In general, comment spammers write messages to escape your attention. Although they use smart spam bots and BlackHat software like XRumer or ScrapeBox, they want you to believe they are real bloggers, real people, writing real comments. They want you yo approve the comment and publish it on your site. They simply lie in order to convince you to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Web spammers are selling links from your blog to their clients. They do this to game the search engines and trick your readers into visiting dubious web sites. Their clients are sometimes seemingly harmless, but are often peddling fake pills, adult, scams and malware.

Identify False Positive Spam Comments you can first check for links to spammy URLs in the comment url box. Sometimes I’ll see a thoughtful comment clearly written in direct response to the post it’s commenting on, under a real person’s name, and still mark it as spam because they link to a site whose legitimacy is questionable. Another great method I use and that never ever fails is lookup the exact comment or one of it’s sentences in google. Let’s take this sample spam comment:

and paste it exactly in google. Make sure you write it between Quotes (“sample comment”) which tells Google to look for the query in that exact order. If you get any results on the exact comment, it’s most likely comment spam. Now check this:

We received more than 330,000 results. We are talking about 330,000 clones of the same spam comment posted in blogs.

Another consideration is that old posts tend to attract a lot of spam. Real people generally recognize that if a post is a year or so old, the conversation there is pretty much over. Spambots do not realize that. It still sometimes happens that someone comments on an ancient post, but the age of the post is a big red flag.

If you can Identify False Positive Spam Comments, then you can mark them as spam and they will not comment again.

I tried the following HTACCESS and it fixed all these problems with broken or missing images:

#Wordpress Multi site
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
 
# uploaded files
RewriteRule ^files/(.+) wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$1 [L]
 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^ - [L]
RewriteRule . index.php [L]
#END WordPress Multi Site

If you are using The Donncha Domain mapping plugin to allow users to use domain names, make sure to update to the latest version that is compatible with WordPress 3.0.x. Otherwise you could see this message when a blog user tries to login:

“You don’t have permission to view this site. Please contact the system administrator.”

To update to the latest version of Donncha’s domain mapping plugin:

WordPress 3.0 Domain Mapping 0.5.2

If you notice any other issues after updating to WordPress Multisite, let me know and I will see if there is any fix.

Start activating the multi-site features of WordPress 3.0 by adding this line of code to your wp-config.php file:

/** Enable or disable Worpress Multi-site features **/
define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true);

Refresh your Dashboard and got to ”Tools -> Network”. You will see a screen that looks similar to the one in the picture below:

If you want to install your additional blogs on virtual sub-domains instead of sub-directories you will need to create a wildcard DNS record on your server to enable the sub-domain (blog1.yourdomain.com, blog2.yourdomain.com, blog3.yourdomain.com) functionality of WordPress 3.0.

Your server must support wildcard DNS records for you to do this. As an example I will explain how to configure it with Hostgator. It’s very easy to do with the Hostgator Baby Plan allows them. When you are in your Hostgator Control Panel, follow these instructions to create a wildcard DNS record for a domain.

Select “sub-domains” under”Domains” in CPanel
Enter an asterisk “*” in the sub-domain’s name field
Select the TLD the wildcard DNS is to be set up on
Enter the server location address for the wildcard folder, e.g. /public_html/bigbuz
Click “Create”
Back to your WordPress admin panel, you need to install the now activated WordPress 3.0 Network settings, viz

Find the Network settings page in your WordPress admin panel (Tools>Network)
Choose whether you want to use sub-domains or sub-folders for the additional blogs
Type a name for your network of sites
Set your admin email address
Click “Install”

After a minute or two you will be presented with a configuration screen. Back up your .htaccess and wp-config.php files before you proceed to follow the instructions provided on that configuration screen.

As a precautionary measure to prevent visitors of non-existent sites from being greeted by 404 error messages, redirect them to a URL of your choice by adding the below code to the bottom your wp-config.php file:

 /* Send visitors to non-existent blogs here */
define( 'NOBLOGREDIRECT', 'http://yourdomain.com/' );

Change http://yourdomain.com to the URL of your choice

Log out then log back in.
You will now need to go through your settings to enable or disable the new options provided by WordPress Multi Site.

Upgrading from WPMU to WordPress Multisite 3.0

If you are upgrading from WPMU to WordPress Multisite 3.0, you can do it automatically from the dashboard, but some manual configuration is also needed. After you upgrade and you login again into the dashboard, this message will be displayed:

Warning! WordPress encrypts user cookies, but you must add the following lines to wp-config.php for it to be more secure.

Follow the steps listed there and then you could see something like this:

“Thank you for Updating! Please visit the Update Network page to update all your sites.”

Follow the link and update all the blogs. (If you have any). Update Network.

Also you could see the following message:

“The wp-content/blogs.php file is deprecated. Please remove it and update your server rewrite rules to use wp-includes/ms-files.php instead.”

So, just remove the blogs.php file from the server and edit your .htaccess file. The .htaccess file can be found in the root folder, where the wp-config.php file is.

Open with notepad and change:

RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?files/(.+) wp-content/blogs.php?file=$2 [L]

to

RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?files/(.+) wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$2 [L]

Done! Your new Multiuser 3.0 installation is ready to use.

Enjoy!

Download Theme

Preview Theme

Download Theme

Preview Theme

You can either install or update Patagonia and Tandil theme automatically from your dashboard. This is recommended if you didn’t change anything in the css or php files manually. Otherwise, make you sure to save your customization before upgrading.

Happy WordPressing everyone!

As you may know, Akismet is another great plugin and I use it on WpThemesPlanet. It blocks most of the spam comments. However, it is always interesting to have an alternative in hand. I have tried TypePad on another blog for the last 3 months and it works wonders. It blocked 100% of the spam.

The service is free to anyone who wants to use it for both personal and business sites, regardless of how many comments you receive. As with Akismet, you also need an API key for it to work. You can get a free API key in the link below. The great news about TypePad AntiSpam Plugin is that it can be used for WordPress MU too. This is the difference with Akismet, which needs a special license for WPMU. That’s why most WordPress WPMU Webmasters are using TypePad Antispam plugin lately.

Download the plugin here.

Register for a free TypePad API Key here.

The TypePad AntiSpam plugin for WordPress is derived from WP-Akismet by Matt Mullenweg. All subsequent modifications are copyright 2008, Six Apart Ltd.

Enjoy!

Creating the image

The first thing you need to do is to create the image that you want to use as favicon. Don’t make your image too complex because small detail tend to get lost when resized to a tiny 16 by 16 pixels.

If you want to easily draw your own favicon, there is a great online tool called Favicon.cc. It lets you draw your own icon while the Favicon in the browser updates in real time to reflect your changes. If you use this tool you can skip the next step as the tool will handle the conversion to .ico as well.

Converting your favicon to .ico format

If you draw your image with Photoshop or any other editor, you will need to convert your file to .ico format. Modern web browsers will generally let you get away with using a png, gif or even a jpeg for your favicon, but to be compatible with older version of internet explorer and Firefox, you’ll have to convert the image to .ico format.

To convert your image, you can also use the Favicon.cc website, only this time, click the “Import Image” button on the left side of the page and upload your image. The tool will convert your image to .ico format and let you download the final product.

Add the favicon to your site

Then make sure you store/save your favicon icon inside your WordPress Theme images folder. For example /patagonia/images/favicon.ico.

Then, assuming you save your favicon.ico file in your theme directory, add the following anywhere between the tags.

1

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/favicon.ico">

Just copy that line and paste it in the header.php. In patagonia theme, you can paste this line right after the <link rel=”pingback”…> line.

If you have many sites and you want to track the whole server, the best option is to use a single web server script. These are easy to install and run. You can contact your hosting support and they will install it in a few minutes. Some hosting companies have a 1 click install of these tools. Others come with stats installed by default.

Many different free and paid web stats tools are available. I will show two of the best known free web stats tools. I tried both on my own sites and I will show you how they work, along with their pros and cons below.

Webalizer:

Webalizer is a free open source script written in C. It has a very simple interface with a straight to the point approach. Some people like using Webalizer because it’s a nice tool for viewing web stats quickly. You can choose to have the stats either protected by username and password or open to the public. Remember the best part of using your own server based script like webalizer or awstats, is that you don’t have to insert any code on your pages. If you have a lot of pages, webalizer will track the activity in all of them automatically. No codes needed like with google analytics. This is a huge advantage and you also have full control over your stats.

Visitor tracking and stats information are GOLD nowadays. With Webalizer, you’ll be able to see your daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly traffic stats. Also referrers, spiders and KB’s used. Sometimes you see a lot of traffic coming in and you don’t know who’s sending you that traffic. Webalizer will tell you. It will recognize most traffic sources. You can sort the traffic by Hourly Statistics, URLs, Entry URLs, Exit URLs, Agents, Systems and Countries. Here is just a sample screenshot, as you can see the graphic environment is pretty basic, but in terms of information it is a great script. It’s a “lite” script, which means that it can be used in very small servers and still process big amounts of traffic. You can get Webalizer here.

AWStats:

AWStats is a free open source script written in Perl. Some webmasters prefer AWStats due to its fancy report format. Although the type of information AWStats displays is similar to the type of information Webalizer displays, for some statistics the reporting values might vary between Webalizer and AWStats due to the different way they process logs. To choose the one that’s right for you, review both types of reports. One report may be clearer or easier to understand for a specific web metric. You may also have an aesthetic preference. The key is to find something that works for you and meets your needs and comfort level. Here is a sample screenshot of AWStats:

You can download AWStats here. There is a more detailed graphic analysis of both scripts on their sites. You can take a look at the demo account to get a better idea.

Many other web stats tools are available, and although we covered only two of the most popular ones, don’t be afraid to experiment with others until you find the one that meets your requirements. You could also look for a paid tool if you or your client can afford it. These two tools we covered are the standard scripts in shared hosting environments.

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Good luck everyone!