Freebies
Cool Flash Portfolio Showcase Tools
How you showcase your portfolio is very important for any freelancer or design company. It reflects the way you do business, your attention to details and gives an overall feel of professional work. It can mean the difference from getting or losing clients.
To enrich your portfolio showcase you can use Javascripts based on the Prototype or Moo.Fx libraries, scripts such as Litebox, LightBox 2, Highslide JS, ThickBox & many others. These all work just fine, but are a bit too common these days. If you want something special, you have to go the extra distance, XML Flash based gallery scripts.
Here are some resources you can try. They all use XML and ActionScript and are fully customizable.
5 Exceptional Plugins to Keep Your Wordpress Blog Spam-Free
Quoting from the Akismet website … “Remember the days before spam ?“… Yeah, I know… Nowadays spam is everywhere : in your mail box, on your website, on your blog, on your instant messenger, on your social networking profile, in your online game, on your mobile phone, on your fax, basically everywhere we look on the internet. It has become a constant of our “virtual lives”. The good news is that spam-fighting techniques have also got a lot better.
So what exactly is spam ?
Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages. Spam has been around for ever, since 1978 when the first email advertising messages were sent. Since then it has known a continuous increase over the years. It so widely used because it’s economically viable because advertisers have virtually no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, and the fact it’s difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings.
Wordpress Spam
For a regular Wordpress blog there are 2 large types of spam :
- comment spam, regarding comments posted as a response to a blog post. This also includes trackback spam.
- contact form spam
So what can I do ?
Fortunately there are quite effective ways of eliminating spam from your Wordpress blog. We will present below 5 Wordpress plugins : 3 for comment and trackback spam, and 2 for contact form spam.
Stop Comment and Trackback Spam
Akismet, the first frontier
If you own a Wordpress blog, you know what Akismet is. Akismet, or Automattic Kismet, is a spam filtering service created by Automattic, the corporation which employs most of the main developers of the weblog platform WordPress, and released on October 25, 2005. Akismet attempts to filter link spam from blog comments and spam TrackBack pings.
Akismet comes already installed with every Wordpress blog. All you have to do is activate it from your Wordpress Admin page. For the plugin to work it requires an API key which can be obtained by registering on Wordpress.com.
The plugin stats are a testimony of it’s performance. At the time this article was written Akismet plugins from all the Wordpress blog caught 6,949,364,430 spam messages, and over 8 million today. On our blog has stopped since the last Wordpress update over 24.000 spam comments.
Download :
Usage :
- Download Akismet or use the version included in your Wordpress blog.
- Log in to your Wordpress blog’s admin panel. Go to Plugins and activate Akismet.
- Signup for an account on Wordpress.com
- Get the API key from your Wordpress.com account and go back to your Wordpress admin panel. Go to Plugins -> Akismet Configuration and enter the API key. YourAkismet is now active and your Wordpress blog is now protected by it.
Defensio
An alternative to Akismet is Defensio. No way near as popular as Akismet, Defensio has the advantage of being available for a lot of blogging platforms like : Wordpress, Text Pattern, Movable Type, PixelPost, Mephisto etc.
It has a few advantages like :
- Spam quarantine sorted by spaminess
- OpenID support
- Background color applied to spam comments to increase ease-of-identification
- Spam comments collapsed (and restorable) to allow for easy and efficient navigation
- Performance statistics provided to show how Defensio is doing on your blog
Note : Only works for Wordpress 2.1 or above.
Download :
Usage :
- Deactivate Akismet and/or any other anti-spam plugins by going to your Plugins tab in the WordPress control panel.
- Copy the ‘defensio-anti-spam’ folder (unzipped from the file you downloaded) into ‘wp-content/plugins/’. You should now have a file called ‘defensio.php’ in ‘wp-content/plugins/defensio-anti-spam/’.
- Return to the Plugins tab in your control panel and activate Defensio.
- Under the Plugins tab, you will find a new tab called Defensio Configuration. Go there and enter your API key (issued to you when you signed up for the Defensio service). If the key turns green, this means it has been successfully validated.
- Under Defensio Configuration, you may also set the threshold level for “obvious spam” (this can be hidden from your quarantine, at your option). We recommend you leave this “obvious spam” level at its default value (80%) until you get a feel for what a better value might be for your own purposes.
- Your blog is now protected by Defensio’s enhanced spam filtering web service. From now on, all comments posted to your blog will be analyzed by Defensio and attributed a “spaminess” value that will help you sort and manage your spambox. Under your blog’s Comments tab, notice that the quarantine has been re-labelled “Defensio Spam”.
WP-SpamFree
An extremely powerful anti-spam plugin for WordPress that virtually eliminates comment spam, including trackback and pingback spam. We use it on this blog in combination with Akismet and I must say it’s excellent. Ever since we installed this plugin, basically we didn’t have spam anymore. In just a few months it managed to stop 15.446 spam comments.
Wordpress Fun - Free Wordpress Theme
Details : Professional Wordpress theme, bought and released for its readers by Smashing Magazine. It uses quite a few PNG files, so be sure the image paths to these are correct (for IE6). It can be used with or without the widgets.
Requirements : Wordpress 2.5.1 or Wordpress 2.6
Demo : Wordpress Fun - Free Wordpress Theme demo
Download : Wordpress Fun - Free Wordpress Theme download
