WordPress

WordPress plugin Smart Throttle 1.0.0 released

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WordPress plugin Smart Throttle 1.0.0 released. With this release Smart Throttle is hosted on WordPress plugin repository allowing users to easily install and upgrade.

In this release I have added the ability to configure throttling parameters. You can download the latest release from either here, here or from your WordPress blog under Plugins -> Add New in wp-admin.

Please do not forget to rate the Smart Throttle plugin and give your ideas to improve it. 🙂

My fight against comment spam on WordPress blogs – Smart Throttle

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My blog was hit with a comment spam flood which almost brought down the server under load. There were aproximately 30 bots continuously posting spam comments, geez don’t they realize that none of the comments get published. With all the writes to the database, my servers came to a crawling stop. I disabled comments for a while, until I figure out a means to prevent the spam messages from being posted. First option was CAPTCHA, I installed re-CAPTCHA WordPress plugin. This did reduce the spam but in an ugly way. I was thinking of a means to stop the nuisance spam without even writing to the database. Then I came accross this, and gave me the idea for Smart Throttle WordPress plugin. It’s very simple, depending on the rate of comments in the last hour by the user the comment flood time out will be automatically adjusted. Check out the plugin home page for details how it’s done. The plugin is released under GPLv3. I have now disabled re-CAPTCHA plugin and so far things are looking good, most of the spam bots are lost in the you are posting too fast message 😉 . Give your blog a break with Smart Throttle.

Using memcached with WordPress object cache

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I like the web pages to be snappy, including my blog. I found my blog to be bit slow after I moved to WordPress even after performance tuning. After looking around for a solution I came across memcache back-end for WordPress object cache which can be downloaded from here. You have to drop the file object-cache.php into wp-content/. You will have to specify the memcached servers by adding the following lines to wp-config.php.
[sourcecode language=’php’]global $memcached_servers;
$memcached_servers = array(‘default’ => array(‘127.0.0.1:11211’));[/sourcecode]
My blog loaded faster than before, it was all good. Afterwards I wanted to install the memcache back-end for WP object cache on my mother’s blog using the same memcached server. I just dropped the wp-config.php file into my mother’s installation of WordPress. That’s when things became awry. My mother’s blog started to redirect to my blog 🙁 . After looking at wp-config.php closely it was clear to me it was designed for WordPress MU. However I didn’t want to give up on using memcache with WordPress. Looking even closer I noticed that I can specify the global variable $blog_id and it would be perpended to the memcache object key. I added the following line to wp-config.php in my mother’s WordPress installation in addition to the two lines above and applied this patch (patched object-cache.php).
[sourcecode language=’php’]global $blog_id;
$blog_id = ‘priyani_mohanjith_net’;[/sourcecode]
That’s it, both my blog and my mother’s blog became fast and it was working without any issues. Hope this helps someone who wants to use the same memcached server with multiple installtions of vanilla WordPress. You cannot use this technique or memcache unless your blog is self hosted on a server where you have full control.

Bye, bye Blogger. Howdy WordPress

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Finally moved my blog to WordPress from Blogger. I also moved it to a different URL as well. Move was as smooth as it could get. I wasn’t sure whether I should make the move. I didn’t want any Google juice to be lost or give my readers 404s. In my old setup I was using Feedburner to serve my feeds and Blogger to serve my blog. Now WordPress serves the blog and Feedburner still serves the feeds. Here you have the steps.

  1. Install WordPress (I used 2.6.3)
  2. Import the blog posts and comments from Blogger. Go to Manage -> Import in WordPress and follow the instructions there.
  3. Set the authors properly.
  4. Download and install the WordPress plugin wp-maintain-blogger-permalinks-1.0.zip. (Do not forget to enable the plugin as well)
  5. Under Manage > Maintain Blogger Permalinks click the button that says Maintain Blogger Permalinks.
  6. You can disable (or even delete) the wp-maintain-blogger-permalinks plugin.
  7. Go to Options > Permalinks, select Custom, and enter the following: 
    /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

…and you are done 🙂 .
Hope this helps someone who wants to move to WordPress form blogger.