I know this is old news, and that everyone knows how bad spam is on blogs, but I thought I’d share a screenshot of what my blog is telling this morning.
What you see is an actual screenshot from this blog, and it says Akismet has protected this site from 108,241 spam comments.
Akismet was only installed about 6 months ago, so you can see how much spammy activity there is online. I even made the decision a few weeks ago to delete all old comments, right back to 2005, because I don’t have the time to sift through all comments and work out which ones were spammy, or check to make sure that previous commenter’s websites were still live.
Considering that WordPress sites are a prime target for spammers, activating the Akismet plugin is absolutely worth it. I also delete all comments that Akismet doesn’t pick up when they have even a hint of spamminess to them. I recommend you do the same.
In addition, I now also have a message in the sidebar requiring a real name for any commenter. Yes, it’s sad, but the Internet is filled with too many people who want to ruin it for us all. So, if you’d like to comment, please do. But be warned, Akismet is watching 
With the social media wars seemingly at an end, the choice of which buttons to include at the end of each post is a fairly easy one to make. In this site, I only use GooglePlus and Facebook. In this post I’m going to show you how to add their buttons to your WordPress posts.
You might ask why I only use g+ and FB? They are the only two that I find useful, and that seem to rank highly in search engine results.
The first step to adding your social buttons is to create a new file in your theme folder called social.php
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WordPress is the most popular blogging platform for anyone who wants real control over their template and interaction with readers, and often we want to put some code directly into the homepage, and no other page. You could use a plugin, but if you prefer making template changes, here’s a quick tutorial.
The easiest way is to duplicate the index.php in your theme folder, and rename it to home.php, and then making the changes that you want in home.php, upload to your host, and see them in action.
The downside of creating a home.php, especially if the coe you want to use on your homepage is minor, is that you’ll now have to maintain two versions of the index.php. One of them for the homepage, and the original for all other pages that don’t have their own template.
There is however another way, that I’ve been using for ages because it makes it easier for me to manage my themes with fewer files.
What I do is place two extra lines in my index.php, with the code between them, and voila, I don’t need to maintain two versions of the same file. Read More »