This weekend, instead of attending the Philly meetup that I organize, I'm heading up to New York City to visit with Jason and his meetup.

In case you wondered, the Philly meetup is still on, even though I won't be there, I'm sure some people will show. Check the RSVP list. Don't forget that the Philly Weblogger (non-WordPress) folks show up right afterward, so be sure to have a beer and wait around.

As far as the New York meetup is concerned, I'm currently under the impression that I'll be answering questions posed by the group, specifically things that people wrote about on my request for requests. If nobody asks any questions, then I'll just go down the list of topics from that post, babbling incoherently about many WordPress topics.

Other people will be there. Jason, whom I've never met in person, seems like a knowledgeable guy concerning WordPress. Bobby Deaton says he's coming -- and he'd better because he owes me lunch. John Joseph Bachir, author of Lyceum (a multi-blog fork of WordPress), appears to be a "Maybe" for this event, too. I hope to meet a bunch of other New York bloggers while I'm visiting.

Someone suggested that they wouldn't be able to come, and wondered if there would be a recording of the event. I'm not sure if I'll be able to do that or not, but after the meetup I'll be sure to at least post notes about what we talked about. It depends on how much gear I feel willing to cart around the city all day. I'm actually brining my notebook this time (Wow!) and hope to pay the high premium for Starbucks internet action.

We'll see you at Starbucks, 4pm on Saturday the 21st.

I was thinking a bit about the meetups that have been going on in Philadelphia and in New York City. We don't really have a format for our discussions. Not that I was thinking of changing that, but I was curious:

If you could have someone who knows something about WordPress talk about one thing with you, what would it be?

I imagine that there are a lot of people who are just starting WordPress or who are considering whether they should that might like to hear what it's all about. Or if you've just gotten started, you might have questions about why things generally work a certain way.

I'm curious if the responses would lean toward a general overview of WordPress and getting started, or if there would be a few specific questions that everyone who's using the software needs answered. Remember, this would be an opportunity to talk with someone in person, so you wouldn't want to waste the time on a support question that you could get answered on the forums.

Some questions I've been asked recently at the meetups range widely. Can I use WordPress as a CMS? How do I allow people to contribute to my site without giving them complete access? Is there something I can do to make image handling work better? How can I tell if anyone is reading this thing?

Do you have questions? Let's hear them.

I might schedule a discussion at a meetup based on what questions come in. I'll announce that when the time comes. If you're in the area, I hope you are able to attend. I really need to firm up my plans for visiting the New York meetup this month, specifically, how I will get there (drive? train?) and where I will be going.

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.

If you're inclined to modify your server's configuration a little bit, there are actually a few things that you can do that are much more efficient than what I'm about to suggest. Check out Val's rant for a list of those things. It usually involves modifying .htaccess, which might be available to you, and is often tedious to keep on top of unless you're really vigilant (read: staring at your logs all the time).

An easy alternative to messing with your config files is using this new plugin I've written, called AntiLeech.

What does AntiLeech do? AntiLeech does not prevent the splogger bots from accessing your site. No, it does better than that. It produces a fake set of content especially for them that includes links back to your site (and mine, too, ok?) and sends it only to them. When they steal this content, it appears online just like normal, except now you've turned the tables on them. You're actually using the sploggers to promote your own site.

AntiLeech can detect a splogger bot using its User-Agent string (an identifier that some bots send when they are collecting data), or by IP address. You can enter a User-Agent or an IP address into the Options panel of your WordPress blog. When a visitor with a qualifying (any checked option on the options page) User-Agent or IP address visites your site, they will see only the generated content. They will see it in your page layout and in your feeds. Anywhere you're normally outputting content, that's where the fake content will appear to them.

Regular users whose browsers do not match these strings will see your normal content. RSS aggregators should be able to display your content normally, too.

AntiLeech also uses a trick to detect when new User-Agents have collected and displayed your posts. You may see a little "AntiLeech" graphic in your feed output. This graphic helps AntiLeech collect User-Agents that you might want to block. AntiLeech will tell you on what page it first saw the User-Agent, if it can, to help you better make the decision to block that User-Agent or not.

You can turn off this option if you don't want the image to appear in your feeds, but then AntiLeech won't be able to detect new User-Agents for you. The image is pretty small and unobtrusive, and doesn't link to anywhere.

In addition to all of that, AntiLeech will produce a robots.txt output from the User-Agents that you've specified in the options page, assuming you don't already have one. In WordPress 2.1 there is a hook for this already, but this feature of AntiLeech miraculously still works in WordPress 2.0, too!

Of course, I haven't had AntiLeech in production very long, so I would like some feedback on your use of it, especially if you find it useful.

Let's get these sploggers!

Ok, now I must get food. Sorry if this reads a little light-headed.

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. ;)

In the event that I fail to provide reasonable WordPress updates, then in all fairness, I would expect that the Planet maintainers would remove me. But I try to do two things to appease the WordPress gods - I restrict the feed to only my WordPress posts, and I only post to the WordPress channel when I think I have something of value to say to the community.

I grant you that there is some benefit to me for being on Planet WordPress. I'm getting more exposure for my site than I would otherwise. Still, my pagerank is probably not affected by being in your Dashboard because Google can't spider inside your admin console to see my link. The only way my pagerank would increase as a result of being on your Dashboard is if you chose to link to me in a post. Considering that you have to first choose to read the Dashboard, then visit my site, then write about my site, I think that's a fair arrangement.

Plus, you're getting my updates on WordPress development for free. What a bargain!

Nonetheless, I realize that to many people the Dashboard is considered a nuisance. Especially when my site crashes and the Planet feed repopulates with all of my entries from six months ago (be glad I didn't re-tag all of the restored WordPress posts since then, or it would have happened again). Let me give you a few helpful pointers if you find the Dashboard feeds especially irritating:

If you don't like it, don't read it. I'm sure that's simpler to say than to execute, so let me provide this keen WordPress insight: Bookmark your Write Post page. When you click your bookmark, you'll go directly to the page where you're going to do most of your work, rather than the Dashboard. If you're not logged in, you'll get a login screen, then you'll see the Write Post page. Simple.

Disable the blasted thing. As I said, back before I got added to the Dashboard, I was staunchly against the Dashboard. How do I feel about it now? Well, I like the occasional traffic boost, and while I'm understanding that many people don't like the feature, I think it's easy enough to do away with that it's not worth complaint. So. If you don't want it, install this plugin.

There are actually quite a few plugins out there that disable the Dashboard, but this is the one I wrote. I like it because instead of mangling your .htaccess, it just removes the menu and redirects the link.

Replace the Feeds. Some people don't mind the Dashboard, but would probably like it better if my feed wasn't one of the ones in there. There are a few ways to change the feeds that the Dashbaord loads.

To change the feed manually, you can edit a WordPress file. In WordPress 2.0.4, the file is /wp-admin/index.php. You'll see something like this around line number 146:

$rss = @fetch_rss('http://planet.wordpress.org/feed/');

You can change the feed URL in that command to whatever feed you want and give that a shot. The changed feed should start to appear in your Dashboard instead of the Planet feed. There are also a few other link trinkets shortly after that line that point to Planet WordPress that you might also want to change.

Of course, there are two problems with this method. First, you can only load one feed. If you wanted to aggregate a few feeds into your Dashboard, you'll need to use third-party software to produce that feed before you could display links from more than one site. Second, when you update WordPress, you're likely to overwrite that change. What's a better way?

Use plugins to change the dashboard. One plugin that I found that does the job is Dasher. Dasher replaces the whole dashboard with a configurable page that can contain feeds and "blocks", which are kind of like widgets.

Another plugin that replaces the Dashboard is x-Dashboard, which takes a similar approach but has controls to rearrange the parts that appear. Both of these plugins work on WordPress 2.0.4.

There are a handful of other Dashboard replacements around if you look, some with more robust features, some with simpler features. In my opinion, there's room here for a more customizable plugin that's a bit more usre-friendly to operate. WP-Dash is another plugin might have fit the bill, but Robert's site recently took a dive (he was hosted on this same server when it went down last week).

Note that if your main objection to the Dashboard is that it slows down your publishing process, then the best options you have are to use the bookmark or disable the Dashboard entirely. Replacing the Dashboard with another feed aggregator or replacing the feed used in the Dashboard will not make it any faster, and will probably make things very much slower.

I think those are plenty of options to choose from if you absolutely hate the Dashboard, from someone who has nothing to benefit from giving you that advice. So let me give you a few reasons not to ditch it.

First of all, WordPress announcements are widely made through the Dashboard. When a new version of WordPress is imminent, you can usually learn about it first by reading the Dashboard. This is important because many of the releases between major versions are security-related, and if you value your data, you'll want to know when to upgrade.

The Planet feed at the bottom of the page is often just noise for most people. Every now and then, I hope that one of the items on Planet WordPress strikes your fancy. Personally, I find the droplets of development information useful, but that's probably because I'm a coder. There may be certain items that interest you, too.

If nothing else, practically everyone on the Planet WordPress feed has contributed substantially to WordPress, either directly through development or indirectly through promotion. Consider their syndication a reward for their hard work. There's nothing stopping you from contributing too, you know?

I suppose there will always be people who complain about the quality of the links in the Dashboard or their content (hey, I never, ever spellcheck!), but I do believe there is value there, and for the folks that don't see it the same way, the options above should help mitigate their disagreement.

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.

Yes, I have revealed my evil agenda. Bwah-hah-hah!

Ten Stone (the restaurant where we meet) has a wide variety of local and national beer on tap, and is friendly for folks under 21. The food isn't half bad, either. So if you care not about the blog discussion, you can at least get sloppy drunk a meal.

Don't miss out on the fun, come visit and blog about your experience!

(Check the meetup page for the address and to RSVP.)