Make Money from Blogs » Akismet

Optimizing your WordPress account – 2

ashish — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 18:09:48 +0000

A few weeks back, I had written about how to take some basic steps towards optimizing your WordPress account. Imagine what would happen if more people started promoting your WordPress Blog, or wonders of wonders, it appears on the front page of Digg or Slashdot. In such cases, unless you have optimized your WordPress configuration already, you can be pretty much sure that your account will get to a state where the server is not able to handle the load, and will shut down; further if your account is on a shared server, you might have some uncomfortable queries from your host.
So, here are some points on how to optimize your account:
1. Since WordPress works on a database system, it pulls every bit of content from the server. If there are a large number of requests for your blog, your server has to make that many DB queries to fetch the content. This puts a lot of stress on your server. User a Super Cache plugin to Cache some of the load and serve static HTML files instead of querying the DB (link to plugin, and page).
2. When you serve various files such as binaries, videos, images, scripts, etc from your server, it becomes slow. Place them on other servers, so that the load on your server is reduced. For example, you can get videos from Youtube and Photos from Flickr, and also, you can even hire some hosting space on another server or on a service such as Amazon S3 for this purpose.
3. If you are more advanced, look at your server logs; it may be possible to determine multiple requests from a bot or script that is of no good, blocking these may make your server behave a bit better
4. Look to get stats on how your web page is loading. If it takes a lot of time to load your page, there may be a lot of plugins working, or scripts loading, and so on. Some tools you can use for this purpose are – LiveHTTPHeaders (link, displays the HTTP headers), Firebug (link, Look at loading times for various artifacts on a page),
5. Inside your wp-config.php file, remove some of the DB calls that are not necessary. For example, hard-code your Template Path, Stylesheet path (link to relevant site). You will get some improvements.
6. Review your themes. Some themes call a lot of graphics, and overall call a lot of files. If your CSS files are divided into multiple files, combine them. Replace graphics wherever possible with text.
7. Review the plugins your are using to see whether they are required. Plugins can make your site much slower, especially if they do a lot of DB access and inefficient. If you are advanced technically, monitor the performance of your plugins.
8. Refer to this quick cheat sheet for DB optimization (link to cheat sheet)
9. Reduce the number of posts on the front page of your blog. Typically, WordPress gives you 10 posts on your front page, you should reduce this to 3-4.
10. Use WP’s Built in Object Cache as described on this page (link). From the same site, refer to the MySQL Query Cache.
11. For some detailed technical analysis of what can be done (link)
12. Clean Options (Finds orphaned options and allows for their removal from the wp_ options table) – Get it from this page
13. The combating comment spam page on WordPress.org (link). If you have a good blog which is getting popular, increase in spam is only to be expected. Akismet filters out most comment spam, but just getting it into the junk spam list also adds some load to your server.
14. Page with 5 tips for making your Blog Digg / Slashdot proof (link)
15. High Traffic Tips For WordPress on WordPress.org Codex (link)

If you know more ways beyond this, please do let me know.

Defensio: An alternative to Akismet

ashish — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 08:12:20 +0000

Akismet is the current default anti-spam plugin on WordPress. It works by filtering comments already posted on the blog, and then decides on the basis of its algorithms whether the comment is spam or not. It is supposed to be continually updated so that new tactics by spam spinners are caught and the plugin continues to block such spam. This is different from the case of plugins which are captcha based where the user has to look at the random word that is generated, and then enter the same word. The idea is that only a live user will be able to make out the word and enter it, spam scripts cannot make out the word and hence the comment will not be posted.
There are a number of people who do not believe in captcha based defenses, either because these are eventually overcome by spam creators, or because they add an additional layer of difficulty for people who wish to add comments, something that blog writers want to avoid. So, a lot of people use Akismet on their wordpress blog, but many of such people are not satisfied. Akisment many times generates false positives (that is, it flags a genuine comment as spam) or is not fast enough to prevent some of the newer spam techniques from working. Enter an Akismet alternative, Defensio (link)
From the site:
1. Is Defensio better than Akisment?
We can’t make any promises (sorry), but our early testing suggests that Defensio’s performance is very, very good. As with any adaptive filter, it will only improve with time. You may need to give it a few days before it really kicks into gear, but quite quickly you should see a significant reduction in the flow of comment spam to your blog.
2. Why do I need to create an account with Defensio?
In order for our plug-in to work with your blog, we need to generate for you a unique API key. This requires some personal information (namely your blog and email address), and thus the requirement to create an account and sign-up for the service. All personal data will be kept strictly confidential, as described in our Privacy Policy.
As you post articles to your blog and your readers’ comments flow in, Defensio adapts to your content and habits in a personalized way. This means that no two bloggers will see Defensio react in precisely the same way, even for similar comments, which is a good thing — because one person’s ham might be another person’s spam. And our continuously evolving set of algorithmic tricks ensures that we’ll never let spammers gain the upper hand.
Reviews of Defensio:
1. Chaos-Laboratory (link)
2. womantribune.com (link)
3. Techcrunch.com (link)

Comment spam on WordPress – Use Akismet

ashish — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 19:21:25 +0000

When I started using WordPress as my blogging platform (first buying a domain, then using one of these hosting services (link to article), and installing WordPress on it), I used to think that getting the right template on the blog, and then getting some good quality content on the blog was all that was required. Within a few days, it turned out that I was wrong. After some days, I started getting comments from people, and those comments were welcome (since that meant that people were reading my blog). However, it soon turned bad – I started getting comments that were in the nature of spam. These were comments that would be posted by a script, and there would be 20 spam comments for every genuine one. It was pretty frustrating.
I started reading about how to tackle this menace of junk spam comments on a WordPress Blog, and I realized that I already had the tools with me, it was just ignorance that was preventing me from acting on measures to prevent spam. There are some setting inside WordPress that will help you do this,

There are some settings there that you can use, depending on how many people visit your blog and leave comments. In the beginning, you would have few visitors and comments, and you can afford to put moderation for all comments on. As you start getting more visitors and geniune comments, you will need to tweak the settings to be able to get genuine comments in and push spam comments out.
Something that has worked like magic for the WordPress installations that I have is a plugin called Akismet (from Automattic); it has been so far been able to filter out almost all spam comments while letting genuine comments through.
How do you get it to start working ? First, it is available under the plugins options: Login into wp-admin -> Plugins -> Activate Akismet
You will need an API key to get it to start working, and you can get the key by registering for a WordPress.com account (link). You can use the same key on multiple blogs. Once this key has been entered in this destination: Login into wp-admin -> Plugins -> Akismet Configuration
And it should start working, your comments with spam will be filtered into a separate location called Akismet Spam under the comments heading. It is rare that a genuine comment goes into this queue, and a bit less rare that spam does not get filtered out; however this plugin has caused me great happiness since it does so much of the work of spam filtration (remember, if you are using Akismet on a commercial blog, or on a blog that earns more than $500 per month, you should be buying a commercial key).