Weekly Digest: Guest Bloggers Galore, Theme Spam, Blog Scraping, and Personal Blogging

It’s been a week and a half of fabulous guest bloggers bringing some color and excitement to Lorelle on WordPress. Wow! And some babble about WordPress Themes with link spam and vulnerabilities that must be addressed, and blog scrapers stealing content from WordPress.com Blogs. And one of my guest bloggers begins a series on the […]

What Does WordPress, iThemes, Goodwill, Home Depot, and Target Have in Common? Your Identity and Security.

We received a new credit card in the mail today to replace our old one AGAIN. An “unsuccessful attempt” to access our secure security data happened and this is a precaution the bank is taking to protect us. I have no other information so I’m left wondering. Yesterday I received an email supposedly from Home […]

Blog Exercises: Does Your Site Look Spammy?

Does your site look spammy? How would you know whether or not your site looks spammy? It’s time for a spam check. Web design is hard, especially if you aren’t an expert. Yet, in many ways you are an expert if you are a fan of the web. You’ve seen enough sites to know the […]

The Secret Recipe of Comment Spam Comments

Mr. Louis Vuitton just sent me a message in my blog comments I’d like to share with you. I share this touching message because it is highly educational when it comes to the art of spam comments, and serves to remind us of why we love having Akismet, the best comment spam fighter, on our […]

Malware Found in WordPress Theme – Protect Yourself Now

I’ve just published “WordPress Theme Malware Prevention and Protection on WordCast, covering the recent WordPress Theme dissection of malware by Otto. The article sums up his revealing analysis of how a Theme malware code integrates itself into your site, even down to the server level, through a twisting path of imaginative code. The code reminds […]

Access Requested to the WordPress Theme Viewer

Update December 11, 2007: Matt Mullenweg offered updated news on the WordPress Theme Viewer saying: Just wanted to do a quick update for those wondering when you’ll be able to add new themes or update existing ones here in the directory. We’ve been working very hard on a new Subversion-backed database for themes that will […]

Customizing Your WordPress Theme Footer

UPDATE: WordPress now has custom menus. At the bottom of the article, I explain how to customize your WordPress Theme’s footer using Custom Menus. Yesterday, I covered the basic code found in the footer of the WordPress Default Theme, and gave you some ideas on how to add some impact and navigation to your WordPress […]

Fighting Comment Spam: WordPress Comments Mass Edit Mode

Every once in a while, the comment spammers win. Just a little. They use new techniques, new IP addresses, some method that slips by Akismet and other comment spam fighting tools. Your Comments Panel overflows with comment spam. After marking 10 or 20 as comment spam, your natural inclination is to fire off an angry […]

Are You Risking Your Blog With an Unofficial or Vulnerable WordPress Theme?

Recently, Automattic and WordPress decided to clean up the WordPress Themes Viewer, removing all the “sponsored Themes” from its database. There has been a lot of debate over the definition of a sponsored WordPress Theme. In theory, any WordPress Theme design which was “paid” for development and construction is a sponsored Theme. Those aren’t the […]

Sandbox Theme for WordPress Design Competition

This is a guest post from engtech of Internet Duct Tape. The Sandbox WordPress Design Competition has come to a close after two months. It was a resounding success. Live previews of the 46 new Sandbox designs will be available on August 5th, 2007. Over 31 people who participated in the competition. Some designers were […]

Fighting Registration Spam in WordPress

Most WordPress blogs are protected by the best anti-spam triangle of comment spam defenders: Bad Behavior, Spam Karma 2 and Akismet. However, little or nothing is available to help prevent registration spam. Registration spam differs from comment spam as it comes through the WordPress login form, not blog comments. WordPress blogs which require registration to […]

Weekly Digest: On The Road to WordCamp, Sponsored Themes, Selling Your Blog, NoFollow, and More

The Weekly Digest from Lorelle on WordPress this week will be shorter, and do not expect a Weekly Digest next week as I will be in San Francisco playing with my WordPress friends. I’ll have a ton of news on my blog following the WordCamp conference! To subscribe to the Weekly Digest category of Lorelle […]

Duplicate Content Controlled Naturally Through Themes

Worried about all the fuss over duplicated content. WordPress, Duplicate Content, and Wrong SEO Plugins by Planet Ozh will help set you straight. Keeping your site safe from the duplicate content issue, and more generally getting things optimized for search engines, should not be a plugin’s job, it must be your theme’s job, it must […]

Weekly Digest: Blog Silence Day, Comment Spam Brainstorming

Welcome to the Weekly Digest from Lorelle on WordPress, a one-stop buffet of tips, tricks, and techniques on WordPress and blogging. Past issues can be found in the Weekly Digest category. For information on how to subscribe to this weekly digests of the events and activities on Lorelle on WordPress, check the bottom of this […]

New Comment Spammer on the Loose – Pay Attention

Comment spammers are on the loose again, coming up with more inventive ways to distract us from their spamming comments, while they think they are increasing their page rank in search engines by forcing you to link to their websites with their comment spam links. I need to make this really clear, to you and […]