Web Development Blog

I’ve added the All in One SEO Pack plugin to my blog in hopes that it will help with SEO. This plugin allows you to rewrite the title tag for your posts, automagically add a meta description, change the title/description/keywords for your blog home page and use noindex for archives and categories (helps with duplicate content issues). This plugin superseded the Duplicate Content Cure plugin that I was using so I shut that off. Having an all-in-one seo plugin like this should really help with the management of the blog since it makes it easier to make global changes for quite a few settings. Thanks to John Chow for posting this plugin on his blog!

I was thinking that this would be a good time to share the current plugins that I use. Here they are, straight from my plugins page:

Click the links to find out how to download and install these. All are easy to install and configure. Let me know if you have any questions.

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There have been two blogs that I’ve been reading lately that have really jump started my knowledge about blogs and blogging. I wanted to take the time to mention them here since I think they are great resources for anyone starting to blog on a regular basis. They have also been a really great resource and motivation for the Ads Project since they are focused on monetizing your blog.

The first is John Chow’s blog at johnchow.com. I’ve been reading this one for about a month now. This blog has such a wealth of information on it and has become a blog that I keep going back to read for reference and for new articles. He really lays out how to blog better, and how to monetize a blog well.

The second blog that I’ve just caught on to is Yaro Starak’s blog at entrepreneurs-journey.com. Again, a wealth of information on how to blog well and how you can do it to replace the income from your job.

What really stands out about these two blogs though, is that they both offer an ebook that details the paths to their success. They are very generous offerings to the blogging community, and are a perfect resource for any would-be blogger. Instead of being packed with sales pitches, the books are an honest look at the commitment it takes to run a great blog. Basically, both authors have condensed everything they know about blogging success down into an easy to digest 50 or so pages. I really recommend reading both books:

• John Chow’s ebook
• Yaro Starak’s ebook

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I get so tired of looking at my web statistics in Awstats and then going over to Google Analytics to see the actual traffic to my blog. Why is there such a big difference? One of the reasons is trackback spam, and it affects a lot of WordPress sites. This post isn’t going to show you how to eliminate trackback spam, but it will show you how to live with it, and how to figure out your actual traffic (or at least eliminate the trackback.php visits).

If you don’t know, Awstats is a web statistics program that gets its data from the apache access log. That means that it tracks all of the traffic to your site. This includes trackback spammers, normal visitors, bots, everything. So when looking at my Awstats statistics I see really inflated numbers (ones that I wish were real) that don’t account for the actual traffic I have. I want the program to show real people who are engaged in the content, not Joe Trackbackspammer (which is most likely a bot) posting trackbacks about how to find some kind of drug, or good time, or casino, etc, etc.

Google Analytics, on the other hand, is a javascript based web stats tool. It’s free from the folks at Google. It only tracks pages that actually have the Analytics javascript on them. In my case, the culprit, trackback.php does not have the code, so Analytics doesn’t count it. I can instantly see a better view of actual traffic to my site. Using Analytics in this way would also block out legitimate trackbacks, but I get so few (like .01%) that it doesn’t bother me.

One thing that does bother me about both stats programs is that you can’t tie who is visiting with what they visited (unless I’m missing something and haven’t found it yet). However, this is really easy to do by looking in the raw log file. You’ll need to obtain the raw log file from your host and look at it with text editor. I suggest something like VIM since these have a tendency to be huge files (believe me, it kills Dreamweaver to open these kind of files). Just take a look in your Awstats log to see which ip addresses you want to look up in the log file. Look for the ones that have equal numbers of Pages and Hits in high numbers. This usually means that the computer associated with the suspect ip address is hitting a single page over and over again. Once you have an ip address use the find tools in VIM to find that ip address. If there is a whole slew of trackback.php visits from one ip on one or several posts then they are spamming you.

So how do you block them? Well the easiest and most drastic thing to do is to block their ip address from viewing your site. This is how I’ve gotten rid of some annoying spammers. The problem is that some of them use random ip addresses so you can’t block them using this method. Also, you may inadvertently block a lot of users if the computer using this ip address is behind a router or switch that controls a network. If those problems didn’t make you flinch then simply add this code to your .htaccess file and say sayonara to those spammers:

#Deny IP adresses
<limit GET>
order allow,deny
deny from 000.000.000.000
allow from all
</limit>


Replace 000.000.000.000 with your suspect ipaddress, of course.

You should also install the Akismet plugin, which comes with WordPress. All you have to do is enable it in the Plugins section of the Admin interface. This will eliminate almost all of your spam, including comment spam, by placing it in a spam folder of sorts. The spam is deleted after a period of time automatically and it has worked like a charm so far for me. The only downside to this method is that the spammers still get to your server and waste resources, whereas the method above completely blocks them.

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