I am sure, I don’t need to explain anything about Spam over here. Blog spam is nothing new and there have been already many articles written about it. However, I still get questions like “What is the best strategy to avoid spam comments?” Just to kick start things, I would like to mention the definition that has been given in everybody’s favorite website i.e. WikiPedia -

Spam in blogs (also called simply blog spam or comment spam) is a form of spamdexing. It is done by automatically posting random comments or promoting commercial services to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, or other publicly accessible online discussion boards. Any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks submitted by visitors may be a target.

How to fight comment spam

There are various plugins although in my four years of experience as professional blogger, I’ve come across only handful of plugins that have done wonderful job for me. They have been shared by lots of experienced bloggers over and over again and here I am, who would like to share it with you one more time!

1. Akismet – This wonderful service from Automattic has been consistently helping thousands of bloggers in fighting blog spam. Not only it is available for WordPress, it has been extended for various other platforms like Movable Type, Drupal etc. There is no reason, why I would not suggest this plugin to any person who is using WordPress.

2. WP-Spam Free – Scott Allen has rightly described it as an Extremely Powerful Anti-Spam Plugin! Its so powerful that it literally makes your blog secure from all the comment spam. Although, this plugin is infamous for using extra resources from server. If you have a high traffic blog and get lots of spam comments, then there is no reason why you shouldn’t be using this plugin. Personally, its my favorite among all the plugins that I’m listing over here.

3. SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam – Another wonderful plugin for fighting spam on blogs. It not only helps to fight blog comment spam. It also can be extended to fight automated registrations and automated contact form submissions. This plugin uses a familiar trick of fighting comment spam i.e. CAPTCHA verification. It has lots of configuration options and if you don’t want to rely on automatic anti-spam plugins like Akismet & WP-Spam Free then this plugin will easily serve the purpose for you. [Plugin Homepage]

[Photo Credit - ScoopDog]
4. Bad Behavior – This wonderful script has been developed to fight against spam bots. It’s not specific to WordPress and is available for other content management systems. Its pretty light on servers and has been made available on plethora of CMSes. It has done a wonderful job in keeping this blog spam free from long time and will continue to do so!

5. reCAPTCHA – reCAPTCHA is a service that is used by thousands of popular websites to fight spam bots. The service can be easily integrated in a WordPress blog with the help of this plugin. I like this service/plugin because it definitely has proven its effectiveness to fight the spam bots and also because it helps in digitizing various books. Here’s what they have to say about digitizing the books part -

While the world is in the process of digitizing books, sometimes certain words cannot be read. reCAPTCHA uses a combination of these words, further distorts them, and then constructs a CAPTCHA image. After a ceratin percentage of users solve the ‘uknown’ word the same way it is assumed that it is the correct spelling of the word. This helps digitize books, giving users a reason to solve reCAPTCHA forms.

I hope that you’ll find these plugins useful enough (just the way I have) to keep you blog spam free!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

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WordPress is the best blogging platform and there is no doubt about that, other than that it is also becoming the first choice CMS (content management system) for corporates too. One of the major reason for the same is that WordPress is pretty simple and even though it has got less inbuilt features, there are thousands of plugins that are available for free and extend the it to match the existing CMS. It’s simplicity attracts thousands of developers and is one of the fastest growing CMS at the moment.

Because of this simplicity offered by WordPress, there are many developers who create high quality plugins, however many plugin authors develop the plugin whose code quality is not up to the mark and thus causes issue. We at Blog Design Studio have faced many issues while integrating various plugins in our themes and we always felt the need of a repository that has listed only high quality plugins. I’m sure that the team and Incsub must have faced the same problem and thus in order to address this issue, they’ve launched an app store called WP Plugins.

WordPress plugin developers can upload their plugins on this WordPress powered site and allows them to sell them to users. Plugin authors get the option of selling the plugins for one time fee or as subscription based offer that gives users the access for support and future upgrades.

My opinion about WP Plugins

There has been a wonderful conversation going on at the TechCrunch’s post about this App Store, where there are mixed reactions for this particular service. There are some hard core fans (open-source fans) who didn’t like the idea of this App Store, however if I were to give my opinion, I would say this idea is fantastic as this particular option allows plugin developers to develop high quality plugins without worrying about marketing, selling options. Other than that, users will also be able to access high quality plugins at one single place. It definitely is a win-win situation for everyone, however, the idea will only flourish or will be helpful for users only if there will be enough plugin developers who’d sign up for this initiative and not launch their own app stores in future.

Although, I do agree that they should mention that they aren’t affiliated with WordPress! There are some people who just don’t get it by looking at the site and seeing no logo of Automattic.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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The company’s name is After The DeadLine and as I said earlier that this service/plugin actually proof reads your blog posts and tells you if you’ve made spelling or grammatical mistakes or not. After The DeadLine has been already integrated in WordPress.com & is available as a free plugin for WordPress.org users.

The bad thing about it is that – I deliberately made few grammatical mistakes while writing this blog posts and it couldn’t pick up even a single one, although the good thing is that this plugin is intelligent enough and as announced by Matt – it will learn as more and more people will start using it.

I would suggest that bloggers should install this plugin and use it before publishing their posts as not only this will help bloggers like me (who don’t have English as part of their culture). Of course, proof reading of posts is possible if people use expensive software like MS Word or Apple Pages, however not everyone can afford those software, so I’m sure that this free plugin will surely help them in improving their writing style and will ensure that there will be far less errors in their blog posts.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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Apart from that, Jeff Chandler posted the idea of having bbPress as WordPress plugin. I would definitely love to see a bbPress plugin for WordPress or a bbPress lite plugin with WordPress. The plugin should allow bloggers to create small forums along with the blog and should allow those forums posts to be displayed in the blog as blog posts based on the blogger’s discretion. There are few other bloggers who appreciated the idea; however, Chip Bennett and few others are not happy with the idea as this kind of plugin will make database heavier.

What are your thoughts about having bbPress Lite as a plugin for WordPress? Do you think it’ll make life easier for those who are not technically sound – I’m sure we can have many ideas floating around this topic.

Note – There is no plugin in the making and this was just an idea that came in Jeff’s mind and I just think that it’s a wonderful idea. May be Movable Type community would be interested in such kind of suggestion.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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Anyway, after recovering from the first little shock of the day – I realized that the link showed the UPCOMING ROLE MANAGEMENT PLUGIN for WordPress. From the looks of the preview, it looks like an amazing and easy to use role management plugin and I’m sure that many WordPress developers along with many User Generated Content based WordPress blogs will find this plugin pretty helpful.

Here’s how the plugin looks like -

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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We are WordPress theme developers and have provided free themes (not as much as others have, although we plan to release many free themes in coming time) and we understand that how good it feels, when someone appreciates your work by either giving donation or if they just give some exposure to us by writing about our theme. I guess this week is my confession week and in this post, I would accept my fault of not saying thanks to the developers as much as I could have by writing about their wonderful work as often as I could have. After reading the post, I thought that it is a good reminder of saying thanks and fixing up my mistake, so here I would like to say thanks to all the developers who have contributed in this wonderful community in anyway!

And now some special thanks to these wonderful people whose plugins I’ve been using since long time -

Matt Mullenweg – Do I need to say anything about him? Thanks for giving us WordPress and lot more!

Michael Torbert – I would like to thank Michael for creating All-in-one-seo pack. I’m sure this plugin has made life simpler for the bloggers tremendously as not only it helps in taking care of the onsite SEO areas.

Oliver Seidel – Thanks to Oliver who created cforms plugin. I don’t think that there is any other plugin that will match this wonderful form plugin ever. This plugin powers both the forms that you see on this blog. It is so extensive in features that I used to wonder if I will be ever able to understand this plugin. No wonder that why Oliver (not the plugin developer but our lead designer/coder) has fallen in love with this plugin!

Alex Rabe – I guess Oliver (our designer) was absolutely right when he said that NextGEN Gallery plugin is a CMS in itself! Alex has created this master piece as it literally serves most of the purpose of any gallery requirement that you will have. At one stage bloggers found ways to integrate Gallery 2 (Gallery 3 beta is also out) with WordPress, however I’m sure that after this plugin, not many would like to go through the pain of integrating both these brilliant software.

Ozh – Another person for whom all the words of appreciation will be less for the amount of work that he has done for the WordPress community. You should check out his contribution in the area of WordPress over here and you’d know that why I said so in the first line!

Rob Marsh – Rob has made some of the most wonderful plugins for WordPress. Similar Posts is one of them and I’ve been using it on my blog since early days. I noticed that Rob hasn’t posted on his blog since long, I wonder if we all got late to thank him for all his efforts.

Peter Liebetrau – Peter came as saviour for all of those who were worried about the memory usage of Google XML Sitemap Generator plugin. He created Simple Google Sitemap plugin and after the release of this plugin, I immediately shifted to it. Not that I don’t like Google XML Sitemap Generator plugin by Arne Brachhold, it’s just that it was slightly heavier on the server and I wanted to free up the space. In fact, I would like to thank Arne for creating that wonderful plugin as it offers many more features that no other plugin offers. Thanks to both of you guys!

Austin Matzko – I would like to thank Austin for creating many wonderful plugins that you can download from here. I’m sure that your automatic backup plugin must have saved thousands of bloggers from any calamity!

Lester Chan – Thanks a million for creating so many plugins for WordPress. Not only it has made life simple for bloggers, many of your plugins help WordPress become a complete CMS! I’m sure that no CMS will be complete if it doesn’t have poll functionality.

Scott Allen – I’ve already covered WP-SpamFree plugin by Scott on this blog, however the amount of peace this plugin has given me is beyond my ability to explain it in words. It is by far my favorite plugin along with Akismet to fight the comment spam.

Antonio Perez – Inserting YouTube videos was always a pain, however with the help of Antonio’s plugin; it became super easy to include videos from YouTube but from MetaCafe too (there are some good videos on it too).

Apart from that I would like to thank my friends Keith & Rajesh for developing WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin and Platinum SEO pack respectively.

In the end, I would like to thank my buddy – Oliver (our designer/coder for wordpress themes) for all your efforts in building Blog Design Studio! It wouldn’t have been possible without you at all!

I think this is the least minimum we all bloggers can do to encourage these wonderful developers for building a great community around WordPress and making it more and more usable with the help of their plugins and themes. Thanks once again to all of you!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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There are various threats for WordPress and they can be easily become part of your WordPress blog with the help of plugins, themes and through various security vulnerabilities. To counter this, Sergej Muller has created a wonderful plugin that acts as an Antivirus for WordPress (english translation)!

(Photo Credit – Nirmal)

This plugin scans your WordPress theme for any sort of malicious injections and vulnerabilities on daily basis and lets you run the scan manually too. This is definitely a must have plugin for all of us as it’ll not only keep our blog safe but will also ensure that no other visitor will get infected from any such malicious activity.

Thanks Keith.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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YubiKey costs $25/device up to 9 devices, however if you plan to buy this device in bulk, it may cost up to $10/device. There is a plugin (YubiKey Plugin for WordPress) available to set this device on your WordPress blog and it takes around 5-10 minutes for one to configure this little security device with your WordPress blog. In case you want to use this little device, your WordPress installation will require Hash & Curl libs enabled, else this plugin will not work.

1. Buy a Yubikey.
2. Create a Yubico ID & API Key.
3. Download, install and activate my Yubikey plugin for Wordpress. (goes into wp-content/plugins).
4. Enter Key ID on the Users -> Profile and Personal options page.
5. Enter Yubico ID & API key on the Settings -> Yubikey options page.
Id/key confused ? Well the Key ID is the first 12 chars from the output Your Yubikey generates, they don’t change, the Yubico ID and API Key is used when communicating with the Yubico authentication server.
6. That’s it, enjoy the looks of Your new loginbox, and try logging in.

I would say that this is a wonderful security hardware that’ll make your blog secure and will ensure that hackers will not be able to gain access to your blog. This is by far one of the best techniques that I’ve ever seen and I have to say that I’m really impressed with it. So, if you are serious about your blog’s security then this is a wonderful device for you and will cost you around $40 (including $15 shipping). I think it’s a steal deal as the amount of security this blog will add is going to be lot more beneficial as compared to the price! (via Net security)

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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Once you activate WP Google Language Transliteration plugin, you can simply select the language of your choice and start writing the blog posts phonetically in english script. The plugin will make use of the Google Transliteration service and will transliterate the words in language of your choice. As the plugin uses Google APIs to integrate the transliteration service, it can only support the above mentioned languages and as soon as Google will open API for other languages, the plugin will start supporting them automatically.

Here are the features of WP Google Language Transliteration plugin

1. Wordpress Post or Page Content can be written or edited in all supported languages on the HTML editor of wordpress (and not on the visual editor).
2. Wordpress Post or Page titles can be written or edited in all supported languages.
3. Wordpress Post or Page URL slugs can be written or edited in all supported languages.
4. Wordpress Post Categories and Tags can be written or edited in all supported languages.
5. Lets your blog/site visitors to comment in any one or more of the supported languages.

I’m sure that this plugin will surely excite all the bloggers who are interested in writing blog posts in those languages as it will make things much more easier and the best part is that there reader’s will also be able to communicate with them in their preferred language!

Links – Download Plugin | Screenshots

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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What is VideoPress?

VideoPress is an upgrade for WordPress.com based blogs that’ll give you the uploaded video in various formats like DVD quality, HD quality and optimized versions for iTunes and Miro. It’s a plugin for WordPress MU and can be used by WordPress.org as well, however it isn’t simple enough to install and will need some tutorial for less than geeks.

How do you compare it with the likes of Vimeo and YouTube?

Both Vimeo and YouTube offer HD upload facility and both of them allow you to embed the videos in webpages or blog posts. However, both of them have certain limitations and thus VideoPress is just like another competitor to them. However, as a professional blogger there are certain advantages of VideoPress over the other two.
The good thing about VideoPress is that you’ll be able to embed them anywhere and so if you signup for a WordPress.com account, you’ll be able to use the upgrade even if you have a self-hosted blog. You just need to buy more storage and VideoPress upgrade and you’ll eventually save lots and lots of hosting dollars and will not fall in the hassles of managing the server and video server.

Apart from that, VideoPress will offer you more customization options in near future (as promised in Matt’s post) as compared to YouTube or Vimeo. Team Automattic has always kept things open source and have given more powerful features to bloggers and so, I’m sure that they’ll definitely attract a good share of the online HD video market. What are your thoughts about VideoPress?

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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