Recent Problems with the Blog
Some of you that have visited my blog recently may know that there have been some problems as of late on my blog, and may notice that some of the entries, and all of the comments have disappeared. I’m working on fixing the problems, and hopefully my blog should be running in tip top condition by the end of the weekend.
By clicking on the link “Read More” below, you can see my explanations of the most recent problems, and what I’ve been doing to fix them, and what I will be doing to fix those of them that remain. Hopefully if you create a blog using Nucleus CMS, you can avoid some of the problems I’ve had with it, or fix them using the information I’ve provided.
At times the skin looked ugly, or simply broken. I was experimenting with a new skin, and of course had to have a blog to test it on. For anyone out there, I highly recommend creating a test blog before you get started, in order to allow you to work on it without disrupting the operation of your blog. I’m not sure why I didn’t think of it ahead of time.
Also, each skin uses a second set of details called a ‘template’ which determines what each item displays, and how it displays it, so if you want to edit something like how prominent the ‘read more’ link is (something half my readers don’t seem to know is there when I use the default skin) you’ll need to do that through the template.
Nucleus CMS comes with the ability for users to leave comments on blog entries. By default this option is turned on. The blog automatically allows a person to create a link out of what they placed in the name field. The user specifies the location or e-mail address the link will lead to by pasting it into another field. Supposedly, according to a plugin on the CMS site, the blog automatically places rel=nofollow into the code, and offers to get rid of it.
A little bit of background on rel=nofollow. Because the comment and link feature is a common feature on blogs, people began to use that link function to generate ‘backlinks’ which bump a sites search standards on Google, MSN, Yahoo, and other search engines. Blogs were flooded with completely worthless and unrelated comments the same way that a person’s e-mail or a forum might contain that spam. Only unlike e-mail, in addition to bothering various users, the spammer profited even more, improving their standings on Google. This started to hurt Google’s reputation, as some people at least partially blamed them for this large amount of spam. So Google used the ‘rel’ attribute of the link tag, and created a new value for it, called “nofollow”. If any link on your site had rel=”nofollow” in it, Google will ignore that link, and won’t use it for determining the standings of the site in the link.
The “captcha” (capture character) plugin for a Blog is used to make it harder to automate spam. The IP Ban plugin allows you to prevent posts from an IP you know posts nothing from spam, and the Blacklist feature allows you to ban certain words that have been blacklisted. Common ones are “Viagra” and various swear words. These all make spamming harder. However if a person is determined enough, they’ll likely find a way to create spam. Instituting rel=”nofollow” helps to remove the incentive to spam.
After doing all of my editing, I was looking over the html code the PHP scripts were creating for each page, and discovered that the rel=nofollow code was not being instituted. I didn’t know if that was due to my tinkering, or if that plugin was created by a spammer to prevent people from realizing they needed to add the code to their blogs themselves. I later found out that I hadn’t edited the part of the blog where that code would have resided, so I’m betting on the former.
Also as a part of my inspection, I realized that my actual e-mail address was up and for viewing if you dug deep enough into certain areas of the blog. I decided to fix that by altering my e-mail address and pointing it at an invalid one that clearly spelled out I wasn’t going to let people see my address. Unfortunately that “update” of information caused me to have to re-validate my address using an e-mail the blog sent out before I could access any part of the admin area again, or update my information (including pointing my e-mail address back at a valid one so I could re-validate my account). Woops. And unfortunately I’m not knowledgeable enough about databases yet to be able to fix the information by crawling into the information in the database. In the mean time I temporarily disabled the blog using my access to the code that grabs the information from the database, and if you would have visited during this time, you would have seen that fact.
So unfortunately I had to create a copy and paste back up of all of the contents of the blog, delete the old one, and install it all over again from scratch. Fortunately, at least I had some recourse in fixing it. Unfortunately, as a side effect of this, the time stamps for my old posts will be somewhat approximate. I was only able to access the date that I posted them, not the exact time. Also, all of the comments on the blog, once I put them back on, will have the time stamp of the time I re-posted them, not the time stamp of the time they were originally posted. Once I realized I was going to have to reinstall the blog, I figured that posts from spammers wouldn’t hurt for to long, so I re-enabled the blog.
My first priority in getting my blog back up and in running order will be to restore all of my old posts. Following this I’m going to get all the plugins I want installed.
After the plugins, I’ll be putting together an altered version of the default skin and template as a step towards creating my own. The style will look much the same, but there are 4 main changes I’m going to make. After that, it will be a slow change, where I will update a few details at a time. The first of the changes is that I’m going to switch the menu over to the left rather than the right.
The second is that I’m going to make the blog variable width. That is to say, rather than specifying that the blog as a whole will be so many pixels wide, or that the text area will be, these will scale with the width of the browser. Weither the window is at less than full resolution, or the user is using a 20 inch wide screen monitor on it’s maximum resolution, the blog will scale so that the person can actually use the majority of their screen. The only parts that will definitely be fixed width will be things like margins and borders. The only other thing that may be fixed width is the menu on the left side. Other than that, the browser width will determine all. This is, in my opinion, a vast improvement to having to scroll back and forth with a bottom based scroll bar, or having only 1/3 of the screen be taken up on my wide inch monitor I use on my main computer at home. Many of my friends also use high resolutions.
The third change is that I’m going to make the “Read More” link more obvious so that people that aren’t used to reading blogs will realize that there is more to read on split posts like this.
The fourth change is that I will be making sure that I have rel=”nofollow” in all of the links in the comments on my blog.
After that I will be re-enabling comments, and posting all of the old comments people left on the blog previously. Hopefully I’ll be able to get all of that done this weekend.