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Selectively updating your Twits on Facebook – “Selective Tweets”

ashish — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 09:15:21 +0000

Using social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter is an important part of how to promote your blog, but one of the challenges is how to ensure that your updates make it to all these tools. There are a variety of tools that are used to update your social networking sites; you can use Twitterfeed to update your Twitter presences from your blog posts, and you can use Networked Blogs to update your Facebook Fan Page. In addition, inside Facebook, you can update your Twitter through sending your Facebook Fan Page updates in the form of tweets to your Twitter account.
However, consider the case where you use your Twitter account to tweet, and your tweets are not only your automatic blog posts, but you manually add stuff to your Twitter account. In such cases, these tweets will not make it to your Facebook account, and you are missing out some important cross-tool promotion. In such cases, welcome to the concept of a tool called “Selective Tweets”, which takes your unprotected Twitter account (it does not work if your tweets are protected), and then these updates (marked with a #fb) are then picked up for posting to your Facebook Fan Page.
Refer to the following App page on Facebook (link)

Selective Tweet Status lets you update your Facebook status from Twitter –
BUT you can choose which tweets you want – just end a tweet with #fb when you want to post it as your Facebook status – simple!

You need to add the app to your Fan Page, and then you are set to go.
Refer to the FAQ for Selective Tweets if you need some help or have some issue (link)

Keep your blog safe – clean your comments of spam and junk comments

ashish — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 19:43:10 +0000

What does this mean ? Keeping your blog safe by removing junk comments ? Well, I have yet to find anybody who likes spam comments or junk comments on their blog. These comments could be in the nature of normal sounding comments (except that they will also have a promotion link to a website (and these cause the biggest problem since they seem to be legitimate comments), or comments that are not related to your post (and contain one or more links), or they could be outright junk that peddles all kind of products such as Viagra / Drugs free of prescriptions / Sell sexual products, etc.
There are people who don’t tolerate such comments on their blogs and use all sorts of spam-prevention methods, and there are others who let such matters go. So, if you have an account on Blogger, the default condition is to let people add comments to your blog, without your finding out about new comments unless you monitor your posts. One way to avoid this is to add a higher level of control, either by adding a Captcha in the comments page, or by restricting comments to those who have an OpenID.
Why should you remove such junk comments ? If you have such junk comments on your blog, there are problems:
- People who visit your blog are likely to be put off by such comments and you lose readers
- People will be less eager to forward the contents of your blog to other people
- Search engines are not comfortable with such content, and if such content is found on your blog, then your blog itself may get penalized
It does not take much time to setup a process of comment moderation, captcha, and other such methods of reducing comment spam, and deleting the ones that get through.

Have a Blogger account: Protect yourself from comment spam

ashish — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:57:14 +0000

Worpdress is a blogging platform that provides you the ability to extend its functionality through the use of its plugin. So, if you have a WordPress blog and want to fight the plague of comment spam, there are a number of plugins that you can use for this purpose. There is Akismet, Bad Behavior, Spam Karma 2, and other such plugins that give you the ability to block comment spam.
However, if you have a blog on Google’s Blogger platform, the ability to have such plugins is lost. There are widgets that allow extension of abilities, but the amount of flexibility you can get is reduced. For fighting Comment Spam on a Blogger blog, you need to look at the tools that Blogger itself provide. These are the following:
Controlling who can add comments: You can set such a policy on by Logging into the Blogger Dashboard, then going to Settings -> Comment, where you can select multiple options. You can select from the following:
1. Anyone – includes Anonymous Users
2. Registered Users – includes OpenID
3. Users with Google Accounts
4. Only members of this blog
These settings help control who all can comment on your blog. So if you feel that you are getting too many spam or junk comments on your blog, you can select that only Registered Users, or users with Google Accounts or even only Members of the Blog can add comments.

Further, you can even select to have comment moderation on your blogs by setting that option in the same page. You need to enter your email address, and then you can get an email whenever a new comment has been added to your blog.

Finally, you can enable a Captcha (also known as word verification)

WordPress Plugin: Using bad behaviour plugin to stop spam

ashish — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:16:38 +0000

As your blog becomes popular, one problem that seems to cause a lot of concern is comment spam. You must have seen them, comments with long lists of URL’s that advertise items that you would rather do not appear on your blog, or medicines that you are not interested in buying, or other similar comments that have no relation to your blog. What do you do ? You search for some way to stop these spam. Akismet is one option, but even with Akismet, you get a lot of spam that needs to be cleared out regularly. Once I missed out clearing the comment spam from Akismet for several weeks, and when the auto-cleaning for Akismet happened with around 20,000 such spam comments, it created a performance hit on my shared server (and the steps I had to take after that are not something you want to repeat on your own blog – I had to get my account re-activated).
Read (and download) the plugin at this location (link)
Bad Behavior prevents the spam from even making its way onto your server or blog, thus ensuring that you do not have to fish among all the comments filtered by Akismet to search for genuine comments. From the site:

Bad Behavior complements other link spam solutions by acting as a gatekeeper, preventing spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place. This keeps your site’s load down, makes your site logs cleaner, and can help prevent denial of service conditions caused by spammers.
Bad Behavior also transcends other link spam solutions by working in a completely different, unique way. Instead of merely looking at the content of potential spam, Bad Behavior analyzes the delivery method as well as the software the spammer is using. In this way, Bad Behavior can stop spam attacks even when nobody has ever seen the particular spam before.

WordPress anti-spam plugin: Use Spam Karma

ashish — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:47:11 +0000

Dealing with spam can be quite a pain for owners of WordPress blogs. If you have an active blog, sooner or later you will have to start dealing with the fact that there are various ways to generate spam, and you have to deal with this spam. Soon, you will end up with so much spam that you will not be able to find genuine comments. However, there are ways around this. WordPress comes with a default plugin called ‘Akismet’ that needs to be activated in order to block Spam. Akismet needs a user to have an account on WordPress.com in order to be activated.
However, there are users who sometimes find that Akismet generates false positives (cases where a comment is mistakenly flagged as spam). False positives are the hardest to track, since these can get lost among the spam, and if you have a large number of spam, then you will lose valid comments. So, if you are looking for an alternative for using Akismet, then another plugin that is pretty famous is called ‘Spam Karma 2′ (link to download page). From the site:

Spam Karma is a modular system for detecting and blocking comment spam. It works through the use of various plugins that each test a comment for a particular aspect of “spamminess”. Each of these tests assigns points to the comment, and after all the tests are run they are totaled up. if the overall points are negative, it’s considered spam and blocked.
There are a lot of options for how you want the system to interpret the points and so forth. You can set the relative strength of each test individually, making some tests more important than others. There are third-party plugins available as well, which add functionality beyond that of Spam Karma alone.

FAQ is available at this link.