Blogivists HQ

One of our big goals for 2010 is to become more than a blogging platform. Of course, the blogs will always be the core part of the Blogivists family, but we want to expand out and be able to offer a lot more to our user base.

We’ve recently coded in a community feature that allows any user to create a community through the backend, we’ve added internal instant messaging systems, we made it possible for any user to start an internal discussion forum, we’ve expanded our themes to include premium themes, and now we’re adding one of the coolest features we’ve ever had… Read the rest of this entry »

It’s obvious that a lot of changes are happening around Blogivists.com. We’ve upgraded our software, coded in a ton of new features, cleaned up the old themes and upgraded the existing themes.

We’re also building a new support system that we hope will help deal with any major issues as they arise. This new system will be in place by New Years Day of 2010.

One of the new functions we haven’t talked much about is our upcoming premium services. As you might imagine, running this website is not cheap for us, but we work hard to keep it free for you. Of course, we can’t do this forever without building in alternatives that can bring in revenue needed to operate the site. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this year we had two excellent anti-spam plugins running. Unfortunately, they both became unstable and began causing problems for the site.

But, I think we might have found another good combination. We’re going to try using a marriage of the two following plugins to cut back on comment spam.

1) Akismet
This is probably the most famous anti-spam plugin for Wordpress. To get it working on your site, you’ll need to go to Plugins>Installed> and activiate Akismet. Then, you’ll need to get an API key for Wordpress and enter it into the plugin configuration field.

2) Cookies for Comments
This plugin is automatically installed on your blog. It essentially identifies fake visitors and passes their data directly to the spam folder.

We’ll run these two plugins for a couple of weeks and see if they help. If not, we’ll try a different route.

Thanks for hanging in there!

-Eric Odom

One of the major problems with the server switch is that we were using an old, outdated version of a couple spam preventing Wordpress plugins. While these plugins were doing their job of not sending us emails, a lot of spam comments still made it to moderation cue. (I know this because I had to clean out about 35 pages of spam on my own blog).

So, instead of trying to overwrite the plugins with a new version, I decided to overhaul the spam blocking system. I took out the old spam filters and implementing a new set of features. These are very aggressive spam blocking measures that I hope will cut back on the spam we say day in and day out.

The spam fighting hacks have three major components.

1) Captcha – Anyone not logged in is now required to fill in the Captcha word in order to even submit the comment. Now, I understand this can be annoying for people who are not registered members of our community, but it’s far more annoying weeding through 35 pages of comment spam, so I think the benefit outweighs the negatives.

2) Trackback Database – If the spammer does somehow get past the Captcha, or if they set up an account to spam us without us catching it, they’ll have to hope their URL’s have not been checked into the trackback database we use. This is not just a database we use; Rather, it’s a database that thousands of Wordpress users chack against and report to. So if a spammer’s URL has been flagged before, it’s going to get blocked out and the comment will be marked as spam.

3) Comment Links – It’s perfectly OK to have a link or two in a comment. Heck, I do it all the time. But it becomes questionable to have more than two links in a comment, and from now on we’re watching for this. Our system checks for comments that are heavy on the links as they come in, and if they have more than two links, they get bypassed.

We’re working on a few more options to help combat the spam, but I think these three will help dramatically decrease the amount of spam we’re dealing with right now.

Stay tuned for more updates on this!

-Eric Odom

Want to make your blog posts more exciting? Want your readers to see – to experience – what you’re writing about? Of course you do! Appeal to the A.D.D. inside all of us by having video on your blog.

How did you do it? Here’s how to do it:

1. When writing a post, on the right-hand corner of the text box, switch over from the “Visual” viewer to the “HTML” viewer.
2. Find the video you want on YouTube (or the video website of your choice).
3. Copy the “Embed” code of the particular video. On YouTube, it is found within the video-information box (directly to the right of the video).
4. Paste the “Embed” code in your post (making sure you still are in “HTML” viewer).
5. Switch back to the “Visual” viewer. A yellow box will represent the video’s location within your post.
6. Finish writing your post.
7. Publish and bask in the adoration of a job well done!

As always, here’s some video to visually take you through the process:

UPDATE: On step 5, I mention that one can revert back to the “Visual” viewer after embedding in “HTML”. While, of course, you have the ability to do so, you should not. Not if you want your readers using Internet Explorer to be able to see your video.

For some reason, Internet Explorer will not display video properly if, after embedding video, you switch back to the “Visual” viewer. The very act, that of switching viewers, corrupts the code for Internet Explorer. So instead of seeing video, anyone using Internet Explorer sees a blank, white box. Strange, I know.

Note: this is not a problem for anyone using Firefox (or any other browser, besides IE). These people will see video properly no matter how the author embeds code. However, given that a large percentage of the population still uses IE, it’s probably smart to always make adding-video your last step.

Here’s the step by step:

• Complete all work on your post.
• Embed the video and then click “Save” or “Publish”.
  
• If for any reason you need to go back and edit features of an old post, copy first and then cut the video code, re-pasting it into its previous position after all editing work is complete.

There you go! Here’s a video tutorial to demonstrate getting past the IE conundrum: