Okay, I think things are finally (more-or-less) back in shape around here. Sorry about the problems you might encountered here over the past few days. I finally upgraded this site to WordPress 2.1, but I encountered some problems along the way. The problems were really indirectly related to the upgrade, and turned out to be my own dumb fault.
On Friday, I decided to use my lunch hour to perform the upgrade. I backed up my database and my wp-content directory, deleted all the old WP files (I traditionally haven’t bothered with that step, but I knew that several files were renamed/outdated, and I wanted to do some general housecleaning anyhow), installed the new ones, and upgraded the database schema via wp-admin/upgrade.php. Everything looked fine. I switched the theme over to Sandbox and activated the ‘Rockem Sockem’ skin that I had created previously. Then I began activating my sidebar widgets to get my sidebar set up the way I wanted. It was around this time that I started noticing problems…
I started seeing really slow page loads and blank pages, and most of the time when I tried to access an admin page, the browser would time out, or think that it needed to download the page instead of display it. The load on the server was higher than usual, so I figured it was spammers hammering my site at a bad time. Except that when I watched my logs, I really didn’t see much suspicious activity. I wrestled with this for a while, still thinking that high server load was causing the site to have problems. I figured that perhaps upgrading from PHP4 to PHP5 might gain some improvements, and spent a few hours compiling PHP 5.2.0 and recompiling all the associated extensions that I needed. Nope, that didn’t seem to help.
Then at some point, on a whim, I brought up my wife’s web site, which runs on the same server. And what do you know — it came up just fine. I could also login and navigate the admin pages without any problems. Sooooo, the problem was just in my site. Probably a malfunctioning plugin. I disabled all the plugins by renaming the plugin directory temporarily and reloading the page (WP will automatically disable any plugins that it can’t load up, in case you weren’t aware of that trick). Voila, the pages loaded fine. I began re-enabling plugins one-by-one, starting with the ones I was most sure were okay, gradually working down to the likely culprits. Until I finally found it. It was my Now Playing widget, which I had recently (and hastily) refactored. Arg! It was my own fault that I had been having so many problems!
I haven’t narrowed down the exact nature of the problem yet, so that widget remains off. I suspect that the root of the problem is in the old Amazon search library that I’ve been using. I had meant to write my own, updated, stripped-down functions for that, but hadn’t gotten around to it, yet. I suppose I’ll be doing that soon(ish).
So, with that said, welcome to the new improved geek ramblings, powered by WordPress 2.1!
Follow you, follow me
February 15th, 2007Two years ago today, we released WordPress version 1.5. This was a pretty major release that introduced several new features that are still major staples of the current 2.1 branch: the Dashboard, Themes, and Pages. It also added a minor new change which was mildly controversial to some: comments were automatically flagged with the ‘nofollow’ attribute.
The
rel="nofollow"idea had good intentions: to give content producers a way to link to another site without implying that they approve of it. The way it works is that if Google, or Yahoo!, or any other service that uses this standard sees arel="nofollow"attribute on a link, they will ignore it. They don’t follow the link, and they don’t count the link in the destination site’s ranking calculations. One of the main use cases (as in WordPress’ case), was to reduce the effectiveness of comment spam, because the spammers would not get any “Google Juice” out of the links. Hurray for our side! We just stuck our finger in the spammer’s eye!Unfortunately, we also tweaked the eyes of our regular readers, most of whom could probably use a little of that Juice. “Oh well,” we said. “That’s just the price we have to pay for a little peace of mind.” Well, most of us said that. Some were adamantly opposed to the nofollow idea. Many of us knew that it was just a bandaid, and that it wouldn’t really deter spammers from trying, it would just reduce their ability to get high rankings in search engines.
At the time, comment spam was a pretty major problem on many blogs, and there weren’t many effective remedies. It seemed like all of us spent the beginning of each day going through our comment queue, manually deleting the garbage that made it through the gauntlet of whatever defenses we did have in place. So, nofollow was the last-ditch attempt to deny satisfaction to the spammers when our other measures failed. But it did not discriminate. It had no way to know whether it was de-juicing a good guy or a bad guy. (Eric Meyer had some good thoughts on this subject, BTW.)
These days, many sites have better anti-spam measure in place. Akismet has been very effective, and many WordPress users swear by Spam Karma 2. With measures like these in place, hardly any spams ever make it through to be displayed on your blog. And if they do, hopefully you delete them pretty quickly after they appear. So, that’s even better than just telling search engines not to index their links. They can’t index something that they never see in the first place, right?
With that in mind, I’ve installed Kimmo Suominen‘s dofollow plugin here, and configured it to remove the rel=”nofollow” attribute from comment links after two days. The two day limitation is to account for the occasional hiccup where spam might make it through over a weekend, and I don’t get to delete it immediately. The important thing is that I’ll be giving back the Juice to the comments that get to stay here. If you’ve got a WordPress blog, and you feel like comment spam is under control on your site, I encourage you to do the same.
Tags: Akismet, commentspam, Google, Metadata, nofollow, PageRank, plugin, Spam, WordPress, yahoo
Posted in Blogging, Microformats, Plugins, Search, Spam, WordPress | 93 Comments »