Weblog Tools Collection

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We will not promote sponsored themes on WeblogToolsCollection any more. There are a bunch of reasons for this decision much of which has been rehashed in the past. Things have gone downhill since then. I cannot hope to please everyone and I do not apologize or repent for this decision. I believe that this is in the best interest of the community and this is the best way I can serve my readers.

I strongly urge sponsored theme authors to reconsider their means and I laud those who choose to offer their themes to the community without sponsored links.

A few days ago, Project Honey Pot introduced a new service, http:BL, “a system that allows website administrators to take advantage of the data generated by Project Honey Pot in order to keep suspicious and malicious web robots off their sites”. A honeypot is a trap set to detect email havesters and spam robots : this should ring a bell to most bloggers, I guess.

The beauty of Project Honey Pot is that anyone can contribute : just register an account, download the script and put it somewhere on your blog. It’s been more effective than I would have thought and wished : the day I had my first honeypot installed, it detected a new and before unseen comment spammer.

Contributing to this project is an easy way of making the web a cleaner place, and it will also benefit to another Wordpress related spam-fighting project : the almighty Bad Behavior will soon implement the http:BL API.

Using the API itself is fairly easy. I’ve written a short tutorial, Honey Pot & http:BL Simple PHP Script, showing how to use the API to increase protection around your beloved blog. And for those who are not interested in writing their own script, there is already an http:BL WordPress Plugin waiting for you.

Thanks to posts here on WLTC and around the blogosphere, the topic of “sponsored themes” is at the top of everyone’s minds. I thought this would be a good time to share my thoughts on the ramifications of sponsored themes, and what it means for our community.

For those who are new to the topic, in the past yew years a market has developed around advertisers that pay money to websites to have plain-text links back to their properties so they can rank better in search engines like Google for the text in those links. At some point the people gaming Google realized instead of buying links from dozens of individual sites, they could pay theme authors to bundle their links with their download and get hundreds or thousands of sites with their link for a small fraction of the cost. This is politely referred to as “theme sponsorship.”

Sometimes theme authors do this without telling their users it’s a sponsored theme before download, or use CSS or PHP tricks to hide the links or other ads in the template so most people will either never notice or not know how to remove the ads. I’m not going to talk about these folks, because they’re obviously unethical and should be banned in every way possible.

However there is another class of themes that disclose up front they’re sponsored, and generally appear on the up and up — what about those? I think there are three main issues we need to keep in mind:

1. Google penalizes sites that promote things Google considers spam. Because of the trend of paid links, even on respected sites, Google has publicly stated that they have taken measures to diminish the effect of these links by lessening the value of where they’re coming from. I don’t claim to know their internal rankings, but I believe this is related in some way to Trustrank — if you link to untrustworthy places your Trustrank goes down. (Just like if you kept recommending crappy movies to your friends they’d stop taking your advice.) I’d be the last to recommend any of us should tailor what we do to please Google or any other search engine, but at least on my blog it accounts for 60% or more of my traffic, so I’d rather stay on their good side. Once someone understands the ramifications they are welcome to make a link ad decision for their own site, but it bothers me when theme authors are making the decision for others.
2. Many users of WordPress probably don’t understand the above point or are not able to properly modify their templates to remove the bundled ad if they did. In fact, the economics of theme “sponsorship” depends on most site owners not touching the link. When advertising or something else unwanted is bundled with a desktop application and relies on most users not removing it we have a word for it — adware. (Sometimes malware.) It’s not illegal, and it’s certainly one way for software authors to get paid for their work, but it’s ultimately disrespectful toward the user and reputable download directories like Download.com ban it.
3. Finally many of these themes try to legally disallow you from removing the advertising link by claiming it’s part of the Creative Commons attribution to leave it. This is almost funny, because these themes are on shaky legal ground themselves. WordPress is Free, meaning you’re free to do pretty much anything you like with it. It’s under a license that encourages user freedom called the GPL, which says if you distribute something that links internal functions and data structures of a GPL program (like themes do with WordPress) that also needs to be Free. At best, theme authors claiming you can’t remove the link are ignoring or ignorant of the license issues, at worst they’re actively exploiting the work of thousands of volunteers that have poured their blood, sweat, and tears into WordPress.

There are other issues, such as a proclivity of some ad-bundled theme designers to value quantity over quality, but I don’t think those are as important.

Themes with bundled and embedded advertising will always exist, and it’s perfectly within the rights of the GPL for people to create them and even sell them. I also bear no ill-will toward theme authors who’ve succumbed to the attraction of the money, I disagree with their decision but people make mistakes and it’s not a personal thing. However as a community we should decide whether the slippery slope of bundled advertising is a behaviour we want to encourage and promote on our official resources such as WordPress.org and the Codex, and even on community hubs like Weblog Tools Collection.

I’ve seen some designers claim if we discourage bundled advertising with themes we’re taking away their livelihood and saying they should work for free. (Conveniently ignoring the fact that WordPress was built “for free.”) However just because you can make money from something doesn’t mean you should. Something doesn’t have to be illegal for it to be wrong. There are more important things in life. At every conference I go to I meet dozens of people who make their living with WordPress and manage to do so in a way that doesn’t exploit users or cross ethical lines, so I find it hard to believe that the lack of sponsored themes will hurt the WordPress ecosystem. Authors could also monetize their own sites with ads, instead of putting them on yours.

Finally, no one is forcing these people to make themes. In fact I would posit that it’s better not to release anything at all than to release a sponsored theme. Our design and theme community thrived before themes with embedded ads came along, and it will continue to thrive long after their gone. Embedding ads in themes is disrespectful to users, and creates confusion and uncertainty about which themes people can trust.

Two years ago I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life when I made a decision to accept a “sponsorship” on WordPress.org without considering the ramifications it would have for its users, our community, and the web as a whole. It pains me to see others going down a similar path. We should think about how these people are trying to exploit the WordPress community and good name instead of looking the other way because they’re paying.

Once you’ve had time to mull over the social and ethical issues of ad-bundled themes, I encourage you to vote on this WordPress Idea to remove sponsored themes from WordPress.org, rating it 5 if you agree and 1 if you don’t. Thanks for your time, and happy blogging.

Hurting Comment SpammersEvery Adsense Ad has a ‘Ads by Gooooogle’ link on it and if you click that link and look for the ‘Send Google your thoughts on the ads you just saw’ link on the page it takes you to you’ll be able to tell AdSense what you think about the ads Though this might not be the mighty deterrant we are looking for, if every blogger made it a point to report one spammer every day, we could take away some of their revenue. How many times in the recent past have you clicked on a link from a comment thinking it was benign and was faced with a link farm of some kind. I wish in all those cases I would have done what Darren suggests. Anyone know of a Greasemonkey script that can automate the process of reporting?

Over the last couple of days my servers have been suddenly getting extremely slow and non-responsive at times. The system load averages climb to the hundreds and nothing responds. This has lasted from a few minutes to a few hours (the night before last). I found nothing out of the ordinary coming into the system and was having trouble figuring out the source of this DoS, until late last night.

I was watching the server logs while working on some code and noticed that I was getting referer spammed. As I continued to look (and log) in amazement, a handful of machines made a large number of requests to my server, all with the tell tale referer spam clues (there were about 10,000 total requests in that attack). My understanding is that when the spammer requested such a large number of pages in quick succession, the server buried itself in trying to keep up with the dynamic pages being built. Since Wordpress does not protect against rapid multiple requests from the same host, the spammer was effectively administering a DoS.

Referer spam is harder to stop at the php level and instead of trying to stop the attacks, I figured I would put a plugin in place that would alleviate the negative effects of a large number of requests. You guessed right, this blog now uses Staticize 2.5 to thwart DoS referer spammers. Since I do not advertise referers anywhere, the only damage sustained is some loss of bandwidth. I could ban their IPs but that would require constant maintenance. I have thought of some other output buffering and filtering, but thats in the works.

So if your server has recently exhibited some of these symptoms, it might be time to take a closer look at referer spamming and adopt some measures to stop them. Thanks Photomatt for Staticize!

I have been noticing this over the last couple of weeks, but is the Pubsub LinkRank jaded against WordPress blogs somehow??

It looks as if somewhere around a week and a half ago, something was changed in the algorithm that completely trounced the rank of WordPress blogs, even the really popular ones while others continue to flourish.

Photomatt’s LinkRank
BinaryBonsai’s LinkRank
Dougal’s LinkRank
WordLog’s LinkRank

However, Scoble’s LinkRank continues to grow.

All of these ranks, including the one for this blog, are either askewed or are borked. Is this a result of some sort of a WordPress bug, vendetta against WordPress or a bug on PubSub’s side? Or maybe it was due to an attempt to fix the algorithm that went horribly wrong for WordPress users?

(All of this is really not as serious as I would like to make it sound, so be gentle! ) What do you think?

EDIT: Bob Wyman provides an explanation. Look at comment #3

I understand that a lot of sites are offering “blogging news” and are trying to gain popularity by capitulating in this niche market. Since I tend to keep track of a handful of blogging tools, I tend to find a lot of blogs that are blatantly copying the articles from another blog and passing them off as their own. Some of these blogs are adding attribution, but that is not enough.

Let me elaborate a little. I come from a very strict educational background where any sort of plageurism is looked down upon with extreme disgust. Now that might not apply to the blogging world, but I still consider blatant disregard for intellectual property to be a major problem. In academia, usage of material from external sources is encouraged. There are however, very strict rules of identification of sources and proper punctuation of external information so as to designate their origin and provide the required attribution. Though these very strict rules cannot be adhered upon in the fragmented blogging world, nominal rules of respect for Intellectual property still applies.

I encourage bloggers to use external sources. I strongly encourage discussion of these bits of information in personal blogs. However, please do not copy every word and every punctuation from another blog and call it your own. Providing a “source” or a link to the original author is simply not enough when you are copying the whole article. If you are going to post the exact information from another blog to your own, make sure that the external information is blockquoted or somehow designated to not be your own. Readers are not stupid and they will catch on. Providing unoriginal content can only go so far.

I have identified a couple of blogs that are completely made up of posts from other blogs. Most of these are the new fangled “blogging news blogs”. This has irked me to the point that if these people do not stop, I will take it upon myself to maintain a list of these blogs and prevent their access to this site and any other that I might have influence in. I will go so far as to suggest that my readers do the same.

Please respect other people’s intellectual property. You are very welcome to provide parts of posts as text in your entries with simple attribution. You are even welcome to quote large parts of posts as long as they are designated as being completely from another blog or website. But please do not steal the work of others and do not think that a small source identification is enough to make a whole article your own work. I hope other authors feel the same way!

When does a blog start getting annoying to read? How many posts can be too many posts? I know of at least a few bloggers (including myself) that post regularly throughout the day. Some of these posts are lengthy and more involved, while others are small links with a little explanation of the link.

Some of the very prolific posters (that come to mind right away) include:

• Photomatt
• Dave
• Scoble
• Om

Some of the people that post infrequently include:

• Pilgrim
• Dunstan
• Zeller
• Shea

And yet, there are some others that make it a point (or so it seems) to post once a day, everyday

• Alex
• Anne
• Jeremy

Now, it is very difficult to draw any strong conclusion from this information because almost every one of the blogs listed above are top notch and have their own place in the blogosphere. Dave blogs a lot. Period. He blogs a lot, provides useful content in almost every post and is quite out of the ordinary (meaning, does not fall into any of the groups in terms of post quality/quantity comparisons)

Scoble (and almost everyone in group 1) blogs a lot, but his content is mostly short and commentary rather than being exploratory and long winded (of course, he proves me wrong with the last few posts he has had). Photomatt (I myself included, among many others) posts quite frequently and provides a lot of smaller but useful resources and insights everyday. Every couple of days, inspiration hits for a more involved and time consuming post.

Pilgrim and the others in group 2 vary in their content. Pilgrim is very involved in his posts. He lets the posts linger for a while, adding content with his asides between posts (that might be exascerbated by his other new blog). Others in that group will write as and when inspiration strikes on a variety of topics. These blogs vary too much to draw any kind of conclusion or make a generalization.

The third group is the most interesting. These blogs are the “best” read once a day. I know I can visit Alex’s blog once a day and know that I have not missed anything important. Well, thats a generalization and that comment will bite me when I turn my back, but you know what I mean. Anne writes very well explained and researched articles that are on the cutting edge and so does Jeremy. Jeremy blogs lengthy articles (mostly) at least once a day. His posts are almost always fun to read and get a lot of attention.

I myself try to moderate between the extremes and have come up with a fairly good schedule for myself. Well, not as much a schedule as a plan. If I see or read something at work that I consider to be even closely interesting in the context of blogging, it goes online. I make it a point to draft topics on which I have an opinion and then tool away at them when I am bored or when inspiration strikes. I try to get a few posts out everyday and a lengthy, useful post every few days. Now, what I would like to know is whether bloggers actually have schedules set for themselves. I know that I am caught by this bug and am a compulsive blogger so my opinions might not count. I would also like to know if people consider limits in their blogging. Is there such a thing as too much bloggage in a day?

To sum up this post in one sentence paragraph, would this blog be less tolerable and less attractive if I had a post every half an hour? What if in order to post every half hour the topics were less important and much less contextual? Are subjective and specialized blogs more attractive (or useful, different question I guess) than generalized blogs?

I had made a couple of small changes to my RSS feeds over the past couple of days and was about to write up something about those feeds when I got my first complaint. Now, some people might say that the choice to add comment information to ones’ RSS feeds (inside the body of the post, not as a seperate feed) should lie with the author of the blog. However, I believe, especially in the case of this blog, that it would depend on the consensus of the readers. Here is the problem.

I had elected to add a comments link along with the number of comments already posted, inside the body of my RSS feed. I was not sure whether it was illegal (code) and whether it would be accepted well by the community. I seem to have gotten my answer, at least from one reader who voices their concern.

…please remove the Comment option and the slashes out of the RSS feed. They make stories pop up several times with a number of RSS readers who go after unique and/or updated stories.

Now I have two three questions for my readers. They might be related, they might be unique, depending on your perspective.

1. Should the comment links be removed from the RSS of this blog?
2. Should we offer a full feed (with the comment link and everything else) and an “excerpt” feed with none of the frills?
3. Is there a place (more of a general question, blog ethics) for comment links, or even a short list of recent comments in the main feed? (note that there is a seperate feed for comments already)

And while on the same thought, what about sending your whole feed as an image? I have seen feeds where the comments link is made up of a PNG that has been crafted using a dynamic image generator script. The image stands out and is quite out of place in my opinion, but does it belong there at all?

These thoughts and questions are on a more basic level. However, in being technical, do any of the feed formats solve this problem in a semantic manner? Am I missing the boat completely?

I use feed readers quite often. As a matter of fact, I have been using FoF frequently as of a few weeks ago. I really like the product and personally prefer to see feeds that are relatively complete with most of the information about a post being available through the feed. Many bloggers like to get people to click through their blogs by providing a “teaser” in their feeds for each post. I used to do the same, unknowingly of course and this has been rectified in this recent set of updates/changes.

In spite of all of this hoopla, I still prefer to visit all of my “reads” through a browser at least once every few days when I get a few minutes. It sure beats any feed reader out there!

Blogversations :: A Better Way to Market: Another service for bloggers out to make money, only now with a new twist to it all. Advertisers pay bloggers money to discuss their companies or their products and advertisers get a very finely tuned audience. “No Advertorials” the site touts. What do you think?