The Blog Peoria Network

I’ve spent some time investigating this, and I’ve made a change that will cut back on spam blogs, otherwise known at “splogs.”

Basically, I’ve renamed the file that lets people sign up as users and get their own blogs. The link is on the front page. This will, I think, foil some of the robots that search for WPMu signup pages. Eventually, news member signups will be moderated, which means I have to approve them.

Unfortunately, this breaks the link on so many member blogs. I’ll be going through the theme files and changing the links.

Why is this important to members?

First: Spam blogs take up resources. They soak up bandwidth.

Second: I like to run a list of member blogs and most recent member posts on the front page of this site. I have plans to make the front page of this site the place to go to see content from this community’s citizen journalists. I can’t do that if on any given pay have the blogs on this site are gibberish and long lists of links to bestiality or incest sites.

By the way, users who use Widgets on their sites can paste code that lets them show fellow Blog Peoria Project members. Just paste the following code into a PHP Code Widget (you have to approve the plugin, first, and be using a widget-ready theme).

The code is:

<?php list_all_wpmu_blogs(’50′, ‘name’, ‘<p>’, ‘</p>’, ‘updated’) ?>

I’ll be adapting the default Blog Peoria Project theme to automatically include this script.

Also, members can activate the RSS Feed Widget, and direct it to show the Blog Peoria Project Members Feed:

http://blogpeoria.com/wpmu-feed/

And as I’ve announced here before, I’ll  eventually be moving Peoria Pundit to the Blog Peoria Project. I’ll be leaving the current site up so the thousands of incoming links won’t be broken. It’s just a matter of notifying advertisers of the new address, and building a theme that has room for the ads and the links to BP members.

I know. I’ve been threatening to move all Peoria Pundit posting activity here for as long as there’s been a Blog Peoria Project. This time, it’s personal.

And after that happens, I’ll be doing more marketing to folks who really ought to be posting here. The new Blog Peoria Project will be truly a network of Peoria blogger/citizen journalists, businesses and organizations.

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.

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.

Here’s some exciting news for Blog Peoria Project members who want to drive traffic to their sites. I have installed and activated a new plug that generates single RSS feeds for posts and comments for ALL Blog Peoria Project member blogs. Ive used these feeds create links to the 10 most recent Blog Peoria member posts and comments made to Blog Peoria blogs.

If you are looking at this site shortly after I wrote this post, you might see links to some spam blog posts. That’s because I installed the plugin before I EVERY BLog Peoria member get a little expire. The URL for the feeds can be copies my right-clicking on the orange “RSS” buttons on the top of the sidebar lists. I do encourage members to place these site-wide feeds on their blogs. A feed with a dozen or more new posts a day is going to be read more than a feed that gets one or two updates a day.

Even more good stuff is coming down the pike.

To put it in language a high-priced consultant would understand: These new feeds a tool in our belt that will allow us to leverage the synergies of a hyper-local community-based multi-blog site for maximum benefit. As more blogs join up to partake in all this synergy, critical mass will be reached.

Henceforth, anyone who wants to sign up for a blog or just register as a user will have to get past a simple verfication system. It’s designed to keep spambots from creating fake blogs.

I’ve tested it and it works. If you have trouble creating a blog or registering, just let me know by replying to this post.

East Bluff Barbie has a funny post about some of the porn spam she receives.

Folks, be sure you are using the Akismet plugin. Just activate it on the Plugins page, then click on “Akismet Configuration” in the sub-menu and enter this site’s WordPress API key: “b7a782e0688d” and be sure to NOT use the quote marks.

It’s NOT perfect, as some spam does leak through, and some legitimate comments don’t. It is the best out there, though.

UPDATE: OK, I’m going to recommend no one use this plugin for the time being. The problem is that in order for it to word, there needs to be a change to the user’s templates. That change causes an error message on ny blog using the same that doesn’t have the plugin activated.

 I’ve added a new plugin that might make it easier for members blogs to be found and read by others.

The plugin is called Bunny’s Technorati Tags. To use them, go to your Admin >>> Plugins and activate the plugin. Then go to Admin >>> Write. Directly below the large “Post” field where members can write their blog entries, there’s a long strip called “Tags.” Once the post has been written, users can use the “Tags” field to create a list of words that describe a post.

When you publish your posts, the Technorati site is notified, and those tags ack of signals that the post is about these topics. When Technorato users search for those keywords, your blog entry pops up on the list.

Trust me, I get about 100 hits a day because of Technorati Tags.

And it’s also a good idea to go to Technorati, sign up and claim your blog.