The Blog Peoria Network

Some of you may have already noticed: I’ve switched out the “favicon” for many BlogPeoria sites. The favicon is the little image that appears next to the blog URL in the address bar. Since the last upgrade, the default favicon was the blue-on-white Greek “Mu” letter. This bugged me, since I once as using a hand-made yellow-on-maroon “bp” symbol. I finally got around to deleting the old “Mu” and switching it with the “bp.” Unfortunately, some sites continued to render the old symbol. I tried deleting, but it didn’t work. So, I spent a few minutes manually adding a line of code to the themes of the most popular Blog Peoria Project blogs.

From now on, the only time you will see the  “Mu” icon is on administration pages.

ALSO: I removed the plugin that let users scrape content from other sites. The only other site that was using it behind my own heinleinblog was abusing it.

Askewed News is coming back. I swear. I needed to find some software to open a “zipped” database. I’ll get her posts loaded back up sometimes tonight hopefully. I thought the backup database was corrupted (which would be BAD). It turns out it was my compression software. I’ll have it uploaded as soon as I can find some time. I planned to do it today, but there was breaking political news.

UPDATE: The upload was a success and everything is working fine as far as I can see. Again, my apologies.

I’ve installed a new plugin that’s available for use by members.

It’s called “WP-Autoblog.” It’s designed to automatically add content to your blog. This is how it works: Once activated, you enter an RSS or Atom field into a form found on the “Options” panel. The plugin takes the results and posts them on your blog. The results can be an excerpt of the entry or the full entry, and the original author can be mentioned/liked or not.

Folks, this plugin has the potential to be used for scraping — blogs that contain nothing but content stolen from other blogs. But that doesn’t have to be the case, I’m using it on heinleinblog to generate links of interest to Heinlein fans. I’m using the RSS feed for a Google News search for “Robert Heinlein.” I use the results to create original entries that go beyond the sort of “scraping” that you see so often these days. This requires a bit of editing AND adding content after the entry appears on my site.

Anyone can use this if they want, But PLEASE be careful.

I have manually activated Akismet spam blocking for three member blogs during the past two days. One Blog Peoria member (who shall remain nameless) has 39,000 comments in the moderation queue. That is NOT good. You cannot even get the “moderate comments” page to load with so many.

Also, if you logged into the admin panel today, you’ve noticed some changes to the news feeds. The admin dashboard opens to a page showing the posts on the front page of The Blog Peoria Project, as well as links to member posts. Cool, huh.