milsoms.com blog

No sooner have I started my blog than I am getting attacked by spammers creating automated comments on my posts about gambling, drugs and sex aids among others!

They do not actually get onto the blog as I have it set for comments to require manual moderation first, but I do get an email about each one and have to delete them and it is getting to be a pain.

The answer is to install anti-spam software as a Wordpress plugin and the best one seems to be Akismet. This is obviously quite a big problem - here are some stats from Akismet page

238,397,660 spams caught so far
646,285 so far today (this is at 9.30 am UK time)
92% of all comments are spam

1. Download the plugin and unzip to your local drive
2. Upload plugin file to your WordPress plugins directory inside of wp-content
   (when I checked, it was already there)
3. Activate it from the plugins menu inside of WordPress.
4. Enter your API key.
   (register for a wordpress account to get one sent to you free by email)

I have researched spell checker plug ins and there are a few about but all seem to have some sort of problems.  It seems the best solution is to use the Google toolbar spell checker as it works fine in the WordPress writing window.  The toolbar is well worth getting anyway as it has other useful tools and the PageRank indicator (just search for “Google toolbar” in Google and get the version for your browser (I have used it OK with IE and FireFox)
When you click on the “ABC” icon in the toolbar it highlights any errors with red and underline and offers alternative spellings, or you can just edit to correct it or add new words to the dictionary.  Once fixed, the word stays green until you are finished.

Works a treat!  (except it seems to make the text cursor disappear so you can’t see where your insert point is?)

I wanted to try a different theme for the blog and start to understand the templates and how they work so I can get the blog designed exactly as I want it and begin to add the features and functionality I want.

I have purchased a set of AdSense templates and there is one that looks like a good start. The hgeader image is wrong but I have the Photoshop .psd version and can edit the text to show what I want.

I have copied the whole theme to a working directory on my hard disk, edited the header image and edited the index.php, header.php and right.php templates within the theme to use my own adsense publisher ID. I also defined an AdSense channel for this blog and edited that as well.

I then used my FTP software to upload the whole theme directory to
www.milsoms.com/public_html/blog/wp-content/themes/

and it magically appears as a chioce on the Presentation / Themes page. Selecting it changes the whole blog to work with that theme. There is quite a lot I want to change but I will stick with this for now.

This blog is going to get pretty big so it is going to need some organising!  I am going to include links to all the resources and tools I use and also my own comments, reviews and working notes on software and training materials as I need to be able to find things as well as my visitors.

I will start by setting up some categories and  take it from there.  Here is my starting setup

• Introduction and background
• Plans
• WordPress and blogging
• Website setup
• Website creation and content
• Consultancy work
• Resources (software, information, tools, websites)
• The profit improvement handbook
• Marketing (this is going to need some subdivisions later)