Weblog Tools Collection

Archive for September, 2005

9/7/2005 ↓

• Webloog.com: Another Wordpress MU site

  Webloog.com: Another Wordpress MU site (1)

9/5/2005 ↓

• Wordpress Theme Toolkit

  Wordpress Theme Toolkit Helps theme authors in adding an admin menu to customise their blogs. Pretty cool with lots of examples for the beginner theme author. (0)

9/4/2005 ↓

• WP Theme: Renovatio

  WP Theme: Renovatio Two column and functional wordpress theme with splashes of novelty thrown in such as dynamic image headers, an admin page to tweak the index further and a magazine-like interface. This could also be a good starting point for someone who likes the index but would like a different CSS. That makes me think. More people should develop barebones index types and let others generate different CSSs for them. (2)

9/3/2005 ↓

• WP Themes List now with 330 themes

  WP Themes List now with 330 themes:

  my wordpress theme list has more than doubled in size since you first visited it, and now links to more than 325 wordpress themes freely available for download thanks to the generous community of wp users

  (3)

9/1/2005 ↓

New, more sinister, comment spam trend 14comments

Mark Ghosh General

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I had been wondering how long it would take spammers to figure this one out. Here is what has been happening for the last week or two.

Spammers have been looking for blogs that do not have any kind of spam protection or are weak and have let some spam links through. They then monitor those blogs for activity to see if they are being used/check often. If they find that the blog is uninhabited, they then start adding links pointing to those spammed posts in their new spam comments to be sent to unsuspecting bloggers. Thus by making the links to blogs in their spam comments look somewhat eligible (and in a foreign language) the spammers are raising the pagerank of those spammed posts in “compromised” blogs and effectively giving their own spam links the attention they need.

I suggest that all bloggers become proactive about spam. Please keep your spam filters updated and actively remove commenting from old posts beyond a certain age (if you are unwilling to weed out comment spam). I suggest an intelligent comment detection mechanism and I believe it already exists for Wordpress in some form. If a post is of a certain age and it suddenly receives comments, they deserve to be moderated and then allowed by the blog author.

I see this quickly becoming a major problem since quite a few abandoned blogs exist and some established bloggers still allow comment spam to seep through into their blogs.

• MSN Feed Search

  MSN Feed Search: This news has been making its rounds along with calls for the “death” of Technorati and cheers for Icerocket. Make what you will of all of this. I think the MSN search is quite cool and IceRocket has always done a good job for me. (look for the “link tracker” from Icerocket soon) (0)

• Feedburner Redesign

  Feedburner Redesign After you are logged into the Feedburner interface, you see the changes that have been made. Feedburner does a very good job of collating feeds and information about feeds even if your blogging software provides its own feeds. Feedburner also has a very detailed set of suggestions for Wordpress blog owners including a link to Steve Smith’s Wordpress Feedburner Plugin. The distinct advantage of providing feeds through Feedburner in my opinion is that it provides accurate counts of the number of subscribers to your feed. Thanks Fiftyfourevelen.com PS: Is it just me or is the default Feedburner interface looking more and more like a metallic Technorati? (0)

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