How effective is a site re-design? The final proof is in site traffic. When we started re-designing Taragana.com we had many apprehensions. One thing we knew for sure, the corporate site we had then sucked in three major ways:

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Anaconda Theme for WordPress 2.x blogs is a next generation 3 column CSS based theme provided by us. Anaconda Theme requires an attribution link at the bottom of each page. That is all we ask for our hard work in developing and testing this theme. However you may not want to have this attribution link / link back in every page of your blog for some reason. Here is what you can do to remove the linkback / attribution legitimately and without feeling guilty about it.

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Our website ( taragana.com ) needs to continuously adapt to our growing business. The old website was based on Joomla CMS, which despite its strength, was pretty hard to easily customize for our complex needs. We needed a solution to enable us to easily create microsites for our products with distinctive look, embed functionality with PHP snippets etc. After extensive research and prototyping we adopted MODx (review).

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This WordPress blog was hacked for few hours on 24th December (nice Christmas present!) from Russia. The hacker exploited several WordPress vulnerabilities in administrative scripts to gain full access to the website (as permitted to apache user), including the ability to upload & run scripts, delete any file owned by apache user, view the file and directories etc. This is a full disclosure on the how the site was hacked and how I detected and removed the hack along with few comments on the state of WordPress security. I added a WordPress plugin and made modifications to prevent any such hacking attempts in future using WordPress. This is a must read for WordPress bloggers.

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MODx is an excellent AJAX enabled content management system, which is leagues ahead of Joomla / Mambo. One of the features of MODx is that pages aren't fully deleted. They are marked as deleted (displayed as strike-through items) and they are not displayed on the web. However they still remain in the database. This is a great feature to prevent accidental deletion. However sometimes you really need to delete pages to reduce the clutter and prevent conflicting aliases. Here is how you can truly (and irrevocably) delete pages from the database.

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I have been an avid user of Mambo and now Joomla since 2001. taragana.com is designed using Joomla. Unfortunately we haven't been able to maintain the site very well, our fault not Joomla's.

I wanted to re-design the site to highlight our products and service, and to cope up with our plan for several micro-site development in 2008 in addition to delivering a nice look. Let's look at my 5 simple requirements for CMS:
1. We should be able to easily embed custom code (php) to embed widgets (or snippets as Modx likes to call them) in certain pages.
2. We should be able to easily modify the pages, preferably from the page itself (think AJAX editing).
3. Ability to create micro-sites which differ structurally and functionally from main sites
4. Flexible hierarchy and menus
5. Automate Sitemap (Google & regular) & RSS feed generation, nice permalinks & SEO optimized URL
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Do you know about the other Fedora, the open source software repository?
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Update: Comment Guard pro has been released. Please check the features here.

I am happy to announce the release of Comment Guard Plugin (0.2 Beta) for beta testing¹.

Comment Guard plugin (for WordPress) unobtrusively prevents robotic spam² (which accounts of over 99% of your spam) without causing any problem for humans. Humans will not feel any difference at all.

Additionally it also stops cold certain well-known human spamming³ techniques like link stuffing in the current release.

Comment spam has become a serious problem for popular blogs because it is very easy to automate it and inundate hundreds of thousands of blogs in a very short period of time. Comment spams pollutes your blog, removes your Google rank donation capacity, and forces you to advertise others products on your blog for free.

Comment Guard plugin was born after years of frustration with other popular spam prevention plugins like Akismet, Bad Behaviour or Spam Karma. They were either ineffective or too strict and even denied valid comments. In short they are a pain in the arse for genuine commenters and generate lots of false positives (marks a genuine comment as spam). They also consume bandwidth and CPU by saving the junk comments in your database. I wanted to have none of that.

Comment Guard is also unique in that it is pluggable. You can write your own plugins to add more spam prevention technique, gather more statistics and anything else you may desire like sending a cute note to spammers. I will soon publish the plugin API and examples of how you can write your own plugins. We call them pluglets⁴. Link Limit, as described in the previous paragraph is a pluglet too.

Unlike other comment spam prevention plugins like Spam Karma, Bad Behaviour or Akismet it doesn't make any calls to the database, except one to update the statistics. In future releases even that will be optional.

Unlike Bad Behaviour, Spam Karma or Akismet, it doesn't call any external servers to fetch any data or make RBL checks etc. Our principle is simple. Comment spams should consume least amount of resources; in terms of CPU, Bandwidth or memory.

Notes:
Beta testing has been successfully completed. We have successfully tested the plugin for over hundred thousand hours in real-life conditions and we are fully satisfied with its capability and absolute lack of false positives. We are gearing up for the final release in October. Please submit a comment if you are interested.

Beta testing is by invitation only. Please leave a comment below or contact us if you would like to sign up for beta. We will accept 25 more volunteers so signup now.

We will ship to our beta testers by this weekend. If you do not receive it please let me know by email or using our contact form (above).

Robotic spam is spam that is created by automated scripts. They contribute to over 99% of comment spam in any blogs based on our tests of over 10 blogs.

Human spam is when a (sub?) human being actually takes time to visit your blog and drop their spam, touting their site or services. Human spam are harder to catch and are in many cases subjective. What some considers spam, others do not. It is a matter of preference. If someone leaves a comment relevant to the context and then adds his own link (which may be a recent site), I normally approve it. Others consider even such links as spam as it is advertising their site on your blog. However I wouldn't accept any comment containing certain keywords like v*agra, p*ker etc., others may allow them.

Pluglets are small plugins like applets are small applications, servlets are small servers or piglets are small pigs. You get the point.

I have been trying hard to update all of our existing customers with the latest version of Translator Plugin Pro. It is a hard and time consuming effort (and without any remuneration).

There are essentially two challenges to this. First of all the batch processing script used to create a customized version is doing something very strange. For the first processing it is taking around 1 minute 10 seconds, for each subsequent processing the time is increasing in an arithmetic progression; 30-34 seconds each time. So the second client is processed in 1 minute 40 second , the third in 2 minute 25 second and so on. The code looks fine. I wonder through whether PHP does automatic garbage collection like java. In any case memory isn't increasing significantly. CPU is heating up but not appreciably. I still don't understand the cause of this delay. Also after one batch is run the subsequent batch picks up from where it ended last time + 30-34 seconds. In some situations the counter resets. But I haven't been able to consistently reproduce it. Any ideas as to what could be causing this?
Update: I have found and fixed the problem. It is related to a third party library we were using for processing the file.

The second challenge is customization. Several customer have come with small requests of customization down the road which we have done for them, often free. However it becomes a royal pain to find out the requests from email search in MS Outlook. It is possible, despite my best and laborious effort at accuracy, that I may miss someone's customization or even sending an update. So please don't hesitate to contact me if you do not find your update by wednesday or you think we have missed your existing customization. Please be patient. I am trying my best to esnure everyone receives their upgrade.

This update is a wakeup call for full automation. I am already designing a database (inhouse; not exposed to the internet) for storing the customer and order details which we will use to fully automate future upgrades. Also we will need to distribute the upgrade scripts to different machines. I will either use Condor as this is ideally suited for it or develop a custom java based distributed batch processing software. Any suggestions are welcome. However it is easier said than done considering our tightly packed product development schedule till December 2007.

Update: The final batch of updates have been scheduled for processing. I will do a final check tomorrow to see if I missed anyone. So if you don't hear by end of tomorrow, please speak up.

WordPress, a popular blogging software, has released version 2.1 with many exciting features and over 550 bug fixes.

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