This poster hung in the brewery at 11×17, and I made a post card for the guys and gals of St. Boniface Craft Brewing Co. to hand out at other festivals and tastings to promote the second annual event.
https://www.instagram.com/p/3mvsxGI0VN/
-
Access Database Engine in VS2015 Project Prerequisites
Let us imagine you are developing an application in Visual Studio 2015, and you would like your project to have a prerequisite of the Access Database Engine redistributable.
You may or may not have found this blog post that details how to create the bootstrapper package and where to put it on your system. The file creation details are correct, but the path is not. The correct path for the package is
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\SDK\Bootstrapper\ -
Allow robots to crawl your wp-content folder
An alternate title for this post could be, “How disallowing robots from your wp-content folder could cost you mobile rankings in Google.”
On April 21st, 2015, Google is going to change the way it ranks sites for users on mobile devices. By blocking Googlebot from your plugins folder, you could be preventing Google from deciding that your site is mobile-friendly. If you are skeptical about this Google-is-changing statement I have made or want to dive into the details, read this.
So, why?
Why does Google need to crawl your plugins folder? Plugins often contain CSS or JS files, and those files are necessary to understand what the page actually looks like. Google Webmaster tools told me I was preventing Googlebot from crawling some CSS files in which it was interested. Robots need to download all CSS and JavaScript files or they cannot determine if a page is friendly to mobile users.
I found this line in my client’s robots.txt:
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/Why would this line be in robots.txt at all? My client lives on GoDaddy Managed WordPress Hosting, and that service creates a robots.txt file that looks like this (as of the date I published this post):
User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 1
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-admin/There are a bunch of blogs that discuss the “ideal WordPress robots.txt file” that recommend blocking the plugins folder, and some plugins alter robots.txt to block this directory, too. Before February 2015, even Yoast SEO did this. It’s no longer a good idea.
-
Presenting at the October Philly #burbswp meetup
I am presenting at the October Philly ‘burbs meetup @ Michael’s Deli in King of Prussia, PA. More details
-
When renaming your WP admin user, don’t neglect your comments
A few months ago, popular people in the WordPress community (including Matt) made a push to stop using the user name “admin.” A considerably-sized brute force attack targeted this user name specifically since so many users never change or create an administrator with another name.
I followed the wisdom of the crowd and this post I found that walks you through the process of creating a new user and deleting “admin” while moving all the posts in the process. It wasn’t until a few weeks later when I noticed a problem.
I like to use themes that highlight my comments. This allows users to quickly find my updates about plugins and answers to questions that have been asked in a sea of one hundred comments. Well, all the comments I wrote while my user ID was 1 and my user name was admin were no longer highlighted.
There is a user_id column in the wp_comments table that is not changed when you delete a user and move their posts to a new owner. You need to run a MySQL query like this to implement the fix:
UPDATE wp_comments SET user_id = 11132 WHERE user_id = 1Before executing a query like this on a WP database, the new administrator’s user ID needs to be identified so you can change
11132, which is one of my user IDs. If you do not know how to find a user ID, search this page for “user id.” -
Clobber spam users WordPress plugin
I’ve built another plugin for WordPress websites with open registration. This plugin makes it easy to prevent spam accounts from publishing posts.
A screen shot of the dashboard this plugin creates Frequently asked questions
- What does this thing do?
- This plugin adds an item to the Users menu of your administration dashboard. Click the “Clobber Spam” link and you will see a page that puts the most recently created user names next to the email address and the title of the most recently created post by that user. You can check a box next to the users that have submitted spam and click a button to delete all their posts and prevent them from logging in again.
- Why not just delete the users?
- Because the software these spammers use will try to submit more than one post for each account, sometimes days later. If you delete the user, the same user name can be recreated. We can prevent the account from being used by changing the password and email address. The spam software is forced to create a new account to continue bothering us. Also, I already use a really good plugin to delete old and unused user accounts. It is called Inactive User Deleter by shra and I regularly use it to delete users with no posts and no comments that are at least 6 months old.
- Can this process of deleting spam post submissions be automated?
- I would love to build the “akismet for posts” because I could make a lot of money selling it. I have been using Ban Hammer and Stop Spammer Registrations and I still decided to build this plugin to handle about 50 posts a week that these plugins are failing to prevent.
- Can you add feature X?
- Send me your idea, and we can have a conversation.
I have been running a WordPress website with open author registration for a few years, and the majority of the plugins I have written have been focused on making the management of that sort of site easier. Here is a list of the unreleased plugins I am using that I have created:
- Count comment author URL as link: Include the comment author URL in the max links allowed for comment moderation
- Disable comment author homepage links: Removes home page links from comment author user names
- Hold posts with links: Set post status to pending when a new post is published containing any hyperlinks
- Show pending posts count: Show the number of pending posts in the admin dashboard menu just like comments
A list of the plugins I have published is always available on WordPress.org. I also use a version of WP Status Notifier that I have modified to include a post excerpt and a hyperlink that starts the user deletion process.
With this plugin, Clobber spam users, I am going to stop deleting spam user accounts immediately and simply prevent their use for a number of months instead. I have given some thought to making the registration process more cumbersome for everyone, but I don’t want to sacrifice the user experience of real humans to fight the bots.
Here is a download link: clobber-spam-users.zip @ WordPress.org
