While I have not been writing many posts here, I have been keeping up with the behind the scenes maintenance stuff. Keeping WordPress updated, dealing with spam buildup, updating plugins, dealing with spam buildup, updating themes, dealing with spam buildup, figuring out how to run PHP5 on this blog, and finally, dealing with spam buildup.

Spam, Spam, Spam & More Spam

As hard is it is to believe, most of the time I spent on behind the scenes stuff was dealing with spam. Akismet does a great job filtering it, with only a few pieces getting into the actual comments section, but on occasion, some real comments get sucked into the spam section. Since I get so few real comments here, I hate to just delete those, but that means at least looking at all of the spam that was sorted out.

This doesn’t sound too bad, but if I did not do it for a week, I could easily end up with a couple of hundred messages to look through. There were times I was getting 60+ spam a day in the spam section. Doing searches of obvious spam terms, like certain drug names, and doing a mass delete of the results made it somewhat easier, but still time consuming and not at all fun. (One of the things they do not tell you about when sharing “The Joys of Blog Writing”.) So I finally decided to check out the plugins and see what was available to cut down my numbers.

I was not looking for a spam filter. Akismet does a fine job at that. I wanted something that would catch a known spam IP address and prevent it from even reaching Akismet. I had faith that WordPress plugin writers would have something to address the issue. And my faith was rewarded in the best way. I not only found what I was looking for, I was lead to something greater than I knew existed.

Blocking IPs

Clicking on the spam link on Add New under Plugins will get you a lot of results. A lot of it is probably quite useful, like the various CAPTCHA plugins for comments and contact forms. But I was looking for something that could filter based on IP addresses and preferably was fairly automatic. Fortunately, one of the first plugins I noticed was AVH First Defense Against Spam which mentioned that it used 2 outside services for checking IPs. That was much more appealing than the ones that required my building my own blacklist or having to manually update a provided blacklist.

The installation from the WordPress site worked fine, which is always nice, and it added a separate menu under the regular dashboard menu. The new menu includes an Overview, General Options, 3rd Party Options, and a FAQ page.

The Overview page is not very useful at first. It provides information about stopped spam and some of the settings you use. The place to start is the General Options, which has 5 windows that require some kind of decisions from you.

Most of the settings are easy to understand. Do you or don’t you want to receive and email from the plugin when it runs its daily cron jobs? If you don’t know or care what that means, leave it unchecked and ignore it. Use IP caching or not? If you have a high traffic site, probably a good idea, but again, a simple check in the box to make it happen or not. Do you want to receive an email if a comment fails the security checks? If you want to see it in action, check the box, if you want to set it & forget it, leave it empty.

The two most important parts of the General Options are the Blacklist and the Whitelist. One of the reasons I picked this plugin was the use of outside sources that didn’t require me to set up a local blacklist. And the use of both of these lists is entirely optional. You don’t want to mess with them, uncheck 2 boxes and ignore them. I personally would recommend at least using the Whitelist, to list various search engine IP addresses, but it is not really necessary. I do not know of any search engines that have been blocked from my site by the plugin.

The 3rd Party Options page is where the really important stuff needs to be decided. Under the Stop Forum Spam window, you need to check the top box. That is the minimum requirement for using the plugin successfully. If you don’t want to bother with anything else, check that box, set the number in the email threshold under it to -1, save the settings and move on to other stuff.

What I would recommend, even if you do not want to get any emails from the plugin, is to go a bit farther. One of the options in that window is using an API key from the Stop Forum Spam website. This requires signing up at the website, but that is painless and quick. And doing so give you a way to pay back and improve the service.

When you have an API key, an option is added to anything on the Spam section of your comments. (Yes, you will still get some spam. None of the plugins I looked at say anything about stopping all spam, most say they will not do so. C’est la vie.) You are able to Report & Delete the message with one click. That is, report the IP address to the Stop Forum Spam database, so that it will show up when others check there. I have also been adding the IP to my local blacklist, so I never have to worry about it showing up again. That is not necessary, but since the local blacklist is checked before the Stop Forum Spam database, it saves me an API call on a known spammer.

The other side of the 3rd Party Options page is for dealing with Project Honeypot and their blacklist. In order to use the information from Project Honeypot, you need to join their site and get an API. This is also pretty painless and quick, and they do have a different blacklist, so it works well with the Stop Forum Spam to catch spammers. One of the things that I like about the information you can get from Project Honeypot is it includes things like whether or not an IP address is from a search engine bot. This allows you to easily add them into the Whitelist, making sure they do not get blocked from your site and decreasing the number of API calls you make.

Final Words

This is a very nice plugin. It scales easily with user knowledge and desires, allowing you to control everything in the set up, from emails to what databases to check.  You can set it and forget it, or be more proactive with the black and white lists. No matter how active you want to be dealing with spam, this is a good plugin to use. And just to give an idea about its value, according to the Overview page, as of this writing, 2302 spam stopped in the month of October.

After letting others rate your posts and pages last time, today will be devoted to helping you rate what other people produce. These plugins are mostly for use by people that review something, whether music, TV, or movies. If that is what you do on your blog here are a couple of plugins you may find useful.

Rating Others

Xavin’s Review Ratings gives you the ability to place stars (or any other image you want to use) for things you are ratings, like music, books, etc. It uses a shortcode to place the stars in your post, and has a nice selection of options right out of the box for ratings. The defaults for the ratings can be set on the options page, including editing the output templates. Or you can override them using tags on the shortcode when desired.

Using the shortcode is very easy, just place it where you want it, using tags to set the number of stars, how they are displayed, etc. The documentation on the website is nicely laid out, and gives easy to follow examples for most of the tags, including the only one that is close to complicated, multiple ratings for something i.e., Plot, Characters, Art, then add them into an overall score.

I like this plugin. It is simple to install and use, flexible, and has good instructions. The ability to use your own images for ratings means it will fit into any review site easily, and the grouping shortcode is useful for anyone that wants to break down their ratings.

Ratings Shorttags also uses a shortcode to place ratings where you want them in your post. It has the same flexibility of placement as any other shortcode, but it is really flexible in what you can use for ratings.

On the settings page for the plugin, you can input the HTML for the Unicode symbol you want to use, the color of both the filled and unfilled symbols, and the total number of symbols that will show up.  To rate something, you just add the shortcode with the number of symbols you want filled. Using the Unicode symbols means you have a huge variety of symbols available for your reviews, but it is also one of the shortcomings of the plugin.

Because the Unicode symbols are text, they are affected by any settings that affect your text styling. This means they can rather difficult to see sometimes. This can be overcome by some CSS styling, but it is a bit annoying. Another problem with using Unicode is that anyone who visits your page that does not have the proper font installed, will not see what you want them too. The developer does have some CSS on the website that you can use to display images instead of the Unicode symbols, if you are comfortable working with CSS.

A lot of flexibility with this plugin right after installation. There is even more if you are willing to do some additional work with it and your stylesheets. In some ways it is more flexible than Xavin’s plugin, in others it is less so. You can set it up for rating multiple aspects of something, but it is not as easy as the Xavin plugin and it will not determine the overall rating automatically. But a decent option if it fills a need you have on your site.

Final Words

If you are wanting to share your feelings about something on your blog, both of these will do what you want, in slightly different ways. I admit to a preference for the Xavin plugin, but not for any really rational reason. The Ratings Shorttags plugin would function just as well, but I do not think I need the kinds of flexibility it has. It may very well give you exactly what you need.

What neither of these plugins will do is make your reviews entertaining or insightful. If you want to become the next Rotten Tomatoes, that will be up to you and your ability to write.

Everybody is a critic. Really. When you watch a movie, listen to a song, read a blog post, you have an opinion of it. And most people are not that shy about sharing their opinions. Well, sometimes they are. Like when they don’t want to take the time to comment on a blog. But it is possible for them to share their opinion without actually having to write it. That is where ratings come in.

Rating your posts

GD Star Rating has everything you could want in a rating plugin. In fact, it probably has much more than you want. When you activate the plugin, it automatically places stars at the end of your posts and in any comments on your site. Then your visitors can get started rating all of it, assuming they have javascript enabled.

There are all kinds of options available to choose from, covering both the appearance of the stars and who can and can’t vote. There is a wide selection of stars to choose from, in several sizes, and you can set the range from 1 to 20 stars for ratings. There are not only several places to add personal CSS tags if you want to make some changes, it gives you the ability to edit some of the plugin’s CSS from its Admin pages, and create your own templates for almost everything.

There are 3 widgets available to place in your sidebar, each showing a different stat on various ratings, and each with its own settings so you can control what they show. If you already have using a different plugin for ratings, you may be able to import that information if you switch over. Probably the best part is the database management that is included. Instead of just deactivating the plugin, it will do a complete uninstall of itself, including emptying and removing the tables it has added in your database. This is something that more plugins should do.

The biggest downside to this plugin is the huge number of options. There are 10 pages in the menu that the plugin adds to your dashboard, plus options on the 3 widgets and even more on your edit page. It works very well out of the box, but if you really want to get the most possible out of it, you will need to work at it. The developers have a 30 page PDF available on there website, and the website itself is full of information about using the plugin. If you decide to use this plugin, spend the time to check both of these resources thoroughly.

WP-PostRatings gives you a variety of ways to let readers rate your posts. There are stars, bars, numbers, hearts, plus and minus signs, and thumbs up/down. Some of the options have a set number, others you can use at any size you want. You can also set who is allowed to vote, and if they are limited to just one vote.

There is a management page, so you can look at what each vote was, what time they voted, and even the IP address of the person that voted. A second plugin is included, which allows you to place 2 widgets on your sidebar to share various voting results with your readers. The documentation is well done, although you have to go to the website to use it.

A limitation to the plugin is the requirement of either editing your theme PHP or adding a shortcode to your posts. The first method adds ratings to all of your posts, old and new, the second is easier but requires editing any old posts you want to have rated. The shortcode does allow you to create posts or pages with ratings of other posts, if you want a summary page or something similar. If you want to allow ratings for any comments, you have to edit PHP and it will be across your entire blog.

You have a choice when you want to remove the plugin. Just deactivate it, or use the included uninstall option which will delete the table and information the plugin added to your database. Another case of a plugin that is well behaved and cleans up after itself, always good to see.

Final Words

Here are two examples of very well behaved plugins. They do what they are supposed to, and give you a lot of control over exactly how they do it. And if you decide you no longer want them, they can be removed completely from your database very easily.

While they are usable directly after activation, neither is a model of simplicity if you really want to get everything from them. GD Star Rating because of the sheer number of options, WP-PostRatings because of the necessity of digging into the PHP code. But it is easy enough to start slow with them, adding more of their options as you become comfortable with them and learn more.

So if you want to find out what others are thinking, but they won’t talk to you, these two plugins are both good choices.

One of my most popular posts in this series, at least according to WordPress Stats, has been the first one that really focused on one type of plugin, 8 WordPress Plugins for Ads. The reason for this is fairly obvious, even the most casual blogger hopes to make at least a little money from his writing. And after all, everyone knows how easy it is to write and sell stuff. Just ask the professionals.

Back in reality, most people won’t be able to make a living at blogging, but it is possible to have some money coming in. It has been just over 2 months since that first post on ads, so I thought it was time to take another look at what is out there right now.

WP125 allows you to easily place the popular 125×125 image ads in your sidebar. It gives you another entry on your Dashboard menu after Settings, where all the options and information for the ads is entered. It also creates a widget that controls where in the sidebar the ads appear, but that is all it does.

Setting up the ads is remarkably easy, you have the choice between 1 or 2 columns of ads, how many ad slots will appear, the order the ads appear in, and any title you want to appear on the ad widget. There is also a place for a link to a sales page, where you can put things like ad rates, and you can set it to email you so many days before an ad expires.

Actually adding the information for an ad is also easy. You need who it is for, which is use for the title of the link and the alt tag of the ad image, which slot you want it in, the URLs of the advertiser and the ad image, and the expiration date. The ad can be set to never expire, or to expire automatically after 30, 60, 90, or 120 days, or on a specific date in the future. A very nice piece of flexibility. You can also toggle the plugin tracking how many times the ad is clicked, useful for setting rates and convincing people they should pay you.

A very nice feature of the plugin is the window it puts on your Dashboard with your QuickPress and Right Now windows. You can easily check the start and end dates and number of clicks the ads have received, and it has buttons right on the window to take you to the Add, Manage, or Settings pages. And for those that want to place ads somewhere besides the sidebar, the author provides 2 pieces of PHP that you can stick in your template where ever you want, if you are comfortable messing with code.

All in all, a very flexible, nicely designed plugin that does what it is supposed to. And makes it pretty easy to do at that. The documentation is pretty good overall, with just one problem on the link from the plugin pages. The file that opens in the lightbox is not formatted, so it is hard to read. But the same information is at the homepage, which is also linked.

MyAdManager is designed to give you complete control over 125×125 ads on your blog. It gives you a widget for your sidebar to place ads there, with a flexible size for larger or smaller sidebars. It also divides the ads into two types, Home ads for your own site and Outside ads for ads from other sites.

The set up for the ads is easy, you just need to put in the links to the ad image and the target URL, then set the duration and the type of ad. The choice of duration is limited to either 7 or 30 days, but Home ads do not expire at all.

The best part of the plugin is its integration with PayPal. You can create a page using a shortcode that has a form for visitors to place ads on your site automatically through PayPal. They can choose between the 7 or 30 days paying according the prices you set on the options page. This can make running 125×125 ads almost painless, without having to go through an outside service. You would have to keep an eye on the ads of course, since the images are served from the purchaser’s site and are live as soon as they are paid for.

A very nice plugin, the biggest limitations being the low number of options for ad duration and the lack of a review for new ads if you use the auto-buy set up. If those 2 things do not bother you, it is a very good option for running 125×125 ads on your own.

Author Advertising is most useful for multi-author blogs, where you want to allow each author to get his own income from ads. The set up is actually fairly involved, since first the administrator needs to set up the basic plugin, including determining the  information each author needs to input.

The documentation is very comprehensive, including a PDF manual that is included in the plugin zip file and linked to from the configuration page. The PDF includes some nice examples of setting up Adsense, Amazon.com, and generic affiliate accounts. It also has some useful ideas for using the plugin for guest authors or banner links.

This is not an easy plugin to set up, even following the pretty thorough instructions. It may take an attempt or two to get it going correctly. And the author warns that it will not work correctly on some themes that are out there. But if you have a multi-author blog you want to monetize, this is one option you should check out.

Final Words

So here are three ways to put some ads on your blogs, and with some luck, and traffic, make some money from it. But there is more to making money on your blog than just putting up the ads.

Problogger had a couple of good posts in February about using ads well on your blog: 7 Reasons not to have Empty Ad Spots on your Blog and 5 Ways to Make an Empty Ad Slot on Your Blog Work For You. After reading those, spending some time in the Problogger archives looking at related posts is probably time well spent. There is some good advice there for most blogs.

These plugins make putting the ads on your site easy. The hard part is generating enough quality content to draw and maintain the traffic needed to make the ad sales worthwhile. That takes practice and work.

I was thinking about a topic for this post by going back over my earlier posts and trying to branch off of them in a slightly different direction. I hit upon the idea of looking at plugins that allow you to add affiliate links, when I realized that the biggest affiliate program out there is Amazon.com. A quick check shows quite a few plugins for adding Amazon.com affiliate links, so it seemed like I found my topic. It turns out quite a few of those plugins are very old, but I have found enough to justify a short post on the topic.

Amazon MP3 Clips widge allows you to put a list of MP3s from Amazon.com on a page or post. The MP3s are the clips that Amazon.com uses as samples to entice you into buying songs from them. It uses a shortcode to create an Amazon.com widget that displays albums or mp3s from Amazon. You can add your Amazon.com affiliate number to the shortcode which allows you to get paid by Amazon.com for any purchases anyone makes through the widget. If you do not add your affiliate information, it appears that the plugin developer has his own coded into the plugin so he gets paid.

It is supposed to grab a list of the latest best-selling mp3s if you use the base shortcode, or mp3s from a particular style of music using Amazon.com browse_nodes, but I consistently got a PHP error if I did not provide ASINs for specific albums or mp3s in the shortcode. This may be a shortcoming of using an older version of PHP, or it may be a real problem with the plugin.

This brings up what I consider a major problem with this plugin. Normally, I would go to the page for the plugin and bring it up errors there with the writer, but that is impossible for this plugin. The developer has no support set up at for the plugin at all. The only instructions are what is on the WordPress plugin directory and they are not all that great.

In a lot of ways, it is easier to go get the actual widget from Associates Central. If you want to add a specific work, you still need to go to Amazon.com to get the ASIN. If it works correctly for random clips, you need to find the proper codes for browse_nodes. The only thing it does that really helps is avoiding saving your post in html rather than the visual editor when using the Amazon.com code.

Amazon Reloaded for WordPress makes it easy to add Amazon affiliate links to your posts. In the option page, you put in your affiliate ID and chose which nations program want to use. The plugin puts a window on your post and page editing page, which contains an input field to search whichever nation’s site you picked.

The search is through every area of Amazon, e.g. Books, DVDs, etc., so you can get quite a few results.  But it is limited to only 3 results from each area so you will not be overwhelmed. And you need to be exact with your spelling, or nothing will show up.

The search results are presented as a picture with the name of the product below it. If you click on the link, it will place the link into the text area at your cursor’s location. You can also insert the image from Amazon, choosing between the 3 sizes that Amazon provides, which will also be linked to the product on Amazon. No need to look up the ASIN, copy & paste, or anything else. This does not remove all the hassles of adding Amazon links to your site, it doesn’t do a thing for widgets or embedded objects, but the most common way of linking is made extremely easy.

There are some limitations to the plugin. You need to be very precise about what you are looking for, or it may not show up in the search result. And if you use the image, you will need to add some styling to it if you want it to fit into the flow of your writing.

But all in all, a very nice plugin. It is not okayed for working with version 2.7.1, so you may have problems with it, but it did work fine on my set up. The author is working on a new version, with more options in it, but in the meantime it has some nice functionality as is.

Amazon Widgets Shortcodes uses shortcodes to place pretty much everything that Amazon offers for linking. You start on the configuration page by choosing the country you are using, then placing your affiliate id in the text box there. You can also choose to have documentation for using the plugin placed on your post and page editing pages. This is nice when it comes to using the plugin.

There are also layout options on the configuration page, which can be overridden on specific widgets when you add them. You can decide to show the widgets on your RSS feeds and enforce strict HTML and XHTML compliance. Finally, there are two additional options, enabling context links and product previews for Amazon hyperlinks.

The plugin is easy to use, it places a drop down menu on the Visual section of the text editor, which is how you add the widgets to your post. You do need to create the widgets at your Amazon Affiliate account in order to get the necessary information to put in the drop down menu. You can either follow the directions (a good reason to enable the documentation on the configuration page) to find what to copy and paste in the input fields, or copy the entire html that Amazon provides and place it in the second tab, which will use it to fill in the fields properly.

While there is a good selection of choices available on the menu, including placing a wishlist widget and a single product text link, but it does not include all of the options that Amazon offers. There is no search box option, and you can’t use it for digital media like MP3s or videos. But being able to use shortcodes rather than worry about messing up html by pasting it in the visual editor is worth a lot.

Final words

There are other plugins available for Amazon.com affiliates, some of which look like they have some nice options. But they either did not work on my test blog or required a version of PHP I do not have. I would probably avoid using the MP3 clips plugin, the lack of support and the errors I had are just not worth the trouble.

The other two plugins nicely complement each other. One for adding straight links to your pages, the other for handling widgets of various kinds. They work well and have good support from their authors. If you are an Amazon affiliate, you should check them out and see if they will fill your needs for your blog.

While everybody that blogs really likes to get comments to find out what people think of your writing, a look at the statistics you get from the plugins I looked at last time, will tell you most folks do not say much. In fact, most of them do not say anything at all. But there are other ways to find out what they think. One of those ways is to use a poll. There are a lot of polling agencies out there, but if you can’t afford to hire AC Nielsen or Gallup, you can use one of these plugins to at least get an idea.

Getting Opinions

WP-Polls uses AJAX to add polls to your blog. It actually gives you two plugins, one for a sidebar widget if you want to place polls there, the other to actually make the polls work. The plugin gives you another section on your dashboard menu, where you can create your polls and control how they show up on your site.

Adding polls is pretty straight forward. Type your question into the text field, then the answers you want them to choose from in the answer fields. You have to have 2 answers, but can easily have more than that. And you can allow the reader to pick more than one choice at a time, up to the number of answers in the poll. And you have the choice of having the poll expire at a set time in the future, very handy if you use polls frequently. You can place polls in the sidebar widget, or on any page or post using a shortcode.

On the Options page, you control how the polls are presented, from the color of the and style of the graph bar, to the order in which answers are presented. You also set who exactly can vote, and how the plugin determines if someone has voted before on a poll. It also allows you to set up a page for the results of all of your polls, showing either the finished, open, or both types. The final option you can pick is what will be displayed in the sidebar widget if you use it. If you want multiple polls in the sidebar, you need to choose which ones will appear in the widget itself, otherwise you can control which will be there from either the option page or the widget controls.

Then there is the page of Poll Templates. It has text boxes where you can control the look of the polls, the poll results, and the poll archive page, and includes a very large number of variables that you can use for doing that. This is incredibly handy if you want to make your polls and/or results stand out from the rest of your blog and are comfortable tinkering with html and/or CSS. Or you can completely ignore it if you want to, the supplied styles work fairly well.

Finally, there is the Uninstall page. It goes into your database and removes all the information that the plugin has placed there, including both poll data and tables the plugin needed to work. This is very nice, helping keep your database cleaned up if you decide you do not want the plugin. It would be nice if more plugin developers would do this kind of thing.

PollDaddy Polls has no options at all. At least not on your blog. What it does is allow you to place polls you create on PollDaddy.com (ran by the same folks that own WordPress) on a page of your blog using a shortcode. This means that you must have an account on PollDaddy, but they are free and easy to set up.

Creating polls is also easy, with PollDaddy allowing you to use any number of answers, and even letting you use a variety of media as possible answers. They also give you multiple language choices, let you set it so that the poll takers can add answers, and have a variety of different looks you can use for your poll. Or you can create your own custom styles using their website if you want to make it fit into your site better.

Setting up a poll on PollDaddy is quite easy, with a large number of options available for making it personalized. You only get the percentage of people that answered a question unless you pay for membership at PollDaddy, but that is probably sufficient for most of what you will want to know from your readers. And it has the benefit of not using your server resources.

MicroPoll is also an outside polling service that you access through this plugin. You can use the widget that is installed to place a poll in your sidebar, or copy code from the website and place it on a page on your blog. You can either use a particular poll or have the poll change randomly among ones you have created.

The set up for polls is not as easy as on PollDaddy, and the customization is not as versatile, but it does provide much better analytics for your polls on the free account. If you really want to know where you poll takers are coming from , but are short of money for the PollDaddy accounts, this is a decent option to take.

Final Words

So there are 3 decent options to find out what your silent readers want. They are not as satisfying as getting actual comments, and the feedback is probably not as detailed. But people will click a button to register their opinion much more often then they will put words in your comment box.

You can use polls as a way of getting your readers more involved and sparking your imagination for posts to write. Darren Rowse (aka ProBlogger) has developed this technique to a very fine degree on his Digital Photography School. He uses his weekly polls as the basis of posts, and uses them to engage his readers on his site. After you vote that you use your camera in a particular way, you naturally want to leave a comment to explain your vote. And once someone has left one comment, they are more likely to keep doing so.

This kind of thing may not work on every blog, but it is something to keep in mind. The worst thing that can happen if you try it is people don’t vote. Which does not leave you any worse off then you started.

Not a good day at all. A late post today, shorter than I was planning, because my ISP went out twice, for hours each time, in less than 15 hours. This will teach me to wait until the last minute to finish writing a post. Well, okay, it probably won’t teach me. But this one is finally done.

One of the things everyone writing a blog wonders is if anyone is reading. The best way to know that from the huge amount of comments you get when you post your wonderful words of wisdom. Unfortunately, most of the people that visit your blog do not leave any comments. This is true even on busy blogs, a fact is a comfort for those of us that do not get many comments, but it does not really help find out what folks are reading. So let us look at what the prolific plugin producers have given us to find out this information.

Keeping Count

WordPress.com Stats is pretty much the default plugin for statistics on WordPress blogs. It is maintained by the WordPress and uses the WordPress.com servers for calculations, so your servers are not having to do the work. It gives a good overview of number of visitors, popular posts, referring links, etc., all the things that a blogger is curious about.

The presentation is not all that great. There is a lot of information available, but it is not always easy to grasp the way things fit together at first. Probably the greatest lack of the statistics provided by this plugin is the inability to download them. Not a problem for most casual bloggers, but handy to have. Other than that, this plugin will probably handle most of what you want to know about your visitors once you get used to the layout.

StatPress Reloaded describes itself as real time stats for your blog. It creates a separate menu item on your dashboard, with an impressive list of available statistics. The Overview page starts off with a small section listing the numbers of Visitors, Page Views, Spiders, and Feeds that hit your site. It also tells you your last hits, last search terms, referrers, agents, pages, and spiders. All of this is cross referenced, and includes the IP address of the visitor. And I almost forgot the graph of your hits.

After that, you can really get into the details. There is the Details page, the Spy page, the Search page, the Export page, and a User Agents page. The amount of information available on these pages is easily more than what you get from the WordPress.com stats. It is not as comprehensive as Google Analytics, but it is easier to understand then either of the two, at least for me.

The ability to export a range of days as a csv file is very nice to for looking at information offline. And knowing what spiders are crawling your site, as well as how well they obey the robots.txt file, is also handy. The major downside to the plugin is the fact is the fact it uses your server and database. For a small site, this is not a big deal, but for a large one, it could be a literal show-stopper, especially if one of your posts makes it to the front page of Digg. So this is a nice plugin for small to medium blogs, if you want to know more than what WordPress.com tells you. But if your site grows larger, you will probably need to move on to something else.

Google Analytics for WordPress is the popular choice for integrating your Google Analytics account and your WordPress blog. Looking at the options, it is easy to see why. You just place your Analytics Account ID in the input box, choose where you want the code to appear, and decide if you want Google to keep track of the outbound clicks and downloads. It then starts sending information to your Analytics account.

There is also a section for more advanced options, with advice that you don’t really want to use them unless you really know your way around Google Analytics. I do not know my way around Analytics that well, so I am really not sure how well it works for most of the options there. But there are some nice things in it that are not to hard to understand, like tracking your Adsense clicks and being able to set tracking for different outbound links.

Very nice plugin, easy to set up for beginners, with a nice expansion of options you can use as you gain experience with Google Analytics. The biggest downside to it, is the wealth of information you find when you go to your Analytics account. It can take some doing to really understand and use that information to the fullest, but for large or growing blog, or one that is really serious about monetizing, it is probably worth the effort. And the plugin writer has some good documentation for helping you so just that, be sure to check it out if you decide on this plugin.

Final Words

There are other plugins for tracking statistics on your WordPress blog, some are stand alone like StatPress Reloaded, others use different outside services. And there are other plugins that will integrate Google Analytics into your blog as well, but they will have to wait for another post.

If you are really wondering if anyone is reading, or even just visiting, your blog, adding one of these plugins to your blog will help you find out. That is what they all are for, the only difference is how much detail, and complexity, you want to deal with.

After I wrote my post on plugins for increasing your blog’s security last Thursday, I sent it out on Twitter, shopping for readers. I do that because it is nice to think that someone may get something from the effort I put into writing the posts. Well I got a response on Twitter, from @blondishnet,  about it being better to use other methods, like modifying the .htaccess file, to tighten security on your blog, rather then using plugins.

I think I finally managed to convince her that I did agree with her point, but I was not writing these posts for the kind of person that was able or comfortable with doing that kind of thing. I am trying to point out plugins that are easy to use and add functionality for people that are not technically inclined or even tech-phobic. That may seem somewhat strange, given the plugins are for software used on the “intrawebs”, but the fact is, the web is so ubiquitous these days, all kinds of people use it.

But since I do agree with her, I decided today to put up a few links to other places where you can find information about making your blog more secure.

Links for improving your security

• Blog Security – This should be your first stop. A lot of articles, covering all levels of security. Including a security scanner that can run some basic checks of your blog.
• Geek Ramblings – An article discussing some of the things that Blog Security talks about. The comments are also useful reading.
• Webmaster World – A very informative thread on the forum there about various ways to secure WordPress. A lot of it is very technical, so it is definitely not for everyone.
• Make Tech Easier – Another post about making your blog more secure. With more good information in the comments.
• guvnr – An excellent video tutorial, along with notes on the post, for making your blog much more secure. If you are at all willing to try something new with your blog, follow along and secure it with these instructions.

Final Words

One thing you will notice about these sites is the amount of overlap. They all talk about good passwords, protecting your plugin directory, changing your admin name, and other things like that. The reason they overlap is they are all covering the most basic things you should do for security. If you are not comfortable doing most the things that are talked about and explained in the various places on the list, you should at least do the most basic.

And add some plugins like the ones I looked at last week.  A couple of them will help do some of the things mentioned in the articles, others help in different ways. They are not the best ways to keep your words safe, but every little bit helps.

Keeping your information secure on the Internet is a never ending battle. You need to keep your OS, anti-virus, anti-adware, and anti-spyware all up to date. And your WordPress blog is not an exception to this. So today will be a look at the various plugins available to help increase the security of your blog.

Secure WordPress has a nice selection of options for making your blog harder to hack. It hides your WordPress version number and creates an index.html in your plugin directory to keep that information hidden. It also allows you to remove the Real Simple Discovery and Windows Live Writer links from your blog header if you do not plan to use either of those methods of remote blogging. Two of the options are very useful for multi-user blogs. You can remove the ability of non-admins to use or even see the upgrade abilities for both the core WordPress files and any plugins. Finally you can choose to remove both the tooltips and error messages from the login page.

Not much available on this plugin, but it takes care of some of the most basic things to make you blog more secure. Hiding the upgrade stuff is obviously not useful for single user blogs, but does give you options if your blog expands. And one other nice touch is the ability to delete the plugin settings from your database if you decide to remove it. It would be nice if more plugins had this ability.

Admin SSL is designed to give you a secure connection to your admin login page, as well as some others. You can also set up some pages to not use SSL, if this is required for proper use like xmlrpc. It also allows you the option of adding other pages if you need to. It is easy to set up, and there are good instructions and a FAQ on the plugin at its homepage.

WP-SpamFree uses a combination of javascript and cookies to block spam comment attempts. Rather than capturing the spam like Akismet so it can be checked, this plugin prevents the comment from even being posted. It also give you the option of blocking both pingbacks and trackbacks if you are getting a lot of spam with that method. And there is a contact form included, if you want one that does not use CAPTCHA for spam protection.

The contact form is nice, with options for various fields, including a customizable drop down menu that can be required.  You can also have technical information about the sender included, if you are having problems with harassment. And there are some buttons included to show how many spam have been blocked by the plugin. The documentation is very good, and linked to directly from the setup page.

There are some plugins that conflict with this one. The known list is on the documentation page. The button for how many spam have been blocked is a nice touch, but it does require getting into your PHP files. A widget option, like the one for Akismet, would be much nicer for the average user. But the downsides for this plugin are fairly minor. It is plug and play, you do not have to do anything to get it working. The added options are just some nice touches in addition to its main function.

Invisible Defender is another spam protection plugin, which is even more plug and play than WP-SpamFree. There are no options, you just install and activate the plugin and it starts working. It uses CSS styling and some input fields to detect spambots, returning a 403 error when they are found. Easy to install and use, the only question is effectiveness, which only time will tell.

Login LockDown helps prevent a brute force attack on your blog login. You can set how many times it will allow retries from the same IP address within a certain amount of time before it blocks more attempts. Another easy way to help keep unwanted people out of your stuff.

Final Words

Here are five ways to make your blog more secure. They are all easy to use and seem to do the job they are designed for. None of them cover a large number of areas, but they seem to be able to work together for the most part. It is doubtful you would need both spam blockers, especially if you also have Akismet, but even they do not seem to conflict.

You should give serious consideration to these plugins, or others like them, for securing your blog. Along with standard things like backing up your blog regularly, keeping it more secure will help keep your blogging experience enjoyable.

I knew when I did my first post on Twitter plugins that there were more of them out there and I would have to do another post. And in the last two weeks, that it looks like the number of them has exploded. So with the knowledge that keeping up with the writers, here are a few more plugins that will help you integrate your blog and Twitter.

Twitbar Widget grabs your latest pearls of wisdom from Twitter and put them up in your sidebar. The only options are where you want it in your sidebar, the widget title, the words for the link to follow you, and the number of tweets that will be shown. You just need to put in your ID, no password required, and it grabs your tweets.

This plugin is pretty much the definition of plug and play. The only thing that can be a problem is the fact it shares your blogs styling. This is usually a good thing, but with some themes, like the one I am using, the look is less than pleasing. But this is not the fault of the plugin, which does everything it is supposed to. If you want to put your tweets on your blog, this is a nice way to do it.

Easy Twitter Links makes it easier to blog about Twitter. It automatically goes through your posts and changes any #tagname or @username to links, either for searches or the users Twitter home page. It does a pretty good job at this, it doesn’t grab email addresses that someone is silly enough to post. And the hashtags need to have other words around them to be linked. There are no options available, just install and activate and you are good to go. Not a big thing, but if you do much posting about Twitter and the people there, a very nice plugin to have.

Fishy Tweet places a text link at the end of your posts that allows your readers to submit your post to Twitter. You can set the text of the link, the title of the link, and you can choose to add html and CSS to the link. The plugin automatically shortens the url of your post (using 1 of 3 shortening services) and places it in the text field at Twitter.

A nice plugin for helping get your posts send to Twitter. No options about placement of the link, which would be nice, and only the three URL services, but all in all a good setup.

TwitPlusNNNF is a plugin for twittering your post automatically. When activated, it places a small window on your post editing page, where you control the tweet. It is very unobtrusive, using javascript to hide the sections for adding your Twitter info and the codes you can use in the tweet to replace the post title and URL. It can automatically use the nn.nf URL shortening service, with the option of just using www or including the http://. And there is a check box you need to click to have the post sent to Twitter.

This is a nice plugin. It gives you complete control over how your post goes out to Twitter, with enough options to avoid having your tweets looking identical. The only thing that it really needs it the ability to change the URL shortening service for people that have accounts or prefer other sites.

Bird Feeder also tweets your posts automatically. You save your message on the option page, and it is used for all your post tweets. You can choose to use the URL of your blog rather than the post itself, and you can allow the shortened URL to give a preview.

You don’t have the option to not tweet about a post, and you are limited in the options you do have. The shortening service is coded into the plugin, so you can not make any changes for that unless you want to do some PHP editing. Easy to set up and use, but limited. If it covers what you want done, not a bad choice.

WordTwit is another plugin for tweeting your posts. It has the same kind of options as Bird Feeder, all on the option page: a hard coded URL service, one message for all posts. You do not have the options of using the blog URL instead of the post permalink, and you can not use a preview link. It does use meta-data so that it will not tweet a post that it has already sent to Twitter. This is useful if you do not want updates on old posts going out.

What goes for Bird Feeder fits for WordTwit also. Limited options, but if it covers what you want, a solid choice.

Final Words

And there are 6 more plugins you can use to make your blog more Twitter friendly. They are all very focused in what they cover, not trying to be the one tool for all things WordPress-Twitter. This means more plugins, but it also makes each of them pretty simple to set up.

I will probably have to once again look at Twitter plugins, it is just too popular an area to cover easily. But I will try and wait for a bit before doing so. There are a few other areas in the plugin depository that are also worth covering.