Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

For a few years now, since I started to use real blogging software (such as NucleusCMS and then WordPress), anyone could register on this blog and become a member.  Membership didn’t offer much though.  The main feature members have that others don’t is that they can work with the archive of their comments on this site.  For the rest of the visitors, what was posted, was posted, and there was no way to change it.

Together with a few legitimate users, hundreds of abusers (SPAM posters, bots, etc) registered.  Sometimes their registrations were cleaned out by one of the plugins.  At other times, I removed them manually.  And then still a few of them stayed, masking as real human beings and not doing much damage.

As I mentioned recently, I have installed WP AJAX Edit Comments plugin, which allows comment posting folks to edit their own comments during a certain period of time (15 minutes). This works pretty well for typing mistakes, premature postings, and that sort of things, which appear to be 99% of all issues people have with their own comments.

Since there is no more need for user registration, I have closed it.  I have also removed all user accounts from this site that don’t have at least one comment.  If you think that you need an account, you can send me a message, including your email, username, and a reason for why you want it (I’m really curious).  I’ll make you one.   If you have an account, but forgot your credentials, drop me a line, and we’ll reset it together.  For the rest of you, just use the commenting form and you should be fine.

I went through a few comment-related plugins in the WordPress plugin directory.  It’s amazing how much cool stuff is written and uploaded over there.  Here are just a few to give you an idea of what you can find and install on your blog:

• WP AJAX Edit Comments - this plugin can be used to allow people, who comment on your blog to edit their comments.  They don’t even have to be logged in, and they will still be able to edit their own comments for a period of time.  Also, this plugin provides some nice functionality for blog administrators and moderators, who can approve, delete, or mark comments as SPAM from the post at the blog, rather than from the email message or blog administration interface.  I have installed this plugin, and you, my dear visitors, should be able to fix your own typos now.  Let me know if it doesn’t work for you.
•  CommentLuv - this plugins helps blog owners to give back some love to those who comment on their blogs. When a person leaves a comment on your blog, CommentLuv plugin navigates to this person’s web site (the one that was mentioned in the comment form), looks for an RSS feed of that site, and, if it finds the feed, gets the latest post from it.  It then appends a link to that latest post to the person’s comment. I tried this plugin and it works very well.  However, I decided to not use it here just yet - not because of the plugin quality, but because of the general way I see discussions here.  I’ll probably use this plugin on one of my other blogs.
• Ajax Comment Posting - this plugin makes comment posting a little bit faster.  It avoids the page reload for when the comment is posted.  I’ve installed this plugin on this blog, but somehow I still don’t see it working.  If you notice that it works or, on the contrary, it breaks something for me, please let me know.
• Delink Comment Author - this plugin helps in those cases, when someone posts a nice comment to your blog, that you want to approve, but don’t for the link that author of the comment used as their web site. With this plugin, you can remove the link to the comment author’s web site via comment administration of your blog.  I have installed this plugin too, and it seems to work exactly as advertised.

And now is a really good time to see if the comments on this blog still work for you.  I’ve tried to test things out and make sure that everything is OK, but to be on the safe side - you should too.  Please, leave a comment to this post and let me know if it works or if something is broken.  If comments don’t work at all for some reason, please drop me a line using any other way.

It was almost half a year ago that I wrote these words:

Google AdSense is gone.  I’ve been planning to do this for a long time but never got down to it.  I don’t want to have any ads on my personal blog anymore.  And, it wasn’t making me that much anyway.

As a tribute to my inconsistency and greed, I wanted to let you know that Google AdSense blocks are back.  Currently you can see one in full post view, between the post content and the comments.  Another two are in the sidebar.  I’m still playing around with the ad types, sizes, colors, and locations, so don’t be too disappointment if they annoy you right now.

Why are the ads back?  What happened?  Well, first of all, I accidentally wrote a couple of very popular posts.   I wanted to see how well these posts can do financially.   Secondly, with the latest theme changes and a round of plugin shakes, there seems to be more activity on the blog (more people are coming in, they are standing for longer, and they do more - read, comment, bookmark, etc).  I started wondering if it’s possible to get a penny out of all you people.  So, you can say that this AdSense comeback is an experiment on my side, with some hopes of earing an extra cent.

Of course, I can be totally wrong and off the track (which happens pretty often, if you need to know), and all the positive activity that I’m seeing around here is fueled by the lack of ads.  If it is indeed so, not only will I earn any money with the ads, but I’ll also lose some of the audience (something I’d much rather not happen).

Anyway, call me what you want, but the ads are back. At least for now.  If they are too annoying for you, all I can suggest is start using Firefox browser with AdBlock Plus and AdBlock Filterset.G Updater add-ons.  You won’t see another web ad in your life…

Apologies to those of you who noticed a brief downtime last night.  My hosting company was moving the database from one IP address to another, and they have warned me about it a few times early on the way.  All I had was to update configuration of the blog, but somehow that slipped through my memory.  Once I noticed the problem, it was trivial to fix.  Everything is back and should be working just fine now.

This blog wasn’t the only one affected - I’m hosting quite a few  web sites, and most of them had the same problem.  As far as I can see, all of them are up now.  Let me know if you notice that something is still broken.

I am still polishing a few things here and there on this site. If you don’t follow my Twitter stream, then here is a quick update for you since I wrote about it the last time.

• Installed 404 Notifier plugin. When somebody hits a non-existing page on my site (Error 404 - Not Found), I get an email telling me which page was missing, from where the visitor came, and what browser he used. Since I don’t have the time to monitor my web server logs closely, it was often that I missed something and didn’t know about it. Now, this plugin tells me if I need to fix something. First few days were a real something for my Inbox, but it seems that things are slowing down. Most of the stuff has been fixed and now it’s mostly notifications from SPAM bots and references from some really old web sites.
• Installed Search Unleashed plugin (and removed Search Hilight plugin). Search Unleashed provides an extended (and much needed) functionality for WordPress searching. First of all, it does plenty of highlighting. When you search for something on this site, or if you came to this site from search results of one of the major search engines, you’ll see your query highlighted on the page. Secondly, Search Unleashed extends searching with patterns. So instead of searching for “Limassol” and then “Limasos”, you can now search for “Limas*”. You can also use quotes to search for an exact phrase. And you can even use some logic operators. If you are interested in these things, check plugin’s page for more information.
• Installed WP-Cache plugin. This one should have improved the speed of the site quite a bit. Unfortunately, I can’t make sure of that myself, as my Internet connection is the real bottleneck. However, I do have a feeling that loading of the front page is a bit faster. On the other hand, I get a feeling that posting a comment now is a bit slower. If you noticed any speed changes here in the last few days, please let me know in the comments.
• Installed Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator plugin. This one should help Google (and a couple of other search engines that support the standard) to index the web site better. Hopefully, this will bring more people to the site and increase the number of comments we have here.
• Installed WP_PingPreserver plugin. I often publish posts with links to a few previous articles, and when I do it, only the first of the articles gets a pingback. With this plugin, all of the linked articles should be pinged.
• Fixed Google Analytics code. Now my statistics will work again and I’ll know better who visits the site, when, from where, and why. Spotting problems will also be much easier.
• Fixed plenty of links. Mostly these were links to my old photo albums. Before, I used to have them on my server, but then moved them to my Flickr photo stream. The links in the old posts were broken until recently. Now you’ll be redirected to the appropriate section in my Flickr archives.
• Added protection from some major SPAM bots and other “bad guys”. This was done through .htaccess file with many of the tips coming from this article. If you suddenly get a “Forbidden” error message or get redirected somewhere that you shouldn’t, please let me know via comments. If comments don’t work for you, send me an email, SMS, or IM.

Update: Oh, and I’m still moving things around the sidebars.  This should stop eventually…