Blog Flak

If your Wordpress blog / website is receiving a lot of automated spam you may want to check out the plugin by Homeland Stupidity called Bad Behavior. It’s been around for quite a while now but something this good is always worth mentioning again. It’s a very small download and you just upload the unzipped folder into your Wordpress plugins folder and then activate it in your Plugins section within the Wordpress dashboard. It couldn’t be simpler!

So far it has blocked all access to my sites with spam bots and I’m very much impressed. There are some scattered reports of actual people being blocked from commenting so you may want to decide for yourself if you want to use it. Akismet has done a very good job as well by stopping the spam from actually hitting my comments moderation but I still felt like the spammers were getting over on me. They would still dump hundreds of spams into my sites, sometimes with hundreds of links in a single comment and I found that extremely annoying even though Akismet would “hold” it for review. Now they don’t even get that far!

If you’re anything like me and wish that the spam-tards would all just eat sh*t and die then this plugin might be for you!

Blogger Buzz has announced the official end of the new version of Blogger’s Beta phase. Some people still can’t switch over yet though, including me. I’ll be glad when I can! Yes, I still use Blogger for my personal blog, mostly because of nostalgia. Even though I run several Wordpress sites and blogs and love that platform, I just can’t seem to tear away from Blogger for my personal stuff.

The new version of Blogger is metaphorically bursting with features, from the big guns like drag-and-drop template editing and post labels (which are perfect, by the way, for indexing the 131 historical figures you may have written about), to little polishes like a better-designed Dashboard or that you no longer need to solve a word verification CAPTCHA to post a comment on your own blog.

I’m particularly fond of the high-speed dynamic publishing on the new version, and soon I’m going to build new template designs that fully support the sidebar widgets. Until then though I wish they would come up with a better Captcha system with easier to read characters. Some of those are so squiggly it’s difficult for a human to read them much less a machine!

Blogger Buzz announced that they’re nearly ready to pull the new Blogger out of Beta phase. They’re now allowing team blogs to switch over with a few restrictions.

Team blogs move when the blog’s original creator moves to the new Blogger. When that happens, team blog members will also have to move to the new Blogger in order to post. Team blog members don’t have to wait, though! If you move to the new Blogger, team blogs you didn’t create will still show up on your beta Dashboard. You’ll be able to post with them as before, though they won’t have the new features of the new Blogger. We wrote a help article to explain this all in a bit more depth.

Eventually all blogs will be able to move and personally I look forward to being able to move mine. I’ve been creating all my new Blogger skins on new beta and I love the instant republishing feature. Extra large blogs are still restricted for the time being, but that limitation will gradually be removed.

tags: tips, blogger, blogging, tech help

I put up two new, quick and easy how to’s on adding link tags / bookmarks to your blog posts. One is for Blogger and the other for Wordpress. Both are very simple, just copy and paste the provided code into your blog template editor in the section descibed and you’re all set!

For Blogger: Adding Reddit Link Tags
For Wordpress: Adding Reddit Link Tags

And of course, don’t forget about all the other goodies in the General Help Section

tags: del.icio.us, hacks, tips, tutorials, link tags, wordpress, blogger, blogging, tech help

I know it’s been quite a while since I’ve updated this site. I’ve been going thru chemotherapy for the past several months and I’ve still got a couple of months left to go. Don’t worry, I’ll be fine once it’s all finally done! I plan on keeping this site going with new content coming soon. In the meantime I’ve put up a quite a few new templates at Free Blogger Skins. Here’s the latest one in the lineup.

Check it out and enjoy!

Technorati tags: blogging, blogs, free skins, templates, designs