I had an online conversation yesterday with an acquaintence of mine. She was alarmed to have found that her entire site's content had been republished by some other site!
Apparently, their site had been sucking on her site's RSS file for quite some time, and managed to download a sizeable chunk of data, which they subsequently republished with their own ads strewn about. And she's not the only one by a long shot.
If you're not aware of this phenomenon, it's generally referred to as "Splogging", for "spam blogging". The idea is usually to re-blog content form other people's blogs to gain emphasis on their popular terms for your splog site.
For example, if I wanted my site to be a popular search result for "student loans", first I would install a blog on my server. I would then use some software to aggregate, say, the Technorati feed for posts tagged with "student loans", which gives me a rich bed of content to start populating my site. Using some some dodgy plugins sold by less-than-respectable authors, I can even have WordPress do all of this work for me.
Then, I sprinkle a few links onto the splog that point to my money-making page, and voila! Instant PageRank!
The bottom line for bloggers is that your popular content will be stolen and used to fuel a link farm that profits someone else. How nice. So what do you do to combat it? I have a suggestion or two. more
There are a bunch of folks who don't get it or don't like it, so I figured I would take the time to explain Planet WordPress to the extent that I can, since it seems that I'm the one that usually causes the most problems with duplicated feed items, etc.
Planet WordPress is a site that aggregates feeds from a number of users who have contributed to the WordPress Open Source project, or who provide good sources of information on WordPress, its themes, or its plugins. Planet WordPress produces a feed that is displayed in the Dashboard of most WordPress installations.
How you get your site listed on Planet WordPress is a mystery to me. I appreciate the exposure, but I didn't originally ask to be added to the Planet site. Do not misunderstand, I'm not asking to be taken off. In fact, it is my suspicion that the Powers That Be added my feed to the Dashboard partially because I was publishing a good deal of informative WordPress information, but perhaps also a bit because at the time, I was advocating against the Dashboard feature and they wanted to shut me up. ;)...
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If you're in Philadelphia this weekend, come join us for the Philadelphia WordPress Meetup at 2pm on Saturday. We're a pretty relaxed group, and we're definitely not all geeky (ok, I'm usually the only geek present) so don't think that you need to have technical skills to come hang out.
We talk about WordPress and general blogging, and if you have technical questions there is usually someone around who can point you in the right direction. For example, we have had discussions on how enthusiastic new WordPress designers can create more advanced themes for WordPress. We've talked about the best plugins to use for different purposes. And we've also talked about recipies for desserts. Like I said, very informal.
And if that's not enough for you, the Philadelphia Weblogger Meetup shows up right after our little subgroup, so you can interact with all of the prominent Philly blogger folks and convince them all to switch to WordPress. ...
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I've been using these two plugins for a little while, and they seem to generate interest in people when I mention them, so I have decided to release them and see what happens.
The first plugin, Auth Only, allows only logged-in users to access your blog. It also allows you to customize your login page by adding a login.php template to your theme. Using a login template will allow you to create a customized experience for your registered users.
You will need to use a plugin like the Role Manager to edit the capabilities of roles to grant view_site capability to whichever users or Roles should have permission to view your site. more
MicroWiki is not a plugin.
It seems like I've been working on MicroWiki forever. There are many complex and nuanced emotions for me surrounding MicroWiki. I use it for nearly everything that I don't do with WordPress, so you can imagine how that might affect my feelings toward it.
At the same time, I've bashed the code to death. "Spindle" and "mutilate" are the words I would use to best describe the things I do routinely with MicroWiki after I get it installed somewhere. And every time I think "Hey, this is nearly ready for packaging!" I think of something else that it really should be doing better than it does, and I end up merging code from four different sites to get a revision with everything I've added.
In fact, I'll lay it out for you right here and now: You will not understand this code, even though it runs.
That said, if you want a wiki, maybe this is for you, and maybe it isn't. more
