Tag: blogging

My first top Google search result :)

Wow, never expected this: an article of my blog is the top result for a search query (at least at time of writing): If you search for “You have some suspicious patch lines“, you will find my blog post about this Git error message on Windows on top. Pushes the ego once you notice that actually some people are reading what you are writing 🙂

Too bad, that my original solution to the problem is obsolete and more like an ugly hack than the real solution. But I updated my article accordingly, thanks to the commenters for poining out the best solution.

Writing articles using BlogDesk

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I am currently evaluating BlogDesk, a Windows-only software for offline blog editing, supporting a wide range of different blogging systems, including WordPress (the system this blog is running on).

The main reason, why I am trying to switch from using the integrated online-editor of WordPress to a dedicated software, is speed and offline availablity. Lately I tend to work offline again, because I got a nice little notebook which is able to run on battery for quite some time. I now tend to use the time I’ve got for instance when riding a train. And I want to be able to use this time and publish some posts. BlogDesk online editor is very speedy, it is more responsive than using the online editor. One also tends to concentrate more on the content and less on the layout, because there is no preview possibility.

Additionally, BlogDesk encourages using images in your blog posts, because it makes it easy to incorparte them. It warns you if your images are going to be too big and it provides some ncie effects like the drop shadow used in the screenshot above. Images can be inserted from an URL, a file or the clipboard. They will be uploaded when publishing your article.

Unfortunately, BlogDesk does not support tags in WordPress 2.3+ yet. But I am sure they will come.

BlogDesk is free, but the source code is not available. As mentioned, it is Windows only, but it works very well. I’d recommend you to give it a try it if you are using Windows and are contributing to a blog.

Simple Way of Fighting WordPress SPAM

As I am one of the developers of tag2find, I am also writing in the tag2find developer blog from time to time. This blog is a WordPress blog. One of our main problems there is fighting SPAM. We get literally dozens of SPAM comments a day. To limit the amount of SPAM visible on the blog itself, I found a very simple solution, which up to now did not produce any false positive: if a posting contains more than zero links, it will be held in the moderation queue.

WordPress offers this possibility out of the box, but the default is set to more than 2 links. I tried to limit it down to one, but this still missed to many SPAM attempts. Therefore I now have set it to zero. This works remarkably well. No SPAM postings anymore and we had just one or two false positives, which are not so bad as the comments are not deleted but just held for moderation.

I know, this is a very low-tech approach and puts some work on the maintainer of the blog, but it works almost out of the nature of SPAM, which most of the time wants to deliver links to pages to influence Google PageRank and/or lure people onto the website.