The Duplicate Content Plugin for Wordpress is a very simple, yet effective SEO plugin that prevents search engines from indexing Wordpress pages that contain duplicate content, like archives and category pages.

It does this by adding the meta tag on the problem pages. Installation is very simple.

1. Download the plugin
2. Place the file duplicate-content-cure.php in your plugins directory
3. By default, category pages will have the noindex tag added. If you wish to allow your category paes to be indexed, just change the $index_category_pages variable in the duplicate-content-cure.php file. See the example below:

Change
$index_category_pages = false;
to
$index_category_pages = true;

4. activate it on the plugins page

That’s it. Say goodbye to those pesky duplicate content pages for good.

The plugin won’t replace a good robots.txt file but it’s very easy to use and will eliminate the biggest cause of duplicate content on a Wordpress blog

WordPress « 

Technorati Tags: duplicate content, wordpress plugin, wordpress blog, blog, search engines

Wow! It’s hard to believe, but my first book is now a reality! Several copies of my first book — “Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress” arrived at my door this morning.

This is the book, published by Apress that I have co-authored with Robert T Douglass and Jared Smith over the last six months or so. It has long been my ambition to be published and when the opportunity presented itself earlier this year, I had to grab it with both hands. It has been quite a hard struggle; writing in a small amount of spare time is not easy, but I do think it has been worth it.

The result is six chapters on using WordPress to help build an online community. Although I wrote the book using version 1.5.x most of the WordPress chapters are version agnostic. This isn’t a “how to use WordPress” book (the excellent WordPress Codex is good for that). This is a book about how to use WordPress to help you build an online community.

You can buy the book online directly from Apress including in eBook form. You can buy from Amazon.co.uk or you can buy it from Amazon.com. I’m not sure whether it will be on the shelves of your local book store yet, but it will be over the next couple of days.

Apress have a good summary of the book (my emphasis):

Content management, blogs, and online forums are among the most significant online trends today, and Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress are three of the most popular open source applications facilitating these trends.

Drupal is a full content management system that allows you to create any type of website you desire, from an e-commerce to a community-based site. phpBB enables you to set up a bulletin board or forum. And WordPress is the software of choice for the exploding blog community. All three technologies are based on PHP and MySQL.

Finally, I think Jamie is quite proud of her Dad, Jan is just glad it’s finally published! I must thank them both for putting up with me while I’ve struggled through this. The next one will be easier! I have to thank Matt, Ryan, and the rest of the WordPress community, without whom I would have had nothing to write about!

WordPress « 

Technorati Tags: php, web, software, blog, ebook, man

In fact has already had been downloaded more than 33,000 times as I write this! You can download it from the revamped WordPress.org web site.

There is a lot of new code in this release, most of which is concerned with either the Administration interface, especially the WYSIWYG write interface, or under the hood stuff which will benefit plugin and theme developers. There are a whole bunch of bug fixes too.

There are some very compelling reasons to upgrade to this new version, but there are a whole bunch of reasons to hold off too:

WordPress « 

Technorati Tags: download, web

I’ve just spent a rather painful 45 minutes recovering legitimate comments from my Akismet admin panel. Painful because Akismet had over 1400 comments marked as spam from the last week.

That number is not excessive for my blog: Akismet has caught over 12,000 spam comments since I installed it; but I’ve not been keeping on top of the list this week. Unfortunately checking for false positives is impossible once you have more than 150 spam comments.

The Akismet plugin displays the newest 150 comments each with a check box to allow you to separate the legitimate ones from the rubbish (the ham from the spam). That’s great: check the boxes, push the “not spam” button.

However, the only other action is to delete all the comments that Akismet has determined are spam. But if you have legitimate comments that are not in the most recent 150, you cannot see them to rescue them.

Luckily for me, I’m technical enough that I can figure out how to get round problems like this, but most people are not.

In the end, I rescued somewhere between 40 and 50 comments. I’m not sure of the exact number because I wasn’t paying attention, and releasing them from Akismet’s clutches doesn’t trigger the email notification so I can’t count the emails either. Not one single comment was let through in the last 6 days. I don’t know whether this is a minor hiccup from Akismet or the start of an alarming trend.

I then spent another 20 minutes responding to some of them. Oh yeah, and I’ve spent another 30 minutes writing this post!

I think I will have to look at enhancing the Akismet plugin. Either by adding a ‘delete just spam in the list’ button or by adding pagination to the list of spams. The former sounds far easier than the latter.

WordPress « 

Technorati Tags: blog

After monitoring the comments that Akismet blocked very carefully, I can report that I’ve had no false positives for nearly a week. I’m not quite sure what changed to fix things.
With a dynamic system like Akismet, things will change over time. That is the nature of the beast. I don’t know whether Matt and the crew tweaked something, or whether a concerted poisoning attempt stopped being effective, but I’m glad I can start trusting it again.
I suspect it was the former because the change back was very dramatic, though I’m sure Automattic would not want to admit to it.
Server Trouble

In the meantime, at around one this morning, my server went down, or rather my blog stopped working. After a quick investigation, I determined that the database server was complaining of too many connections. I checked and there were a large number of httpd processes running. Presumably each, or most had a database connection open. Static files were being served ok, but anything involving the database was failing.

I restarted the Apache and that seemed to cure it. I started checking through log files to see if I could determine the culprit, but found nothing suspicious. Fifteen minutes later the site was down again. I then spent the next two hours monitoring the situation. A quick script allowed me to watch the process count:

ps -ef | grep httpd | wc -l

It was growing quite rapidly from an initial 16 to over 100, though the site would start failing at about 80. In the end I gave up when the process count stayed stable for 20 minutes. Though when I checked after a few hours sleep, it had gone down again and was down for over 5 hours. I’m presuming it was an attack of some kind.
It has since gone down again, but the growth in number of processes seems to take a much longer time. I didn’t find anything obvious in the logs that I checked, but maybe it is one of the lesser sites which is being attacked. I will continue to investigate…

WordPress « 

Technorati Tags: blog, man

There a few things different about this new version:
All previous ’skins’ (Blue, Sand, Winter) combined together
Three new skins + more to come
A new administration interface to configure the theme.
All known browser bugs addressed
Support for plugins
Compatible with WordPress versions 1.5.x and 2.0.x
Lots more to come

See the theme page for details. Please download it and give it a try.

WordPress « 

Technorati Tags: download

Wow, WordPress is a mere three years old today. It seems like it’s been going a lot longer, but the birth of what turned into WordPress was three years ago today.

Matt,
If you’re serious about forking b2 I would be interested in contributing. I’m sure there are one or two others in the community who would be too. Perhaps a post to the B2 forum, suggesting a fork would be a good starting point.

Comment by mike — Saturday January 25, 2003 @ 3:58 pm

For a three-year-old its doing very well. It’s got a great team behind it, a massive community, a lot of big name endorsements, a book
(well a third of a book), or two, and a great future ahead.

Many happy returns!

WordPress « 

Wow, WordPress is a mere three years old today. It seems like it’s been going a lot longer, but the birth of what turned into WordPress was three years ago today.

Matt,
If you’re serious about forking b2 I would be interested in contributing. I’m sure there are one or two others in the community who would be too. Perhaps a post to the B2 forum, suggesting a fork would be a good starting point.

Comment by mike — Saturday January 25, 2003 @ 3:58 pm

For a three-year-old its doing very well. It’s got a great team behind it, a massive community, a lot of big name endorsements, a book
(well a third of a book), or two, and a great future ahead.

Many happy returns!

WordPress «