Web Design
2 Plugins to Eliminate WordPress Spam.
Akismet
Many avid bloggers are already familiar with Akismet and rightfully so. Akismet does an amazing job of eliminating spam. It will catch 99% of spam and put it in the spam queue. Head over to http://akismet.com/ and install Akismet. You will need to sign up for a WordPress account and get an API key. Don’t worry it takes 2 seconds and is worth it. Once Akismet is installed need to go to your Akismet Configuration, which is under plugins, and enter your WordPress API key. There is also a check box label “Automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month.“ I chose to uncheck this. With this checked if Akismet detects spam on a post you wrote over a month ago it will just delete it. While Akismet is really good there is a chance you could lose some legitimate comments. If you combine this plugin with the one below there is really no use for this. However the choice is yours. After that it is just a matter of waiting and letting Akismet do its work.
Akismet will install a little control panel to view statistics it will look something like this:
From the WordPress dashboard you will want to check your Spam Queue to make sure that no legitimate messages get through. It does not happen often, but it does.
WP-Ban
Akismet does an amazing job of stoping spam comments from getting to your inbox. How about stoping spam before it ever gets submitted? That is were WP-Ban comes in. WP-Ban can be found at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-ban/.
Basically this can be used to block anyone from ever viewing your blog on the IP level. Granted many spammers will jump though proxies and use 10 different IP’s in a minute. I noticed that I was getting 100′s of spam comments from 1 or 2 IP addresses. I would block that one IP for example the following 4 IP addresses accounted for over 400 spam comments in a day:
194.8.75.149
194.8.75.163
194.8.75.220
194.8.74.220
Blocking those 4 IP address pretty much stopped my spam.
I would be very selective in blocking IP addresses, do not use ranges and never block your own IP. Over the past week I have seen spam almost stop dead in it’s tracks.
Visual Studio Tips and Tricks
Alternate Case/Format selection:
Have you ever been asked to update some code from a long time ago only to find that almost every tag is in capital letters? AGHH!
<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>My Really Old Site</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> <P> Lots of body test </P> <P> Lots of body test </P> <P> Lots of body test </P> <IMG SRC="mypic.jpg" width=351 height=113> </BODY> </HTML>
Highlight all that code and press CTRL + K then CTRL + F and you will format all the code. It would then look something like this
<html> <head> <title>My Really Old Site</title> </head> <body> <p> Lots of body test </p> <p> Lots of body test </p> <p> Lots of body test </p> <img src="mypic.jpg" width="351" height="113"> </body> </html>
Granted your code may still be far from perfect, but it is definitely a huge help.
Key Launcher (Like Alt + Tab on Windows)
Are you someone that lives by keyboard shortcuts? I know I am. Are you familar with Windows Alt + Tab keyboard shortcut and toggling through all active programs? Well a similar feature exists within Visual Studio press Ctrl + Tab and toggle through your active Windows and Files.
Intellisense
Control + Spacebar will bring up intellisense if you are in code view. Great if you click out by accident or you just want to see what is available in the scope of the code.
Break Points
Have a bunch of break points scattered over a couple of files in a solution. Just want to delete them all and start fresh. Ctrl + Shift + F9 will delete all current break points in a solution. Don’t worry Visual Studio will prompt you with a confirmation first.
Get Visual Studio Professional for free!
Well maybe. If you are a student like myself you can head over to https://www.dreamspark.com/which is run by Microsoft. They offer full versions of some of the newest Microsoft products, like Visual Studio. Why? Because they know we are the future and they think we are an investment. Take them up on the opportunity and get ahead of the competition.
Shortcut key posters:
Microsoft Visual Studio has a bunch of keyboard combinations that can be very helpful, to get a more complete list check out some of the resources Microsoft offers:
Visual C# 2008 Keybinding Reference Poster
Visual Basic 2008 Keybinding Reference Poster
Visual C++ 2008 Keybinding Reference Poster
Visual C# 2005 Keyboard Shortcut Reference Poster
Overwriting an Excel file destination using SSIS
This was a problem I racked my brains over for a while when I first started using SSIS. I found a few possible including using a File System task to copy a “Template” Excel file over the existing on, or generating unique files by appending the date. I simply wanted to overwrite the existing data just like the Flat File Destination gives you that option.
My work around was as flows:
Create the Data flow the way you normally would, then go to the Control View Then add two Execute SQL Tasks before your data flow is called so it looks like this
Step 1: Add Execute SQL Task 1 to Control Flow
Set both Execute SQL Tasks to use the Excel file
Step 2: Set Connection Manager
Set your first Execute SQL Task’s SQL Command drop your table which is also known as the sheet name of your Excel file.
Step 3: Drop Table
Repeat step 3 on the second Execute SQL Command this time create your tables.
That’s it. Good luck.
Adobe Photoshop Black Canvas Fix.
So I just started testing out Adobe Photoshop CS4. I ran into a little problem to start with. Every new image I made would be solid black and I could not see anything I was trying to do. When I first started using the new version of Photoshop it gave me a message about implementing GPU processing. This was enough of a clue to get me started.
Steps to take to fix the black canvas:
Adobe recommends that you try to update your video drivers to support GPU processing, and if this works I would take this route as it will make Photoshop more powerful.
If that does not work try the following:
- Open Photoshop go to Edit > Prefrences > Proformance.
- Then under GPU Settings uncheck Enabled OpenGL Drawing.
- A restart may be required, but I do not remember for sure.
Well that is what worked for me. I hope this helps others, because at the time when I Googled for a solution there was nothing.
Becoming Alexa Ranked in two steps.
So when I started the major revamping of http://www.samplusplus.com I became interested in a few things. One of those things being Alexa page rank. I had been tracking my visitors with Google Analytics. However I wanted to see how I compared with other sites on the web. After reading up a little on Alexa this is what I learned…
How Alexa works:
This is just my general understanding of how Alexa works. Alexa gauges the number of visitors to your site by the number of visitors who visit your site with the Alexa toolbar installed. The Alexa toolbar reports back to Alexa and that a visit occurred. Alexa realizes that not everyone will have the Alexa toolbar installed and then adds a percentage to this number to determine roughly the number of visitors you get. Well I don’t know about you, but the the type of visitors that visit my site are not going to have the Alexa toolbar installed. Until about a a month or two ago I was not Alexa ranked because of this. With some further research I found that many believe that anything that makes a call to Alexa counts as a visit, so I tried a few things.
How I became ranked:
First I installed Firefox extension: Search Status.This extensions shows the Alexa rank and the Google page rank of every site that you visit in the bottom part of Firefox. However since this calls to Alexa it is believed that this is considered a visit by Alexa. I can not prove this though.
Secondly I installed an Alexa site widget. I use the Alexa Traffic Rank Button because I wanted something small. I then put it on 90% of my websites pages through a simple php include. I did not put it on my main pages where I desire a very clean look.
Results:
Withing a few days I became ranked. It was not very impressive somewhere in the 8 millions, but I had a rank and I was happy. Within a few months as Alexa collected more data I Jumped to 2,966,415 were I am at the time of writing this article.
Hope this helps others who want to become Alexa Ranked.