I very rarely talk about the spam comment status of my blog. I normally get under 10 spam comments a day, which is quite a low figure, and is one that i’m happy with. I normally navigate to the Akismet spam comments control panel and hit “delete all” after i’ve quickly skimmed through them. Most of the comments I get are full of pointless links and randomly placed BBcode, (presumably for mass deployment of the same comment over different site systems) but some don’t contain any links in the comment body at all; just the website URL of the [spam] commenter. I am completely astounded as to how Akismet is able to catch and delete comments such as those, and it does so by asking very little from the user.

It’s the one service I think my blog relies most on to stop the pointless spam infestation that resides within the internet, and I don’t think the service has allowed one spam comment to be allowed live yet, that’s how darn good it is. I think I highly underestimate it, and the small link situated in the “Buttons” section in my sidebar hardly gives it the credit it should have.

I guess the internet can be a magical place for new users who don’t know what’s what, but a confusing place too. If you want to create a web site you have to search around and find out how to do it yourself, there isn’t much explaining going on.

So, i’ve create this guide. It’s designed to help people get on with their own website, using companies that I use and find great to be a customer of. It’s also a guide to direct people who ask me how to make a website to, as i’m planning to explain everything from domains to a simple guide of setting up something like Drupal with cPanel, something that is offered as standard with my current host A Small Orange.

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I was watching some clips of the Web 2.0 Expo on blip.tv, and I came across Matt Mullenweg’s speech on WordPress, and what he would like to see in the future of blogging. He pointed out that when you post, especially on WordPress.com, when people read your post all they have is the comments section, and possibly a chronological backwards/forwards post link, but that’s basically it for the reader. If they want to find out more on that given subject, they would have to search for the content.

On this blog it’s pretty much the same, you read the normally extremely short posts, and are left disappointed either with the quality of how i’ve explained things, or the fact that you want to read more about that given subject from another blog. I know I have comments, but they are hardly busy at the best of times (i think the average around here is about 0 comments per post). Also a recent addition is the “Possibly Related” section below each post, which I had to go through every damn post on here and tag to get working. But, I don’t usually write other posts expanding on posts prior to them, so they usually don’t help the reader at all.

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I am seriously sick to death of the fucking retards that can’t write blog posts from their own minds, so instead copy other people’s and make the content look like their own.

You know, the kind of dicks that prey on people’s personal blogs, like this one, and copy the content leaving little evidence of the original author. I’ve never taken this approach to blogging, and every single post on this blog has been formulated from my head; from my creativity. I think that the minority of bloggers have completely missed the point of blogging altogether, and assumed that hey, it’s on the internet, why not just copy it?

For example, this site is relatively small. Just take a look at my Mint installation and you will see that I get around 30-40 unique visitors a day. So, what I don’t need is people taking my content, and posting it on their website.

But, that is exactly what has happened with my “Installing and Configuring Lampp” post, which has proved my most popular post, but has also proved the most prone to copying. Why the fuck you would do that I don’t know, but the fact that people do copy pisses me off beyond belief.

So, if you’re not clever enough to write your own blog posts, and instead prey on other people’s websites, I don’t think blogging is right for you, eh?

I didn’t realise that upgrading WordPress would break the pretty random redirect plugin that I modified, but it was brought to my attention today that it did. So, I set about trying to fix it.

The solution I came up with was to create a page with the permalink “/random/”, so that I could apply a page template to it.

Grab my page template: Source, ZIP. Upload it to your active theme directory.

Now you need to create a page called Random. You can fill it with any text you want, because no-one will see it anyway.

At the bottom of the WordPress edit page panel, under Advanced Options, select the random redirect page template.

You now have a fully functional /random/ page that will redirect you to a random post on your site when someone visits it, and the page will show up on any page lists you have on your theme, meaning you don’t have to manually add the link.

Now wasn’t that easy?

I logged into my Development blog to find that there was a new version of WordPress, as my main blog hadn’t noticed. I jumped over to the WordPress site only to find an unfamiliar new design, which is completely and utterly awesome.

When I installed the update I couldn’t believe how different the administration panel looks - it’s so fresh! It nearly makes me feel a little guilty about my very dark blog theme. Being the casual blogger that I am I love the new administration layout and the new swing of things, even if there were some minor issues with the new uploader under Apache 2 that could be sorted with a few lines in the htaccess file.