Behind The Blog

If you have been following any of our Voxeo blogs for a while, you may or may not have noticed that blog posts are starting to incorporate a footer that looks like this:

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My rationale for doing this is quite simple. It’s a fact of life that if you offer a RSS feed for your blog site, your content is going to get “scraped” and show up on other websites by spammers who are purely looking to use your text to get some search engine attention so that they can theoretically get people to click on the ads that they surround your content with.

It’s annoying. Especially when you’ve written some really good content and you want the people coming to your site versus the spammer’s site.

However, after eight years of blogging I’ve learned that there is only so much you can do. Every now and then if there is someone re-using our content in a particular egregious fashion, I’ll try to contact them. But 99% of the time they either don’t easily have contact info or make it difficult to find. (Then there was the time I called up on the phone someone scraping one of my external blogs. She was rather puzzled as to how I got her number, but it was simply in the DNS records for the domain she was using. Needless to say, she agreed to stop scraping my content.) Chasing down content scrapers and asking them to stop takes up time and energy that could, quite frankly, be better spent generating new blog entries and other projects. At some point you have to ask if it’s worth the hassle.

Instead of fighting, I’m trying to use it more as an opportunity for publicity. I’ve found that most of the content scrapers, and so far all the ones I’ve found scraping Voxeo content, are just taking our RSS items verbatim and running them on their sites. Now this isn’t always the case. I’ve found some very bizarre mashups of my content with other content on some spam sites. But for the most part it seems to be true.

So if they are going to take all the content “as is”, I want to make sure that they get some subscription links in there so that perhaps people finding the content on the spammer’s sites will find up coming back to our own site.

Right now I’m adding the footers manually, but at some point I may get around to incorporating them directly into the WordPress template we use to create all of our posts.

We’ll see. It’s all part of this grand experiment known as social media…

What do you do to combat content scrapers? Or do you just not care and consider it added publicity?

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Technorati Tags: wordpress, wordpressmu, wpmu, blogging, content, rss

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If you use WordPress MU for a corporate blog portal, it’s natural to want it to look like other corporate websites and to be “branded” with the corporate logo wherever is appropriate. To that end, we have developed our own WordPress theme here that makes blogs.voxeo.com look more like www.voxeo.com and evolution.voxeo.com. We also have uploaded the “favicon.ico” file we use across our sites so that the URL in the address bar has the Voxeo logo:

Now I thought we had this all set up so that the favicon would survive across WordPress MU upgrades. We have the correct “favicon.ico” file in the two themes we use here (one for the blogs.voxeo.com “portal” page and one for the individual blogs). I thought we were all set.

So you can imagine my annoyance when after an upgrade a while back the favicon that was showing up was the default WPMU one:

The problem turned out to be the fact that WordPress MU has multiple favicon.ico files in the installation. A quick “find” brought me these:

wpmu/favicon.ico
wpmu/wp-content/themes/default/favicon.ico
wpmu/wp-content/themes/voxeo-home/favicon.ico
wpmu/wp-content/themes/voxeo-default/favicon.ico

Our themes do, in fact, have the correct favicon.ico file, but it isn’t being used. The one file that seems to matter is the favicon.ico in the top level of my WPMU installation.

So the fix is trivial… just copy the favicon.ico from one of my themes up to the top level of my WPMU install. Ta da… problem fixed.

Of course, given the caching that web browsers do, the new favicon may not be visible in web browsers until either a refresh is forced or the browser’s cache is cleared. (I had to clear my cache in Firefox.) If users have also bookmarked the URLs in a browser such as Firefox, the favicons in their bookmark menus may not necessarily update. (In Firefox 3, there is a longer process you have to go through to change the bookmark favicons.)

In any event, new browsers connecting to your site should now see the correct favicon.

I didn’t try simply deleting the favicon.ico file at the top-level to see if that would cause WPMU to use the favicon.ico icons in the specific themes. In my case, I only want one favicon used across the entire site, so I’m okay replacing the top-level file.

Unfortunately, this appears to be yet one more step I need to add to my “WordPress MU Upgrade Checklist”…

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Technorati Tags: wordpress, wordpressmu, wpmu, favicon

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Blog comment spammers are truly the scourge of the blogging world. The fact that probably over 90% of the comments we get on this blog site are pure spam is truly annoying. The stats from Akismet, including the “zeitgeist” I’ve shown on the right are rather discouraging (and unfortunately I’d love to say that the stats are inflated because Akismet is a product to protect against blog spam – but unfortunately those numbers are supported by my own experience across many blogging sites). Blog comment spam is a true example of people believing that “the ends justify the means“. In order to get better SEO for their clients, spammers will pollute the zillions of blogs out there written by well-meaning people who just want to write and really don’t want to deal with some of the rather heinous and vile comments that spammers leave. Personally I can’t understand how a blog comment spammer can look at themselves in the mirror and be okay with what they are doing… but hey, there are a lot of jobs/people/services out there that I also wonder about.

In any event today I finally made a switch I’d been wanting to do for several months… I moved this site over to Akismet for blog comment spam protection.

From the beginning of this blog site, I was using Spam Karma 2 for a number of reasons and it seemed to work fine. Then back in July, the SK2 developer, Dave du Verle, announced that he was officially discontinuing development of Spam Karma 2, was releasing it under the GPL version 2 and making the code available for others from a new website. I monitored that site for a while, but no new releases or really any information appeared and the development email list appears to be basically dormant. In reading Dave du Verle’s blog, it’s pretty clear that he’s moved on.

And that’s okay. I for one appreciate all the time and work he put in to making SK2 as solid a tool as it was. (Thank you, Dave!) It was great to have it available while it lasted. But between Dave’s posts and also the fact that more comment spam seemed to be getting through SK2 and winding up on our site, it was rather clear to me that I would need to move at some point soon – and based on my own usage of Akismet on other personal sites, I figured I’d switch to it.

What finally made me make the switch was really the VoiceObjects acquisition and the fact that the VoiceObjects’ blog used Akismet and had an enterprise subscription that needed to be renewed. If you are renewing for one blog, you may as well do it for several…

The Akismet plugin installation was predictably very simple. I just

1. uploaded the Akismet code to our plugins directory

2. enabled its usage through “Plugin Commander” in our Site Admin
3. went to each of our main blogs and activated the plugin
4. in each blog, entered the API key from WordPress.com
5. in each blog, went to the Comments page and cleared out all the spam comments found by Akismet in its initial run.

This last point was a bit strange to me. It seems like SpamKarma 2 must not have been actually deleting the comment spam from our database even though I thought I had it set to do so. Akismet found a great number of spam comments which did not appear to be visible on the site but were apparently in the database. I found it rather strange since I had just cleared out all the SK2 “harvested spam” lists prior to de-activating it and activating Akismet.

Note that I could have installed Akismet directly into the WordPress MU mu-plugins directory and had it automagically be activated for all blogs (the latest versions of Akismet even allow you to hard-code your API key in the plugin so that you can easily protect all blogs). My main reason for not doing this was so that we would remain in compliance with our enterprise license. This license is only up to a certain number of blogs, and I want to ensure we are staying within the terms of that license.

So there we are… now protected by Akismet… we’ll see how it goes in the weeks and months ahead…

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Technorati Tags: wordpress, wordpress mu, wordpress plugins, wordpressmu, wpmu, akismet, blog spam, blog comment spam, comment spam, spam

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If you use the WordPress MU admin dashboard, it’s rather hard to miss the fact that WordPress version 2.7 is out given that you are warned prominently about updating:

Except, of course, that you can’t update to WordPress MU 2.7.

As discussed in this forum thread, the migration of features from the WordPress code base into the WordPress MU code base takes some time. Yesterday lead developer Donncha stated very clearly that WPMU 2.7 will probably not be out before the end of the year due to his own schedule.

Personally, that’s okay with me. I’d rather be sure that the WordPress MU code is rock-solid and stable before I deploy it on this site. I’m looking forward to WordPress MU 2.7 primarily for some of the “automatic update” features to make it easier to update plugins (as well as the main code base). The “sticky” feature to make some posts appear at the top is also of interest. Perhaps the best description of what is in WordPress 2.7 is this one on the main WordPress blog (look, also, at the range of links later in the article to other articles). This WordPress Codex page on version 2.7 also has more technical details.

We’ll see how it goes once Donncha has a chance to build a new release. Meanwhile, I’ve upgraded the Voice of VOIPSA blog as it is a standalone WordPress installation so that I can get used to the new interface in preparation for the move here.

Stay tuned…

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Technorati Tags: wordpress, wordpress mu, wordpressmu, wpmu

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How can you add support for podcasting, and specifically video podcasting to a WordPress MU (WPMU) installation? That was the question I set out to answer… and here are some thoughts on the process I went through.

If you follow the main Voxeo blog site, you’ll undoubtedly know that not terribly long ago I launched a video podcast called Emerging Tech Talk (ETT) where I am posting videos related to “emerging technology” and more specifically “emerging communication technology”. Essentially it is a place for me to tell stories in a video form around the technologies that I am investigating and using as part of my job within Voxeo’s Office of the CTO.

The challenge I had in setting it up was how to set the podcast up so that viewers could subscribe via iTunes and yet I wanted to ideally not install yet-another plugin. Having been involved with podcasting since early 2005, I was well aware that the PodPress plugin was out there and well-loved by WordPress users. However, at this point I’m seriously trying to minimize the number of plugins I install purely because each time I have to upgrade WordPress MU, I have to check compatibility with all the plugins – and that’s more work than I wanted to do.

So here’s how the story unfolded…

YOUTUBE ONLY – When I started ETT, I initially posted the videos only to our YouTube channel. This was admittedly largely due to the fact that iMovie ‘08 has this insanely simple “Share -> YouTube… menu option. Create your movie, make the menu choice, enter your password and other info and… ta da… iMovie goes off and does all the necessary rendering and uploading to YouTube. However, I knew that this would NOT give me an RSS feed that was compatible with iTunes due to the fact that YouTube uses Flash video for their videos and iTunes needs MP4 (.m4v).

RSSHANDLER – In looking around for solutions, a friend pointed me to RSSHandler.com, a site that offers several tools related to making videos accessible in RSS feeds, including a YouTube channel converter that will take your YouTube channel and turn it into an iTunes-compatible RSS feed with the videos converted to the appropriate formats. I tried this out and it did work (although I admit I still don’t know how it worked as well as it did – at some point I’d like to dig into it a bit more to understand what it does). There was only one problem – I didn’t want to convert the entire YouTube channel. Our YouTube channel has my Emerging Tech Talk episodes, but also other videos we put up there. I wanted a feed with only the ETT videos. Now I could have created a separate YouTube channel for just the ETT shows, and I debated about doing this for a while. Doing so would help build the “brand” for the show. In the end, though, I decided that I wanted to keep all the Voxeo video content in one place on YouTube… so I abandoned this RSSHandler.com approach.

FEEDBURNER AND “SMARTCAST” – Since I already used FeedBurner to gather stats on users of my RSS feeds, my next attempt was to use FeedBurner’s “SmartCast” feature to turn an ordinary RSS feed into a podcast feed complete with all the iTunes-required tags. To make this work, I had to start uploading the video files to another web site (i.e. I couldn’t use the versions in YouTube) and so I started uploading them to a directory on the blog server. So now for each episode I’m doing two uploads: one to YouTube and one to the blog server. I also had to add a “download” link to each ETT blog post and had a link to the video file.

Unfortunately, FeedBurner’s “SmartCast” turned out not to be so smart in may case and despite whatever I did the RSS feed continued to pick up the links to the YouTube Flash video files. And yes, I of course tried 'rel="enclosure"' in the appropriate <A> tag… and I put it at the beginning of the entry and also at the end. Nothing worked. I had to turn off SmartCast and return the feed to a “normal” feed.

PODPRESS – You probably know what’s coming… yes, indeed, in the end I did have to suck it up and install the PodPress plugin. Installed it into my plugins directory, went through WPMU Site Admin to make the plugin available, and then in the ETT blog enabled the plugin and configured it appropriately. Even though PodPress is for the standalone version of WordPress, I had no issues using it in WordPress MU.

It works great… I do have to do the dual uploads to both YouTube and our site, but in the end I have a podcast feed that works great with iTunes and presumably any other podcast receiving software.

There are a couple of interesting points about putting up a video podcast in this manner:

DUAL UPLOADS – As I mentioned, I do have to upload the video file to both YouTube and this site. My primary reason for doing that is that I want the video content to be found in YouTube. If I didn’t care about having the content be found in YouTube, I could skip that upload and just have the upload going from our site. But I do want these videos contributing to our YouTube presence and being able to be found there. Having them in YouTube also means they are very easily embeddable in another blog site, linked to, etc.

STATISTICS – The good news, I guess, is that because the video files are being pulled directly from our site, we can get statistics here on the number of downloads. The bad news is that we’ve now got fractured download counts between our site and YouTube. The number of potential viewers is now the number of downloads plus the number of YouTube views.

ONLINE POST CREATION – A downside for me, personally, to using PodPress is that now I can’t create the ETT blog posts entirely offline. I do pretty much all my blog writing using an offline blog editor (MarsEdit, in my case) and then just hit “Send to Weblog” and the posts are uploaded to the blog site. Now, with PodPress in the production loop, I can write the post offline, but when I send it to the ETT blog I have to make sure that the Post Status is set to “Draft”. This uploads to blogs.voxeo.com but doesn’t make it publicly visible. I then login to our site, go into the draft post and then configure the PodPress options to point to the media file, etc. I then “Publish” the post at which point it is visible and also goes out in the RSS feed. It’s not a huge deal, but it just does add another step to the publishing process.

In the end, I have a working platform on WordPress MU for publishing video podcasts, which could also be used, of course, for audio podcasts (Stay tuned! )

Over time I expect to still be investigating other options for doing all this, but at the moment I’ve got something that works and lets us get our content out in audio and video forms. (Suggestions for other mechanisms are of course welcome.)

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Technorati Tags: feedburner, feeds, plugins, podcasting, rss, video, videopodcasting, voxeo, wordpress plugins, wordpressmu, wpmu, wordpress

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