HowTo Recover Lost Website Content

Ever loose all your site content? If you’ve maintained a website for any number of years you know that “things happen”. Servers crash, hard drives go bad, and security holes are exploited. Before you realize it, your once simple startup might have overlook backups in its growth and all your hard work is lost. More importantly, all your unique content is lost that you’ve put hours into. It doesn’t have to be that way if you act fast however!

Search Engine Cached Data

The top search engines cache the text on each page of your site so that they can search on it from queries. They also provide this to be viewed by anyone VIA a “cache” link. Google, Yahoo, and MSN have these features. If you act quickly you may be able to obtain all your site data by using the queries below. Make sure you substitute my site with your domain.

Google

Syntax: keywords site:robmalon.com
Example: Search For Wordpress on RobMalon.Com

MSN

Syntax: search term (site:robmalon.com)
Example: Search For Wordpress on RobMalon.Com

Yahoo

Syntax: keyword (Then use “Preferences” to add a site restriction on searches”)

Revision Systems Recover Accidental Mishaps.

Search Engine Cache (again) - The process mentioned above can also be useful if you accidently reverted content to an old version and somehow lost a large chunk of content on a page in the process. Simply enter the current URL into google and click on the “cache” link it provides you for that link.
Wordpress Revisions - Wordpress also has a revision system complete with auto save. Check out the Revision Control plugin which gives you some extra control over it.
Drupal Revisions - Another great CMS, Drupal, also has a built in revision system. Just make sure you’re using it. It doesn’t auto save by itself. You have to consciously put a tick mark in the revision box when saving a page.

Hidden Form Fields To Prevent Bot Spam

Augie (from intellectualcapitalreport.com) presented a spam prevention method idea which we’ve been talking about under a previous post this past week: HowTo Eliminate Wordpress Trackback Comment And Pingback Spam. The basic idea is to provide an extra input field which is hidden to a user when viewed normally from the browser. This means if you check your form data when a submission is being processed, you can determine if the field is still empty. If it is filled out, then a bot must have auto filled the field.

Spam Field Details

The naming convention used on a hidden field should be named “email” or “url” to trick the bot. Your real email field will then of course need to be named something else. A small price to pay for less house cleaning.

Another key to all of this is to wrap your trap (haha) in a DIV so that the a bot cant tell that the field is hidden. Marking it with type=”hidden” on the input tag itself is a bit of a giveaway. Assigning an id or class to the div and specifying display:none; would cause the bot a lot of extra work which most probably aren’t programmed for. You could also use a built in id or class directly on the div to specify it as a hidden field.

Hidden Input Field Code

Here is an example of what your code would look like:

CSS code would look like this:
#email {
display: none
}
OR if you're doing it by the div:
.specialfield {
display: none
}
Your form would look something like this:
<form method="post" action="yourformprocessor.php">
<div class="specialfield"><input id="email" type="text"></div>
<input id="realemail" type="text">
</form>
Download this code: 1113spamformcode.txt

Using Hidden Fields

It isn’t too much of a stretch to add this to a custom solution or implement it into a Wordpress comments or form plugins because id’s and classes are assigned to input fields by default. If you’re not already using a form plugin check out:

cforms II or Contact Form 7 (my preference).

If I get enough requests I’ll write a post which explains how to implement this into Wordpress comments in a similar manner in which I setup the Enhanced Numbered Equation CAPTCHA.

The More Spam Defense The Better

I don’t have a lot of experience in using spam bots, but this is a promising way to enhance our line of defense against spam. More importantly, its not intrusive on a users browsing experience. Unlike a CPATCHA, it requires a valid visitor to do nothing!

If you have any thoughts or comments, about this spam technique, leave them below.

Posted by: Rob | 2008-11-13 | No Comments »
Category: Coding
Tags: PHP, Plugins, Spam, Wordpress
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9 New & Popular Wordpress Plugins In October 2008

Wordpress has had some impressive new plugins over the past few months. I spend a fair amount of time searching them out and testing most of them. Doing this gives me some functionality ideas for my own blog. So, I thought I’d begin sharing with you my top picks. The following are my recommendations from the plugins released in October 2008.

MyADManager

This plugin gives you full management of 125×125 ads. All the way down to automated payments from PayPal. If you don’t like that you can turn the feature off and approve ads as they come in. You can also automatically schedule ads and maintain your own never expiring “home” ads. This plugin trumps a lot of the services out there who often take a rather large cut of your revenue.

WordPress Referrers

Wordpress Referrers is a way of automatically tracking and displaying URL’s that are linking to your site. This plugin gives you the option to rename a URL, specify how long URL’s are kept for, and define how many referrers you want displayed.

WP Post Thumbnail

WP Post Thumbnail does two things. It first allows you to easily crop and save and image within the write post section of Wordpress. It also allows you to configure up to three preset thumbnails which show up within your theme. This is perfect if you want to display a thumbnail on every page or have a thumbnail image associated with each post or a widescreen thumbnail for featured posts.

Note: Sissors is another new plugin this month that is similar to this but focuses on uploading, cropping, and resizing an image before it gets put into the media library.

Landing Sites

Retaining your visitors from a search engine was never so easy. Landing Site is a plugin that detects when a visitor is coming from a search engine and displays a related post.

WP Double Opt-In Subscription

Allows you to have a built in mailing list which gives you a double opt-in method when users sign up. Confirmation links are sent to the user and they confirm it. All the details of the subscription is logged to your Wordpress installation. You can manage the list within Wordpress or export it to be used inside another marketing program. Custom mail server option, customized signup form, unsubscribe notifications, automatic cleanup of users who did not confirm, and more.

All In One Video Pack

This allows you to embed and upload/record/import videos into your post, right through Wordpress. It also allows you to edit and remix content with an online video editor. Manage your video content, create playlists, and allow other users to respond to your video. Supports several embed sources and over 150 video, audio, and image formats/codecs. Note, a lot of this is integrated with Kaltura’s online video editor.

Backlinks

This plugin displays the most recent backlinks it finds from searching blogsearch.google.com. There is a widget in the dashboard of Wordpress that does the exact same thing. The nice thing about this is it doesn’t rely on trackbacks which some blogging platforms don’t have.

d13slideshow

This plugin can create an animated silideshow of anything you want, including a series of featured blog posts or pages on your site. A really nice addition to your frontpage widgets or to display the elements of a service you’re offering.

Note: Featurific is another very popular feature slideshow animator.

Featured Category

A quick and simple way of displaying posts from a category of your choosing. You can customize the amount of posts that are displayed, heading, and layout.

Note: If you want to get your hands dirty with code you can take a look at a simple way on how to do this on any page. My example here: Wordpress Custom Home Page Design - Widgetized Front Page shows you how to do it in the first part of “Coding The Widgets”.

Posted by: Rob | 2008-11-03 | 4 Comments »
Category: Blogging
Tags: Blogging, Plugins, Wordpress
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