update my blog more often

So, I’ve spent time on and off this week with finding new ways to combat spammers on my blog.

It’s become much more of an uphill battle in the past few years, as spammers continue to increase their attacks.

I’ve had to turn off comments on my blog as the risks are simply not worth the return at this point.

I’ve added several new widgets and plugins to help with the effort and so far they are really proving to be helpful. I’ve been banning IP addresses left, right and center – especially those coming from China, Russia, Turkey, Romania, Ukraine, Taiwan and a few more. Those tend to be nothing but spammers and my blog is not intended for that geographic area anyway.

I’ve also turned off trackbacks and pings and have noticed an improvement.

So the battle continues!!

So, I’ve been continuing to tweak my blog since I did the big upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress.

Mostly, I’ve been seeking to replace some of the lost functionality of my previous outdated plugins and widgets. The one I missed the most was my Translations buttons, as I receive quite a bit of international visitors who do not necessarily speak or read English.

It took quite a bit of researching and experimenting to find one that would work fairly easily, without causing any conflicts with existing plugins.

I also had to add some extra stats plugins as my old one was no longer valid. I managed to get 2 of the working: Daily Stat and Statpress, so I’ll see how they work out in the long run.

Lastly, I added a few blog entries that had formerly been saved in draft form, but had I had not been able to publish with the old outdated version of Wordpress. I backdated them to appear when they were originally supposed to show up, so they are not all “showing up at once”, but more spaced out.

Well, my Wordpress blog had been woefully out of date (by several years and multiple versions); however I had been hesitant to upgrade it for fear that the upgrade would have major problems.

I finally bit the bullet; first I did a major backup of all my blog files and folders as well as the database and copied them all to my hard drive.

Secondly, I did the auto-update via the Wordpress admin area, as I figured that would be the most reliable way. However, I did experience some strange issues with the left side Admin Navigation Menu not showing up at all.

I found this to be very strange, because I had recently did a totally new installation of Wordpress for a friend, and I had a general idea of the new layout.

After trying it on different web browsers (Safari & Firefox), turning off any web extensions, clearing my cache, logging in and out – still no success.

I even tried contacting my upstream web hosting provider; but their support team just had a quick look saying it was nothing wrong with the server and redirected me to contact Wordpress support. I had already combed through the support forums for several hours but did not find any posts similar to my issue.

I did finally manage to access an admin page that let me turn off all the Wordpress plugins and VOILÀ – a working admin section once again!! I slowly turned on a few of them one at a time until I determined which caused the problem and deleted it.

So it took a lot of determination and hard work, but I finally got my blog updated to the latest version. I also had to update to a new theme, as the old one was no longer supported. I picked a fairly simple black and red one for now, but I’ll keep an eye out for something a bit more elegant when I have more time to search through online WP themes.

My hosting server was recently updated and it caused my blog to totally crash, because it was an older version of Wordpress.

I managed to get the upstream provider to solve the problem, by having them do the update to match the server’s new specifications. It saved me a lot of personal frustration and stress. I still, however, have to get used to the new interface and such before I can get to doing much work on it.

This past week, I worked a bit on my blog and added a few new blog entries. They related mostly to a few related local events in the news that would be of interest to my blog readers.

Not much, but it still counts towards keeping my blog active…

Over the past week, I’ve updated several sections of my blog:

- I checked all the web links to see if they still lead to valid sites and removed any dead links.

- I updated a list of online resources, including several discussion groups.

- I also added several new blog entries