It seems like every month, someone will write an article with the headline that Blogging Is Dead or in the process of dieing and discuss which services are replacing the medium. However, according to stats released by Nielsen, Blogging is gaining in popularity. This is great news for services such as WordPress.com. Be sure to read the detailed stats behind the numbers further down in their post. ∞
Crummy Advertising On WordPress.com
It’s a well known fact that WordPress.com shows display advertising but until I read this article on HalfBlog.net, I’ve never looked into what kind of advertising was presented on certain WP.com blogs. HalfBlog.net has a couple of screenshots of ads they discovered while browsing on WordPress.com and perhaps the most insulting one of them all is the Windows Dialogue prompt that tells users they have a chance to win an Apple iPad 2 and to click the OK button.
I decided to fire up a fresh copy of Internet Explorer as I know WP.com loves to show those folks ads to see what I could find. My results range from embedded YouTube videos to flash based videos. The sites I browsed were on the Freshly Pressed WP.com front page and the ads I found had absolutely nothing to do with the content they were displayed under. However, unlike HalfBlog.net, I did see the Advertisement disclaimer above each one. Here are the ones I saw.
Embedded YouTube Video
Flash Powered Video
Embedded YouTube Video
When the issue was brought up within the WP.com support forums, Happiness Engineer MacManX alleviated fears of some that they are not forcing people into purchasing the No-Ads upgrade.
Forcing people into No Ads is definitely not, has never been, and will never be the plan.
Rather, the head-bashing that you described is the plan. The ads are some-what geo-targeted, and at this time, most of the bad ads seem to be shown to folks visiting from outside of the US. I’m not sure if it’s because there aren’t enough fish in the sea for our ad provider in this case, or if they just aren’t vetting their foreign ads well enough.
While Automattic makes an effort to remove ads from the network based on screenshots submitted by users, unfortunately, it’s like playing a game of Whack-A-Mole as Wank puts it.
Complaining about individual ads and getting them removed after the fact is just playing whack-a-mole. It doesn’t do anything to stop similar ads popping up again. Sooner or later you’re going to get malware slipping through (it’s happened a couple of times on livejournal) and the fallout from that is going to be exponentially worse than what you’re getting now.
It’s interesting in that WordPress.com can’t remove the ads because of the extra revenue the small amount of display ads provides but at the same time, it would de-value the no-ads upgrade. So WordPress.com has to find a way to make this work better but when relying on third parties for your advertising needs, there is not much they can do about the quality of the ads that are displayed. I wonder why they haven’t created their own in-house ad network specifically for WordPress.com?
If you feel like going back in time, check out this post from 2006 when ads were introduced to WordPress.com and read through the comments.
A Few Website Pet Peeves I Have
It’s time I get a few things off my chest when it comes to browsing the web. I love browsing through my feed reader to get a grasp on the various news stories surrounding WordPress and my favorite subjects and in the course of a few months, I’ve developed just a few pet peeves that really urk me. In no particular order, here they are and if you can help it, please avoid them!
Permalinks – I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come across a great article only to discover that finding a simple URL to the post was a pain in the rear. When browsing posts in my feed reader, I typically see URLs filled with FeedBurners junk attached to them. Instead, I enjoy websites where the post title within the post acts as a permalink which is nice and clean for easy sharing.
Social Junk – Maybe I don’t get it, but I hate websites that have turned their comment section into a place to monitor social interaction. Instead of comments, I now see tweets, retweets, likes, etc. Everything is mixed together and it’s one big mess. Whatever happened to the days of seeing a great conversation take place within the comments section of a site and being able to easily participate in it? I salute those who have resisted the temptation to put that garbage within your comments section. However, I have no qualms of a smart comment form where reactions from specific services are tabbed based. For example, Comments Tab, Facebook Tab, Twitter Tab, etc. Having everything show up in the comment form is just a poor way to go about it.
I’ll Share It My Way – Of all the ways to share content, I’ve typically only used one method presented on a website and that was the old-fashioned, Email Story method. A long time ago, I used to hit the Digg button if it was displayed on the article I was reading but I haven’t had anything to do with Digg for a long time. Also, I’ve yet to read any articles of major websites providing an analysis of just how much their sharing buttons are used. Typically when I’m browsing through my feed reader, I have my preferred Twitter client opened so that if I find something interesting, I shorten the clean permalink and Tweet it, no buttons necessary. I’ll also send an email manually when I have Thunderbird open but I’ll look to see if the Email link is present within the article before I do that. If sharing buttons work for you to get more traffic, good on you but I tend to think that not many people use them.
WordPress.com Pop Up Links – While I don’t come across them all the time, those pop-ups that occur on various WordPress.com hosted sites are incredibly annoying. Not only that, but when you try to copy the URL, it adds that pop-ups URL stuff into it and in order to get the correct URL, you have to visit the linked site and grab it from there.
As for WPTavern.com, I’m sure some of you have the pet peeve that I don’t have any way to access the various categories that are written about on the site. It’s been like that for a while and I assure you, I’m looking into it. From playing around with the WordPress menu system, it doesn’t have an easy way to add a category drop down menu item to an existing menu. It’s either some categories, all categories, or nothing.
These are just a few of the pet peeves I have that get me all the time. Everyone has web site pet peeves so tell me, what’s yours?
FeedBurner Relevancy And RSS Subscriber Numbers
Jean-Baptiste Jung has a good blog post over at The Blog Herald that questions whether FeedBurner is still relevant. In the post, Jean examines how in the past month, his numbers if varied widely. As a long time user of FeedBurner, I too have seen numbers vary wildly with no explanation. By the way, it’s awesome that WPTavern.com has bumped up past the 2,000 FeedReader average.
Line Graph Swinging Up And Down
I’ve enjoyed being able to know roughly how many people are subscribed to the Tavern RSS feed but in reality, I don’t know how accurate those numbers are. While Jean lists out some other services that could replace FeedBurner such as FeedBlitz, I think we have to take a step back and ask ourselves, does the number of RSS subscribers matter anymore? Are they still used as part of the popularity of a particular website? Will you lose out on advertising sales because of little or no numbers? Without using a service like FeedBurner, you’ll have no way of knowing the reach your sites RSS feed has.
Personally, I prefer to know how many people are subscribed to the RSS feed even if it’s just a rough number. It’s one more metric I have at my disposal on monitoring the growth and reach of the site. How do you feel about the notion of RSS Subscriber numbers?
Woopra 1.4 Released
Woopra Client 1.4 has been released to the public after a few months of beta testing. This new version includes a number of new features and enhancements. For instance, Woopra users now have the ability to embed a chat widget onto their site that enables inbound chatting whereas before, it was only outbound. Notifications have also been reworked so they are a scrollable list. A small but valued addition to the client is a usage meter. This lets paid users know how much of their monthly allotment they have used. Improved firewall connections as well as IP range filtering to exclude visitors have also been added.
The next time you open Woopra, you should receive notice that the update is available. I will not be adding the inbound chat feature to WPTavern.com because I use Twitter for that. It’s one less thing that has to be loaded. By the way, if you want to see what Woopra looks like on a 23 Inch Widescreen monitor, check out the following screenshot. Please ignore the WordPress Porn search query in the searches box.
Raw Look At The Trackback Attack
Now that I’ve weathered the storm and the attacks have subsided for now, I think it would be good to share with you what my raw access log files looked like during that day to see the distributed denial of service in action. Thanks to Kim Parsell, I was able to rename the raw access log file into a text file so I could examine it within NotePad++. Since a large amount of trackbacks were aimed at the backup buddy review I published, I performed a search in the log file for that post. Here is a sample of what I saw.
I’ve opted to use a screenshot instead of text as to not link to any of the sites within the log file. As you can see via the screenshot, the Backup Buddy post was being loaded every few minutes by one IP address. While I did receive a large number of trackbacks from a variety of websites, the log file clearly indicates that at least one IP address was the major culprit. It’s also interesting to note that this one IP address hosted different domains as you can see on the right. Those URLs on the right hand side were the ones generating the trackbacks. This makes me think that IP address is hosting a good sized splog network.
The two files that were blamed for sucking up resources on the shared server I was on, XMLRPC.php and Index.php are shown multiple times being accessed by a variety of IP addresses, not just the one shown in the first screenshot. This is where I think the attack was more distributed in nature.
What angers me is the fact that AnHosting, my original hosting provider of 3 years told me that they had an Automated Firewall System in place but because of the distributed nature of the attack coming from multiple IP addresses, they couldn’t tell what was legitimate traffic versus illegitimate. Their automated firewall must be broken because it should have blocked that IP address shown in the first screenshot.
None the less, I’m currently on HostGator now with WP-Super Cache installed. I just can’t help but think with a little more help from AnHosting, I wouldn’t have had to go through webhosting hell. But they operate on a three strikes rule with suspended sites. Once you hit the third strike, they do not lift the suspension of the site. Since I was on my second strike, I had to leave.
Spell Check Is My Ultimate Crutch
Raphael Mudge has published an interesting post that talks about re-thinking the relationship with the spell checker. His post made me reflect on just how dependent I’ve become on services such as After The Deadline or the built-in spell checker inside of FireFox. There used to be a time when I could easily spell big words when writing them down on paper or saying the letters out loud. Those days are long gone. When I write content and it comes to using a big word, I’ll make the first try a good guess hoping that I got close enough to the word that FireFox will suggest the one I was trying to use.
I imagine that not writing words down on paper with pen is one of the biggest reasons for my lack of ability to spell. Grammar to me is an after thought. I also wonder if I should put myself in a little experiment where I disable all spell checkers for one week to see how I do. If anyone else is willing to go through this same experiment, let me know in the comments. We can give it a try for a week and report our findings.
Can anyone else admit that spelling and grammar checkers have become a large crutch?
Review Of Backupify Part Two
Picking up where I left off in part one of the review, Backupify notified me via email that a backup of my site had successfully completed and that it was available in their Archive.
After downloading the archive to check out what was backed up, it was clear that this service will only provide a backup of the database. I was not able to test the restore feature because this is the site I created the backup from and I wouldn’t want to revert back to a few days ago in posts.
As for the full backup manually issue I described in part one, I still can’t figure it out. I disabled all the plugins to see if it would get to 100% and it still froze at 99%. I’m going to give this plugin a try on my local server install to see if the problem still persists.
Conclusion:
While I only concentrated on the WordPress aspect of Backupify, the service can back up account data from Twitter, Facebook, etc. This is where the service really shines and what it should really be used for. I think WordPress plugins such as WordPress backup or even this brand spanking new plugin, WordPress EZ Backup may be a little more up to the task.
Review Of Backupify Part One
Browsing through my feedreader today, I came across a service known as Backupify which uses Amazons cloud service to store the backup data. Much if not all of the data that we send to Twitter, Facebook, and other social outlets does not exist on our own machines. Depending on how you feel about that data, it could be a big loss to see it all of a sudden disappear. One of the services that Backupify is aiming to support is WordPress.
Registering a new account is simple and gives you 1 Gigabyte of data. After registering, you’ll need to click on the Manage link for WordPress under Services In Beta. This will initiate the backup process. However, you’ll need to install the WordPress Backupify plugin before you can proceed.
After the plugin is installed and activated, you’ll have to visit the plugins settings page and initialize the plugin to the Backupify service. You can also take this time to configure the backup option. Notice how I said option. That’s because the only option you can configure from within the plugin is the ability to exclude comments. The full backup area provides a button where you can backup the site locally. The question is, what is backed up? The database of course.
For some reason after I ran the backup locally, the process became stuck at 99%. The status within the browser window said Done so nothing was ongoing. When trying to refresh, I received a warning that my backup would fail if I reloaded the page but after waiting for 5 minutes, I went through with the page refresh.
I have no idea what happened to 99% of the database that was backed up. After refreshing the page, I gave the full backup another try and the same thing happened. It’s supposed to reach 100% and then save the file to my desktop as a third copy. I’ll troubleshoot this more and report on my findings in part 2 of the review.
Speaking of Part 2, that will be published in the next day or two as the backup system is performed automatically and the backups do not show in the archive until 24-48 hours after it’s complete. Speaking of things happening automatically, the process of installing and configuring this plugin has confused me. I’m used to clicking boxes or selecting options but this plugin does not really have any of that. The Backupify website is also sparse with options because everything is performed automatically. The only thing I can really configure on the website is managing accounts and selecting when backups should occur and how I should be emailed.
Backupify is a free service for up to 1 Gig of data so if you give it a try this evening or in the next few days, let me know in the comments if the 99% local backup problem happens for you.
Close Or Leave Comments Open On Old Posts?
By Jeffro on March 23, 2012
As laid out by BloggingPro.com, the question is simple. Should you close comments on older blog posts? While their article goes into specific reasons as to why or why not, I’ve personally been a fan of closing comments on articles that are 180 days old. I think the bulk of the conversation that is going to take place on any particular post will be within 7 days of it being published. Therefor, I don’t feel the need to have the form open if the conversation is over with. Another major reason I opt to go this route is spam. Back when I used to write for other websites, I noticed that the majority of their spam comments were for articles buried deep within their archives. Every now and then, a legitimate comment would show up but that was the exception rather than the rule. As a site administrator, closed comments on older articles also provides an easier administrative role. Instead of wading through pages of comments caught within the Akismet queue to check for false positives, I normally have only a page or two at the most.
With that said, as a site administrator, how do you have your comments configured and why did you chose that configuration?
Posted in Blogging | Tagged comments, spam, wordpress | 21 Responses