Directing Search Engines to Blosxom Content Pages

I've noticed that folks who come to my site by querying through a search engine often end up on my main page and the article they are searching for has already rolled off the front page. This is because the search engine robots tend to choose the index pages as …

Image Theft Ranting And Blocking

I was really disappointed yesterday when I checked my blog's statistics and found that someone from a Hungarian Agility discussion board had directly linked course images from my website. Direct linking of an image is placing the URL of the image directly in a webpage hosted on another server. Each …

Modifications to Blosxom entriescache PluginHandles Articles With Future meta-creation_date

Fletcher Penney created the original entriescache Blosxom plugin. It is designed to cache all the articles and their creation dates in a Blosxom blog to avoid the overhead of scanning the file system for new/modified files. He merged the meta plugin functionality into the plugin to allow authors to …

Refererblock Version 0.2

I came up with two improvements to the first release of my refererblock plugin:

  • If the referer string matches the site's URL it passed immediately and isn't checked against the blacklist.
  • The blacklist.txt file was being read even if the referer string was empty. Now it is only read …

Those Darn Spammers Blosxom - Hit Counter and Writeback Changes

Over the past year I'd noticed that comment and trackback spammers had been hitting the same dozen or so pages of my blog multiple times daily. (It is probably the same person/group who took a snapshot of the articles on my front page at that time and just reuses …

How Safe is Your Personal Information in the Hands of Website Developers?

I was going through the webserver statistics for this site to see if any new sites had linked to any of my articles (it is always nice to see that what I have to say is useful to someone). Anyway, I ran across someone who had come to my site …

Blosxom Plugin to Block Referer Spam

Like so many other bloggers who allow comments on their websites and blog articles, I was facing increasing comment spam as my blog got noticed by more spammers. The size of this problem is illustrated by this Google query for "comment spam" that returned 1.5 million hits. For the …

Online Button Creation Tool

I was reading the Blosxom email list tonight and came across an interesting photoblog by Rob Park. After enjoying some of his photos, I noticed his post about an online form for creating the XML, RSS, etc. buttons popular on so many websites. Adam Kalsey has created a simple (dare …

AgilityNerd Site Enhancements

I've spent some time over the past couple nights trying to improve the access to information on my site. As a software developer it is often more fun to play around with the technology than it is to do "real" work.

I've made the following enhancements:

  • Added Quick Links to …

Modifications to Blosxom moreenties PluginLinks to a Configurable Number of Index Pages

Jason Clark created the moreentries plugin for Blosxom to allow adding links to the previous and next group of articles/entries in the head or foot of a Blosxom weblog. He solved a problem that most weblogs have; it can be difficult for visitors to browse older articles. Although he …