Bringing Back Old WordPress

Going Back to WordPress 3.8 is Easy

Do you hate the latest version of WordPress? Sick of the horrible visual mode editor, lost your favourite advanced editor? Detest the new image manager?

A know a lot of people who are, who cannot live with the new things WP4 has brought along. People who are so desperate to have functional content editing tools they were thinking of switching platforms. Some of these people are my clients! In fact most of my clients have been complaining since WordPress 3.9 arrived, wanting their easy to use tools back.

Microsofts Struggling Search Engine Bing

In a post on the New York Times mobile website by Nick Wingfield and Eric Lipton the authors remark:

“For Microsoft, any limits imposed on Google might help it improve the fortunes of its struggling search engine, Bing.”

While Nick and Eric’s article is more about Google than Bing, the statement does make us think about Bing as a search engine…

Poor Indexing, Poor Search Results

For the average web searcher Bing, along with the sister Microsoft search engines Yahoo and Search MSN, provides a poor experience to internet users.

Wishing For Spam Free Hosting

Are You Wishing For Spam Free Secure Hosting

Do you wish you could host your WordPress blog (self-hosted) where spam wasn’t a problem, where hackers couldn’t damage your site, where your host took effective steps to keep spammers and hackers away from your blog?

Are you fed-up with all the spam and hacker attacks from China, the former Soviet states and other notorious regions, the sharply rising level of cyber-attacks from the middle east and northern Africa?

Are all the hacking attacks and login attacks from hacked web sites and bad-host web-servers giving you grey hairs?

Ban Web Server Traffic

Web Server Traffic Should be Banned

Opinions will differ about putting a ban on web server traffic. There are those who want their blogs and websites free from malicious activity, safe and secure for genuine valuable visitors. Then there are those who think there should be no restrictions on web traffic and activity (some even think spam is not bad).

Let’s clarify the web traffic we’re talking about. We’re not talking of banning referer traffic i.e. traffic from good back-links from websites resulting in genuine visitors.

Few Updates Recently

Few Updates for Several Months

Regular readers of this blog may be wondering why there’s been so few new posts in the past several months…

The reasons for our tardiness are two-fold: First of all I’ve been relocating my home and business to Aston Bay in the Eastern Cape. Secondly – blame the latest versions of WordPress, and above all the new text editor (TinyMCE 4.*).

Office 2003 Accept Licence Nag

Office 2003 Asking to Accept Licence on Start-up on Win 7

Microsoft Office 2003 keeps asking you to accept the licence conditions when installed on a Windows 7 or 8 operating system. Even though you’ve clicked the acceptance button this nag message keeps appearing. It’s annoying, but not the end of the world.

It can be fixed, usually quite easily. This is the way I found to stop the Office 2003 accept licence nag message on Win 7/8. This should always be the preferred  method to stop the licence nag message in Windows 7 and 8 and the alternative. The other way requires editing the registry and/or some application files.

Google Bounce Rate Value

Does Google Bounce Rate Analytic Have Any Real Value

SEO experts tell us a low bounce rate is important for site ranking in Google SERP. Bounce rate is an indicator of quality content on our blogs and websites. The lower the bounce rate, the better our sites will rank…

Google Analytics shows a bounce rate statistic for our sites. Just how accurate is this analytic statistic, how much credence should we give it?

What is Bounce Rate?

Simply put, bounce rate is the ratio between visitors arriving on our site and viewing more than one page to the number of arriving visitors who leave immediately. If we have a high percent of visitors who stay around to read more than one post we can assume they found our blog useful and interesting.

Htaccess Site Speed Impact

Does the .htaccess File Slow Site Performance

Bloggers often ask the question “does using .htaccess for security or redirection slow down the site”? The answer should perhaps not be a simple yes or no. Some hosts recommend .htaccess should not be too large (not have a lot of rules) as it has a bad impact on performance. Then again some users have very long lists of rules in their .htaccess files and their sites are still fast enough to satisfy visitors and accepted Google page load speeds.

We need to weigh the benefits of using .htaccess for security, redirection and site configuration against any performance penalties (or advantages). Once we understand how .htaccess works on our blogs we can make the decision how we will this extremely useful file.

No Website Url Less Spammers

Removing Website URL from Comment Forms Stops Spammers

Another way to stop spam comments – get rid of the website URL in comment forms. We’ve finally got rid of nearly all spam comments on graphicline.co.za. Although the site was already protected by Project Honeypot, and comments use a CAPTCHA challenge, we were still getting a lot of spam. Instead of switching to RECAPTCHA with it’s more difficult text, we looked for another way to reduce successful spam comments.

The common factor to all spam comments was the inclusion of a homepage URL in the form field. The thinking was; if there’s no field for the URL, then spambots may fail as they can’t finish their job. Without a homepage URL field, manual spammers may be discouraged from posting rubbish as well.

Goodbye Zemanta

WordPress.com Kills Zemanta Writing Assistant

WordPress.com stopped using the “Zemanta Writing Assistant” on 2 January 2014. The end of Zemanta was sudden. The only notification I found was a post by jackiedana on the WordPress.com support forum posted the same day the service was terminated.

“On January 2nd, 2014 we’re removing our third-party integration with Zemanta, which added some tools like a manual related content tool, and suggestions for tags and images”.

The only reason given was a statement that WordPress.com is working on improving the editor. I can’t help suspecting there were other reasons to kill Zemanta on WordPress.com