version out. This is very important as plenty of people remember to upgrade WordPress but not the plugins that they use.

Users

WordPress allows for more than one user account on the system. You can create various accounts for people and give each account a user level which restricts their access. To read about the various user levels I recommend the Roles and Capabilities page on the WordPress Codex.

Users – Authors & Users lists all of the user accounts created and lower down on the same page you can add a new user account. For every user account that's created, an email is sent to the registered admin email, so that you can keep an eye on what your other users are doing

Then you have Users – Your Profile, which allows you to update your own profile and password. If you're comfortable with writing HTML then you may want to untick the 'Use the visual rich text editor' which is the MS Word style toolbar that appears when you come to write a post or page.

Summary

So that's all of the menus covered now and all of the basics covered. If you've missed anything or not sure on anything, be sure to go back through the tutorial posts to find the answer to your question, or feel free to leave a comment on the relevant post

Been a bit of a boring week this week to be honest. Mainly work and nothing much else! Last monday I went to kick boxing for the second time, and survived the whole hour again! This time I didn't ache as such for the next day or two, but because we'd been practising a lot of kicks, my lower legs were very sore. During the hour the lactic acid hit tenfold in my calves and it took a few days before they finally stopped hurting. I even walked to the post office on Wednesday and they got sore very quickly. However I'm hoping that the after pain will ease off more and more as time goes on and I get used to doing actual exercise! I just need to start doing something extra at home as 1 hour a week is an improvement but not much. The only other sessions to go to would involve a lot more people and not just women, so I think for now I'll stick to just one session and get a bit of fitness and stamina first.

This week was good in that I got a couple of DVD boxsets sold on Amazon Marketplace. I had some duplicates after Dave bought me a full boxset of all the series of Alias, so despite meaning to get my duplicates sold for 18 months, when I packed up our other DVDs last week I decided it was time to actually get things sold! We made around £20 for the first and second series which is better than nothing. I doubt anyone would buy the video boxsets I have though, so they'll go into the car boot sale which we really need to do soon!

There's been no movement in the house hunting. The house we have our eyes set on becomes empty tomorrow and the owner has told us to call him on Wednesday to arrange a viewing. It seems to be a great house, with a garage, so despite the laid back attitude from the owner (well his manager to be more precise) we're just gritting our teeth and hoping that we can get to view it and sort out to rent it. Afterall the money is ready and waiting in the bank account so I can write a cheque there and then for him. I think once we actually get to meet then things are often different as you actually know the person you're dealing with, can put a face to the voice and all that. So keep your fingers crossed for Wednesday and hopefully we'll get something more definite sorted out.

The rest of the week was spent working, catching up on various unfinished updates for sites. I've dropped behind in my work which of course plays on my mind a lot. However I managed to get my second wordpress plugin finished, not for general release but to allow a client to update their custom database on their site. It means that they don't need a separate login which is great. I was quite chuffed with myself as it provides a page in the options section but then this offers 3 pages, add, edit and remove. The plugin file is pretty long but worth it now it's working. I also submitted my own WordPress plugin to WordPress and am waiting to hear back from them as to whether they'll accept it. I hope so as the feedback I've had so far sounds pretty good and would love for more people to be using it.

Anyway, besides wishing my brother a happy 34th birthday (old git heh), hope you have an enjoyable Sunday evening Back to the roast chicken