by WebKeyDesign | Jan 13, 2006 | WordPress
Without a doubt, Ricardo Galli’s WP-Cache is my favorite WordPress plugin. It speeds up WordPress significantly, therefore making your blog more appealing to your site vistitors.
Installing WP-Cache
You can either install WP-Cache like most plugins, by dropping it in your plugins folder: wp-content/plugins/. Or you can manually install which means you have to create a symbolic link from wp-content/advanced-cache.php to wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache-phase1.php, something which is impossible to do if you do not have shell access to your hosting account. This is why I recommend the normal plugin install. However you still might have a problem with file permissions, which WordPress will warn you about once you go to Admin – Options – WP-Cache. Usually it will be due to something not being writeable, like:
- wp-content/cachedirectory
- wp-content/
- wp-config.php
You will need to change all three to permissions 0777. This still might result in an error with the symbolic link not creating. For this you must an FTP client like SmartFTP that allows you to change the stickybit. Depending on the ftp client you are using, this might show up as Stickybit or simply you will have a row of 4 boxes to type in a number. You will want to change the directories above to 7777, so that the symbolic link will create. This is usually the problem and solution, if you do not have shell access.
You can read a short description of Unix permissions on WebmasterWorld (membership required).
Once you get pass the permission issues, you should be able to view WP-Cache Options and configure the caching expire limit and exclude pages from caching. If you ever decide to remove WP-Cache and your site no longer works, you must manually go into wp-config and remove the define(“WP_CACHE”, true): line. For security reasons you should change the permissions of wp_config back to 644. Just remember to change the permissions on this file if you plan to enable or disable Wp-Cache.
by WebKeyDesign | Jan 12, 2006 | Web Site Basics
I must admit that I totally forgot about this, last week, when I brought up the subject of splogs (sites that steal your content). There is a link on every page of WebKeyDesign.com that points to our Terms of Use policy. Under the Personal and Commercial Use section there is a statement that prohibits any other site from copying our content. However the statement did not mention RSS Feeds specifically. I have now changed the statement to read:
You may not modify, reformat, copy, display, distribute, transmit, publish, license, create derivative works from, transfer or sell any information, products or services obtained from the Services, except as permitted by these Terms of Use or under applicable laws. This restriction means, among other things, that you may not mirror on your own Web site, the home page, content pages, or RSS feeds of this Web site or any WebKeyDesign Site.
Though I am sure that this statement will not stop sploggers, it will at least make clear what WebKeyDesign.com’s policy is on content theft.
If you do not have a Terms of Use page on your site, you should seriously consider adding one. Most commercial sites have long and complicated terms, but for a personal site you probably can get by with a more simplified statement. The best plan is to consult a lawyer or someone who knows the law, but I know many webmasters end up using Google to piece together a decent Terms of Use page.
The main purpose of the Terms page is to protect your site from liability, and of course to protect your site’s content from theft. Most Terms pages you find are very restrictive, for example NBA.com, does not allow any other site to link to any internal page within its site. You must only link to the main page. Which is pretty ridiculous, but it is what NBA.com has for its linking policies.
Once you finish your Terms Of Use page make sure it is visible on all your site’s pages.
by WebKeyDesign | Jan 10, 2006 | Software
On Windows98, Microsoft had a built-in utility for shrinking the registry, but on Win2k, there is no such utility that I could find. It’s not so much that the registry takes up a whopping 58 megs last time I checked it, it’s that it loads into memory, and so the smaller the better.
Warning: run at your own risk!
I found two freeware utilities that do wonders for shrinking and defragging the registry:
NTREGOPT will optimize your registry for Windows NT/2000/2003/XP. It will not remove any registry keys, it just rewrites the registry, and dumps any deleted data. When I tried it, it meant going from 58MBs to 42MBs.
PageDefrag goes ahead and defrags the actual registry and paging files, on your actual hard disk. You only need this utility if you are running WindowsNT or Win2k. XP already does this automatically.
To check the registry size on Windows2000, go to My Computer, Right-click – Properties – Advanced – Performance Options – Change – Registry size – Current registry size.
by WebKeyDesign | Jan 9, 2006 | WebKeyDesign
Just recently I had written about Om Malik in Bloggers v/s Splogs and Scrappers and how he was upset at having his blog’s rss feeds used as content for another website, (without his permission of course). Although WebKeyDesign is not anywhere near as popular as Om Malik’s blog, I figure that sooner rather later I would also be splogged. I usually check for sites that link to WebKeyDesign once a week, just to see how my linking campaign for WKD is progressing and sure enough I spotted a real splog site with WKD’s content. Usually my own web stat programs pick up what I call a blog links site, this is what I call a site that just links a bunch of blogs based on a keyword, something similar to Technorati, but not as sophisticated or well intentioned either. But b-1st.com is not just displaying links to WKD, they are displaying the entire RSS feed. However, since my feeds do not contain my full content, but only a summary, not all of my content is being stolen, just summaries of it.
I am sure that there are some bloggers out there who believe in syndicating their full postings and having sites like this one really make those bloggers take pause. In my case I really would not mind the actual splogging much, but then I start thinking of the hosting costs involved with running WKD and at the same time the loss of third party revenue, and it does begin to bother me somewhat.
Over the weekend PlagiarismToday.com sent me a nice email informing me of this splog. If you are a blogger and are at all concerned about this issue, you can take a look at their site. I am not in any way affliated with PlagiarismToday.com.
In the case of b-1st.com, they have already angered another group of webmasters and eventually they may be taken down in the near future.
I am still somewhat undecided about splogs, and just what they mean for the average blogger. I suppose I would like to have Google, Yahoo, and MSNSearch, remove them from their indexes but I have a feeling that the big search engines themselves are still coming to grips with the issue as we speak.
by WebKeyDesign | Jan 8, 2006 | WordPress
For WordPress 1.5, I had done some changes to Jeff Minard’s Shortstat plugin and since I recently installed WordPress 2.0 on my personal site, and since Shortstat 1.3 still works for WordPress 2.0, I figured I would go ahead and redo the color scheme and make it fit in more with WordPress 2.0’s new backend colors.
For more detail on the original changes see my original posting of a Custom Shortstat Plugin.
If you like the blue scheme you can download the plugin with the complete changes here:
wpshortstat.blue2.txt
Or if you like the color scheme and want to disable the IP lookup feature as well, download the complete changes here:
wpshortstat.blue.nolookup.txt
You can copy and paste the code into the Plugin Editor or rename the file to wp-shortstat.php and upload it to your server.
Since WP-Shortstat stopped working on WordPress 2.0.1, these custom versions are now based on HappyArt Blog’s modified wp-shortstat. My CSS changes were added by HappyArt Blog to his version, so wpshortstat.blue2 is the same as his plugin. For the lastest version go HappyArt Blog.
