The Web Design Blog

July 17, 2008

Wordpress 2.6 is out

Wordpress 2.6 is out, go grab it ландшафтhere

June 14, 2008

How to delete all pending comments in wordpress

As you probably know this blog hasn’t really been doing anything for some time now. As such, there are exactly 78,445 comments awaiting moderation, and I am certain that they are all spam.

So I can just delete them all right? Sure, wordpress allows you to remove comments 25 at a time, so it will take a small team to get this one by the end of the month.

I deleted the comments straight out of the database in just a few seconds, and here is how I did it.

First, I made a backup of the database.

Following that, I went into phpmyadmin, selected the database wordpress is using, and hit the SQL tab.

I than check in the wordpress admin panel how many comments were pending, than ran the following command in the SQL section of phpmyadmin

SELECT *FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved =”0″

This this will output a number. Make sure this is the exact same number as the amount of pending comments you have in the wordpress admin panel. It should be. If it isn’t you have some serious problems which I can’t help you with.

Now that we have isolated the pending comments, time to delete them all. Go back into the SQL section and enter this command

delete from wp_comments WHERE comment_approved =”0″

This will delete all of these entries from the database directly.

You are done. Go back into the wordpress admin and make sure that the pending comments are gone. Your next step, is to install a better wordpress spam plugin like Akismet.

June 13, 2008

Reduce comment spam with an auto-close comments plugin

Web Design

I just installed a very handy wordpress plugin on a couple of blogs.

Comment spam is obviously a very big issue in the blogosphere, and while there are some fantastic anti-spam plugins out there, they don’t catch all of them. A good way to solve a lot of this is to close old posts. There isn’t really many occasions where comment discussion continues after a couple of weeks, so close all new comments. The majority of blog comment spam is done on your older posts in the archive.

This plugin will automatically close your comments after length of time you set (the default is 14 days). Old comments can still be read, however a user cannot post a new one.

June 12, 2008

Use wordpress one click upgrade - seriously

Web Master

I have a lot of blogs on my server and almost all of them run wordpress. Half are mine and the rest are friend’s blogs which I am nice enough to host for them.

The problem with this, is that wordpress rolls out a new upgrade every couple of months, sometimes more frequently. Upgrading wordpress is kind of a hassle, especially when this needs to be done to 20 of them at once.

There are two options to make this much easier. One is using Sub Version, however this is kind of technical. The other is to install the wordpress automatic upgrade plugin.

It is a simple install like all wordpress plugins, and it basically lets you upgrade the wordpress software in literally 10 seconds. It even makes a backup for you to revert to should something go wrong. Very handy, upgrading 20 wordpress blogs takes about 5 minutes now, log into the admin panel and click a button, make sure it worked, and onto the next one. Easy as pie.

May 29, 2008

Google purged .info domains?

Web Master

???????? ????? ????????Apparently Google removed all .info domains from it’s index yesterday, which one could argue is due to spam. This should be something that webmasters should consider. Is that nice .info domain you are using going to help or hinder your website, or should you settle for a average .com domain? It’s pretty clear that .info are 99% used for spammy websites. Will you be considered part of that crowd when using that domain?

April 28, 2008