irishblogs – Page 48 – Something Odd!

Link Exchange Spammers Are Back Again!

Well, the link spammers never really went away did they? Has anyone noticed a huge increase in the number of “link exchange” emails or is it that I’ve been added to a particularly busy spammer’s list? I just noticed that a few recent ones contained the text “emailsnomore(dot)com” so I’m going to add a gmail filter to delete any emails containing that domain. You probably should too.

Hi,

My name is Daisy Gibson, Web Marketing Consultant. Ive greatly enjoyed looking through your site ocaoimh.ie and I was wondering if you’d be interested in exchanging links with my website, which has a related subject. I can offer you a home page link back from my related websites all in google cache and backlinks which are:

shawntierney(dot)com PR4
collectiveunconsciousltd(dot)com PR3

If you are interested, please send me the following details of your site:

TITLE:
URL:

I’ll add your link as soon as possible, in the next 24 hours. As soon as it’s ready, I’ll send you a confirmation email along with the information (TITLE and URL) regarding my site to be placed at yours.

I hope you have a nice day and thank you for your time.

Kindest regards,

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS NOT A SPAM OR AUTOMATED EMAIL, IT’S ONLY A REQUEST FOR A LINK EXCHANGE. YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS HAS NOT BEEN ADDED TO ANY LISTS, AND YOU WILL NOT BE CONTACTED AGAIN. IF YOU’D LIKE TO MAKE SURE WE DON’T CONTACT YOU AGAIN, PLEASE FILL IN THE FOLLOWING FORM: emailsnomore(dot)com ; PLEASE ACCEPT OUR APOLOGIES FOR CONTACTING YOU.

Celtic Tiger RIP

Brian Cowen and company say sorry. (via)

WP Super Cache 0.9.9.7

WP Super Cache is a full page caching plugin for WordPress that makes your website run much faster!

I’ve just released a new version and the biggest change in this one is the addition of Content Delivery Network (CDN) support thanks to Mark Kubacki who allowed me to integrate his OSSDL CDN Off Linker plugin. (Please go visit his blog and say thank you if you use this feature!)

The CDN support simply rewrites images, CSS and Javascript files so they point at a different hostname. That hostname can be another virtual host on your own server (aka “Poor Man’s CDN”) pointing at your WordPress install or a fully fledged CDN. If your CDN supports “origin pull” then all the files on your server will be copied there as they are requested by visitors. Otherwise you’ll have to transfer the files over manually.

Apart from that, bugs have been fixed, a few features have been tweaked including the uninstall script which has been streamlined somewhat.

I also added links (on the “Easy” settngs page) to some plugins and tools you may find useful in making your site run faster.

Problems? Go to the forum and someone may already have had that problem and solved it. If not, post there and you’ll get a reply.

WP Super Cache and mod_pagespeed

So I finally got a chance to try mod_pagespeed on this server. I particularly wanted to know if it behaved well with WP Super Cache as I’d read reports that it causes problems.

Unfortunately those problems are real but I’ve been told that a new release will be out shortly to address a few bugs so perhaps this will help.

If you’d like to try mod_pagespeed make sure you disable compression in WP Super Cache and clear the cache first. Even though the docs state that the module always generates uncompressed HTML it appears to do the opposite. In fact, it tries to load mod_deflate:

# more pagespeed.load
LoadModule pagespeed_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_pagespeed.so

# Only attempt to load mod_deflate if it hasn’t been loaded already.
<IfModule !mod_deflate.c>
LoadModule deflate_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_deflate.so
</IfModule>

When things were working, supercached files were processed by mod_pagespeed correctly, I noticed inline Javascript was modified to remove whitespace and I presume other changes were made too but I already minify things and have static files off on another domain so perhaps the changes made on my pages are less minimal.

The changes made by mod_pagespeed, like minifying inline Javascript, are not cached by WP Super Cache so your server has to make these changes each time a page is served. I know that mod_deflate does not cache the gzipped page content, but zips up the page each time it’s served. Mod_pagespeed does however provide a caching mechanism so there’s a good chance those changes are cached there. I haven’t looked at the code so I don’t know.

I did have problems with dynamic pages. A simple phpinfo() refused to load quite often, and backend requests sometimes became stuck. Load on the server sky rocketed occasionally, usually when the module cache directory was emptied.

For now I’ve turned mod_pagespeed off but that might change as this is a young project and maturing fast! I’ll update this post whenever this happens.

More plugins releases soon

WP Super Cache, Domain Mapping and Sitewide Tags are all getting quite some attention.

Ron and I have been busy with Domain Mapping and Sitewide Tags.
A new version of Domain Mapping was released a few days ago with a couple of bug fixes and also a new feature that allows you to ignore the “primary domain” on your blogs. It has the potential for duplicate content if a blog can be found at multiple domains but some people need this feature. With careful organisation of content this can be avoided.

Sitewide Tags is almost ready for a new release. Ron added thumbnail support last week, and I checked in code last weekend to fill in the tags page with posts made before the plugin was installed. It needs testing, and if you’re any good at PHP please take a look at the development version on the download page.

WP Super Cache has had a number of bugs squished, preloading works better – it cancels immediately when you click that Cancel button. It also prints the url of the current post being preloaded which is handy if you’re not sure it’s working or not.
I added some extra debugging to make sure the homepage is cached correctly, but you have to enable “extra paranoid checks”. It works fine on my sites but I would really appreciate feedback if you have WordPress installed in a directory, installed in a directory different to where the site is or whatever configuration you might have. If it doesn’t work, the only side effect is that the homepage won’t be cached so it’s easy to spot when there are problems. I want these checks to be active all the time when the new version is finally released so it’s important this works correctly. Grab the development version from the download page and give it a whirl!

Don’t worry about upgrading when the next versions of Super Cache and Sitewide Tags are released. The version number in the development version is the same as the current release so a new version notice will still appear on your dashboard.

I almost forgot. Cookies for Comments has been worked on too! I added code that keeps an eye on how long a visitor reads a post before they post a comment. If the comment is made faster than a certain time the comment is automatically caught. I’ve used it over the weekend here and elsewhere and it’s catching a good number of “real looking” but spammy comments! The development version on the download page is what you’re looking for if you want to try this.

I think I need a P2 blog to post these sort of updates. Blog titles are such a pain sometimes.

The worst targeted spam ever!

I honestly thought that spammers had gotten smarter about making sure their emails were taken seriously. Even the most geeky and anti-marketing of developers will realise that big red and bold text, center justified, looks like something out of the last century. I hope for the sake of their business that they put more effort into their backup service.

This email, which I received twice in the last week is just a joke. I would have immediately marked it as spam and forgotten about it but it mentioned WordPress and obviously my email address is on their list of WordPress bloggers. I wonder if they read my blog?

At least they didn’t CC everyone like an Irish guy did a few years back.

If you want me to look at your new service, write me a nice friendly email, address me by name, email me from your own email address, talk to me about something you’ve gleaned from my blog or my twitter stream so I at least think you’re a friendly individual and I may even check out your site.

Android Battery Saving Tips

Battery usage on all so called “smart phones” is almost universally woeful. Big high-res colour screens, fast processors, sound, wifi and 3g networking all consume gobs of battery power.

Here are some battery saving tips for Android phones. I’m going on a long flight in a few days time so I’ll be trying these tips out before I go!

Go into Settings->About phone->”Battery use” to see what’s chewing up your battery.
Turn off haptic feedback. That’s vibration alerts when you press your screen. Turn off vibration as a notification too.
Apparently 3G uses more power than wifi so make sure wifi is always on. (Settings->Wireless and network->Wifi Settings->Advanced->Wifi sleep policy and select “Never”). My Galaxy S switches to 3G when the screen blanks by default but apparently this is a big battery saver. Only when you have a wifi network around I guess.
Always press “BACK” when you want to exit an app.
Turn off GPS. If your phone uses the cell network to find your location turn that off too.
Turn on power saving, and reduce the screen timeout so it goes black faster.
Turn off wifi when you leave your house or work. That stops your phone trying to connect to a network.
Turn off bluetooth when you don’t need it.
Turn off 3G and use 2G. (Ugh, slow!)
Turn off background data and syncing.
Turn down the brightness on your display.
Don’t use your camera.
Don’t use a live wallpaper, what’s wrong with a static picture?
Don’t use a homescreen widget that pulls data and updates all the time.
Task manager are generally frowned upon but some apps misbehave and don’t close properly. “Watchdog Lite” is a useful app that tells you how much CPU each app running on your phone consumes. Beware closing apps too much. They may look like they’re running, but they’re not. Android keeps them in memory, so they start up quickly next time.
Get Juice Defender off the Market. Besides a ton of battery saving features, the like of which I’m still trying to understand, it has a handy widget that will disable mobile data completely. Nice!

I’d love if Android phones totally disconnected from the Internet when I closed the browser, Tweetdeck or whatever app was using the network. My old Nokia 5800 did that. It connected each time I opened the browser and had wonderful battery life.

So, what other tips can you suggest for power hungry smartphones?

Update! With wifi and the 3G radio on the other night 6% of battery was used over about 6 hours. I switched off wifi and 3G (using Juice Extender) and the phone only burned through 2% of battery power over the same period last night.

Nokia 5800 Long Term Review

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is a smartphone and portable entertainment device by Nokia. It was introduced on October 2, 2008 and released on November 27, 2008. Code-named “Tube”, it is the first touchscreen-equipped S60 device by Nokia. The version being s60v5. It’s part of the XpressMusic series of phones, which emphasizes music and multimedia playback. The touchscreen features tactile feedback. (Wikipedia)

I’ve had a Nokia 5800 for almost a year now. I was really excited when I bought this phone last year. My first touchscreen smartphone! It took some getting used to, having mostly been a Nokia S40 user. It didn’t take long, and in fact now I try to press the screen when I use older phones!

The phone itself does all the usual things and frankly, there are many in-depth reviews out there. Here are a few:

I love this phone. It’s the best phone I’ve ever owned. It’s not perfect by any means but the pros outweigh the cons!

I love the on-screen keyboard for entering texts. It will switch from portait to landscape mode when you turn the phone on it’s side. When I first bought the phone I could use predictive text in both portrait and landscape mode but the latest firmware upgrade changed that. In landscape mode I can’t use predictive text now. That sucks.
The GPS works reasonably well though. Using Windows or Mac OS X software you can download maps for your area to the phone. Unfortunately the GPS chip in the phone is Assisted GPS. It makes a network connection almost every time it needs to find it’s location. I actually bought a data add-on simply because the phone seemed to “leak” data for no apparent reason but it was probably because I had loaded Nokia Maps.
Nokia recently made their navigation system free of charge and it works, sometimes well, sometimes not. Unfortunately it sends us driving in round about ways on occasion. Our journey may be directly down a road but the map told us to cross the river, drive for a bit and then drive across a bridge further up!
The camera is decent enough. It has a flash too. There’s a plastic cover over the lens on the back and unfortunately it cracked. I bought a cheap cover on Amazon but now the light leaks from the flash so I usually disable it when I can.
Reception is very good. Phone calls don’t drop very often, and texts go through all the time. Data calls drop occasionally, and will drop back to Edge if required. No “grip of death”! (har har, bet you’re all sick of that now aren’t you?)
My favourite apps would have to be Gravity, a Twitter application, and Opera Mini for browsing. Opera Mini loads the mobile version of Gmail and Google Reader quickly and display them with little lag. There’s also the free Youtube app which is excellent but I prefer to use a computer for watching videos. I also have numerous free apps and games installed, almost all from the Ovi store.
The Ovi store is Nokia’s application store. It’s basic, but it’s quite good. You can search for apps, and sort and display by different criteria. Only want free apps? There ya go! Installing is a sinch, but it would be nice if they made reviews more accessible. You have to click through to them.
Battery life is pretty good too. If you’re browsing the net and making phone calls it’ll last well over a day but add GPS and suddenly battery life drops like a bomb. If it has to hunt for a signal that hurts too unfortunately.

So, there it is. The Nokia 5800 is an excellent phone. It’s not perfect but I can heartily recommend it.

My next phone? I already bought it. It’s the Samsung Galaxy S, an Android powered smartphone. While the 5800 is an excellent phone it’s showing it’s age. Using the new phone is like moving from Windows 3.11 on a 486 to Windows 95 on a Pentium. Hmm, time to update my analogies?

Who's abusing your website?

I wanted to know what IP addresses were hitting my website. I’d done this before and it only took a moment or two to recreate the following commands. Still, here it is for future reference.

This code:

Excludes “wp-content” and “wp-includes” requests.
Uses “cut” to cut out the IP address.
Sorts the list of IP addresses.
Uses “uniq” to count the occurrence of each IP.
And finally reverse sorts the list again, by number of occurrences, with the largest number at the top.

You’ll probably find Google and Yahoo! bots near the top of the list, but I also found the “Jyxobot/1” bot was quite busy today.

Oink!

Remember Oink! the comic from the ’80s? Ah happy memories. There are two issues archived here, and the Wikipedia page on the comic is a fountain of knowledge.

It didn’t last long but I’m pretty sure I bought the very last issue. This comic strip rings a bell..