There are several different WordPress Plug-ins that help reduce comment spam on your blog, but one of the best ones you can find is WP-SpamFree. This plugin works differently in that you have more control over the filtering than you do with the Akismet plug-in and this plugin allows you to log all comments so you can be sure you are only catching SPAM and make sure that false positives aren’t being blocked.

WP-Spam free has an option called M2 which allows the plug-in to set cookies two ways, Javascript and Non-Javascript methods. I recommend setting it both ways as some browers (especially mobile ones) can block Javascript from running which would prevent them from leaving comments unless you have M2 check marked.

The other thing you can do is set and modify your Your current WordPress Comment Blacklist in the WP-SpamFree Options. This allows you to create a custom list of “keywords”, “emails” or IP Addresses that will automatically be blocked in the future. So if some specific IP’s or emails keep getting through your existing spam settings, you can blacklist the IP that the spam is coming from. (Use with caution as you can unintentionally block others if you put entire IP subnets or keywords that could be found on normal comments.

WP-SpamFree also comes with a built in Contact form that allows you to embed a contact for on your blog, you can customize fields and as well. It isn’t powerful or overly customizable, but can be useful if you want one plug-in that does both functions.

In my own testing I found that WP-SpamFree combined with Akismet both were an ideal way to block nearly all spam comments to your blog. Akismet alone will leave lots of comments in your Pending or Spam Bucket. WP-SpamFree will block the spam and you will never have to go weed through your pending or spam comment areas so it saves you time.

Don’t take my word for it, you can find a really good review of WP-SpamFree over on StrictlyOnlineBiz with screenshots of the plugin settings.

-Dragon Blogger

EMAIL

I was trying to put in a line of html code that spanned several thousand characters and the code would spew right off the post into my sidebar. I had found instructions to wrap the code in <pre> </pre> tags and was testing a variety of different plug-ins to try and get the code to display like proper code. I had spent at least a good half hour finding a way to wordwrap PRE text and was coming up with a few articles but no solutions.

One of the most detailed articles I found about wrapping html text inside pre tags had information on what to put inside your style.css to make it happen automatically, but no matter which block of code I tried, I was not able to get any of the blocks of code in this article to work properly on my blog.

Example, this will run off the page (deliberate, please excuse the cosmetic mess I am trying to make a point)

jadkfjadkjf;lajfdkl;dsfjdksjfljsdflksdjgfoidhsgihdsjfbjfdkshgkhohcnzxnzcmnz.,xmnvjadkfjadkjf;lajfdkl;dsfjdksjfljsdflksdjgfoidhsgihdsjfbjfdkshgkhohcnzxnzcmnz.,xmnvjadkfjadkjf;lajfdkl;dsfjdksjfljsdflksdjgfoidhsgihdsjfbjfdkshgkhohcnzxnz

I then found from a developer forum that inside the WordPress Editor in the HTML mode you can use a pre tag formatted like this:

<pre style="
white-space: -moz-pre-wrap;
white-space: -pre-wrap;
white-space: -o-pre-wrap;
white-space: pre-wrap;
word-wrap: break-word;
">
TEXT GOES HERE
</pr>

And this will allow your long code to wrap properly and look like this:

jadkfjadkjf;lajfdkl;dsfjdksjfljsdflksdjgfoidhsgihdsjfbjfdkshgkhohcnzxnzcmnz.,xmnvjadkfjadkjf;lajfdkl;dsfjdksjfljsdflksdjgfoidhsgihdsjfbjfdkshgkhohcnzxnzcmnz.,xmnvjadkfjadkjf;lajfdkl;dsfjdksjfljsdflksdjgfoidhsgihdsjfbjfdkshgkhohcnzxnz

The bad news is that if you click on the Visual Tab in wordpress it will break your PRE tag and remove all the extra style information, so your formatting will be broken.

So remember if you need to do these updates, always work in the HTML Editor of WordPress, or cut/paste into the HTML editor of wordpress. The visual editor has problems with some tags and especially IFrame code.

-Dragon Blogger

EMAIL

Another tip from Hesham over at FamousBloggers.net lead me to test and start using the SEO Slugs Plugin for WordPress. I have installed the plug-in on all of my blogs now and it is worth being added to my “must use” plug-ins for wordpress to help make sure your post slug (which is the URI of your post in the URL bar) is SEO optimized and doesn’t include useless words like “a,the,and…etc”

What is a SLUG?

Simple, In WordPress, the SLUG is the part of the URL that comes after your domain name.
http://www.dragonblogger.com <- Domain Name
http://www.dragonblogger.com “/wordpress-seo-plugin-seo-slugs” <- Slug

Normally be default wordpress will try to make the slug be exactly what you have as your post title, this is where the SEO Plug-in comes in. It strips out the common words that have useless duplication when it comes to Google Indexing. By default it also means your SLUG will be shorter, in addition to being optimized for the Search Engine Crawlers when they pick up your URL’s on your site.

The good thing about the plug-in is you can install it and know it won’t hurt any of your old posts (you can’t change a slug after the fact or you could end up with 404 pages from Google Indexing and you would have to put redirector methods. You should never change a blog post slug/URI after it has been published and indexed by Google except under extreme circumstances.

Going forward though I recommend all bloggers to use the SEO Slugs WordPress Plug-in to help make sure your WordPress Slugs are SEO Optimized and get those extra unneeded words stripped off of the slug.

By the way, this plug-in has no options. You just install it and the next time you type New Post and start writing a title you will notice how the Slug comes out a bit more compressed. You can test this by deliberately trying to put words like and/for/a in the Title and they won’t show up in the slug anymore. There is virtually no overhead to your RAM when using the plug-in as it is only invoked when creating a new blog post, once the slug is set the plug-in does nothing else after that.

You can read an incredible in depth write up on SEO Slugs for WordPress on Website in a Weekend which includes a breakdown of the code and how it works.  A truly great read!

-Dragon Blogger

EMAIL

In talking with some bloggers over my choice of setting the DragonBlogger.com RSS feed to being a summary feed, I started wondering what was the most common practice by other bloggers and wanted to get a feel for how others felt about RSS and email blog feeds.

There are advantages to having your blog feed being only a summary instead of a full post and these include:

• Not having duplicate content on your own site (feeds can cause duplicate content if indexed on Google)
• Users who subscribe via RSS or Email have to come to site to read full post (can bring more visits to site).
• FaceBook Fanpage which reads in feed also doesn’t have full post and directs more traffic to site.
• Easier for readers if you write multiple posts a day (they will see all summaries and clearly see more than 1 article was written)

Yet there are also reasons for having a full blog post in your feed as well:

• AdSense can be included inside the article feed for potential earnings from feed
• Readers may not click to visit site to read article just from title/summary yet may read full post if available
• More value to being an RSS subscriber, they don’t have to visit site to actually read new articles

One of the things I like about the Yet Another Related Posts Plug-in (YARPP) is that it shows related post title and descriptions even on a RSS feed summary and looks like this:

I like how it includes my original article title, description and then shows related articles. I think it increases my chances of a reader visiting the site from the RSS feed instead of just reading the post in the email and not visiting the site. So I decided to run a little 30 day experiment and set DragonBlogger.com to having an RSS Feed Summary instead of full posts in RSS. This will let me know if my “Direct” site traffic increases versus previous months. (When people click to your site from an email program, it mostly shows as “Direct” traffic since there was no referral).

What is your opinion and point of view on blog RSS feeds, do you prefer RSS Feed Summary or Full RSS Feeds of your blog posts? Did I miss any pros and cons for either side that I didn’t consider?

-Dragon Blogger

EMAIL