W-Shadow.com

I’ve had some of my posts scraped by spam blogs (splogs) in the past. Since I think “legal action” against these sites is not very effective (and I’m lazy, too ), I began wondering if there was some automated way to stop the content thieves. In this post I’ll talk about my findings, starting with simple feed copyrighting and up to advanced techniques that could be used to fight sploggers.

The are many reasons why someone might want to detect if users are accessing their site via a proxy. For one, all spammers use proxies. Proxies can also be used to cheat voting systems, create multiple accounts when only one account is allowed or make it appear like the user is browsing from a different [...]

This is something I made just for fun - a comic parodying the typical global warming, green technology and hybrid cars stories and discussions on Digg. It turned out a bit more violent than I anticipated, well, so be it. This is my first try at making a comic, so don’t judge harshly.

Description of the WPS file extension and how you can open WPS files or convert them to DOC format. There are several free WPS to DOC converters, including an online tool that you can use even if you do not have MS Word or are using a Mac.1

For months I’ve been getting dozens of spam comments, sometimes over a hundred per day. Most of them are caught by Akismet, which is great. The problem is that with high numbers of spam comments it’s virtually impossible to look through the spam filter logs and de-spam false positives. The bandwidth and processing power wasted [...]

We have spam filters, okay, but what about stupidity filters? Surely there is a way to automatically distinguish between the “LOOOL u SUcK” junk and intelligent discourse? - that’s what the authors of StupidFilter must have thought when starting up the project. A new program for catching - not spam, but obtuse - comments is being developed. Might have other uses, too.

I’ve been following WP plugin development-related news for a week or two now, and I’ve noticed something that could make creating a plugin easier - plugin generators. These tools can create a handy template for your new plugin so you don’t need to start completely from scratch; you still need to know (at least) PHP to make your plugin do anything useful, though. In this post I’ll review three WordPress plugin generators I’ve come across.

I’ve added a new feature to my single-click WorPress plugin updater - now you can see which of your plugins are checked for updates. Those plugins that have update notifications enabled will be marked by a golden bar-thingy in the “Plugins” tab. This is useful to see which plugins will notify you when an update [...]

About two weeks ago I was browsing SEO-related sites and came upon a promising technique for getting one’s pages out of the supplemental index. It’s called “third level push” and looks particularily useful for blogs. This is an advanced technique and you should work on the basic stuff first before trying something like this.

Instead of a detailed tutorial I will offer some thoughts about the “third level push” method and some tips on implementing it (yes, this is going to be a long post).