WordPress.com goes to 3 Gigabytes
WordPress.com has just increased its storage space allowance to a massive 3 Gigabytes — that should be more than enough for anyone with text and images, and also enough for audio and movies, or other kinds of large files.
…everyone’s free upload space has been increased 60x from 50mb to 3,000mb. …
Our hope is that much in the same way Gmail transformed the way people think about email, we’ll give people the freedom to blog rich media without having to worry about how many kilobytes are left in their upload space.
[Via WordPress.com Blog: Free Space to Three Gigabytes.]
Bad Behavior/Digg Conflict
This morning, while experimenting with a Digg link on my personal blog, I got an unusual message from Digg saying:
This link does not appear to be a working link. Please check the URL and try again.
Huh?
The link, of course, was fine. It was a link to the home page of my site.
Why is this a big deal? Well, being “dugg” can increase the amount of attention your Web site gets among blog readers. A well-dugg post can attract many, many hits. Some of those people might turn into regular readers.
(You can read my experiences with being dugg here and here. Although things can get a bit out of control when you end up on Digg’s home page, I lived through it without any permanent damage.)
Since I was on Digg, I decided to do a Digg search for the error message. The article I found, “Bad Behavior 2.0.11 Wordpress Plugin Blocking Digg Submission” on GeekTeks.com answered my question and provided a fix.
Apparently, when the author of Bad Behavior updated his plugin and spam site references, Digg was blocked as a legitimate site. The solution is to add Digg’s IP address to Bad Behavior’s whitelist. I just did this on all sites running Bad Behavior and the problem has gone away.
Miraz and I highly recommend Bad Behavior in our WordPress book. It not only helps prevent spam comments from being posted to your WordPress blog, but it also reduces the amount of hits to your MySQL database, thus reducing site congestion and theoretically speeding up access to your site.
Do you use Bad Behavior 2.0.11? If so, read the above-referenced article and follow its instructions to fix the problem.
My essential WordPress plugins
After showing my new MacTips Archive layout to a friend and fellow WordPress user, I was asked which plugins I use on that site. Here’s the list. Descriptions and links are taken straight from the Plugins page in the Dashboard, edited to remove non-essential content.
- Bad Behavior
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Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site.
- Democracy
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This poll plugin is easy to use, install, and manage. It uses AJAX to load data, making it quick and fun to use.
- Democracy Widget
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Adds a sidebar widget for use with Andrew Sutherland’s Democracy Poll widget.
- Popularity Contest
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This will enable ranking of your posts by popularity; using the behavior of your visitors to determine each post’s popularity.
- Related Posts
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Returns a list of the related entries based on active / passive keyword matches.
- Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form
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This powerful yet easy-to-install contact form features exceptional accessibility and usability while still providing extensive anti-spam and anti-exploit security features.
- Social Bookmarks
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Adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts that allow your visitors to easily submit them to a number of social bookmarking sites.
- Spam Karma 2
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Ultimate Spam Killer for WordPress.
- Subscribe To Comments
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Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.
- WordPress.com Stats
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Tracks views, post / page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key.
- WP-EMail
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Allows people to recommend / send your WordPress blog’s post / page to a friend.