Two weeks ago, I got notifications for pingbacks from a website. Though the domain name sounded like a valid web development related site, getting pings to multiple articles from it made me suspicious. Visiting the site, I found that it was nothing but a feed scraper. There was no information about the owner of the site, and the about page was just the default WordPress about page. All the posts were taken from other sites with no attribution given. WebMaster View RSS feed contains links to each article in article content itself. That’s why I got pingbacks.

After three days I got another wave of pingback notifications for my new posts. This time, I decided to do something about it.

Read the article "How to protect your content from scrapers" on WebMaster View

The Brads – Early Morning

Read the article "404 Pants Not Found" on WebMaster View

Go to Opera labs, download new Opera 10 and enable new features from status bar. Besides Opera Unite, which enables users to convert their browser into a web server and share data, two other features available are, Opera link and Opera Turbo.

Opera link allows you to synchronize your bookmarks, Speed Dial entries, notes and other useful browser information, so they are available to you wherever you go.

Opera Turbo is a server-side optimization and compression technology that speeds up data transfer and reduces the amount of data that needs to be downloaded in order to view the page by up to 80%.

Related links

• Opera Unite Homepage
• Download Opera 10
• Opera Link
• Opera Turbo

Read the article "Opera Unite Reinvents the Web" on WebMaster View

Believe it: the humble hyperlink, thanks to pervasive URL shortening, can now be wielded as a weapon. The internet is the house that PageRank built, and it’s all predicated on hyperlinks. Once you start making every link your special flavor of “shortened” link, framing the target content — heck, maybe wrapping it in a few ads for good measure — you’ve completely turned that system on its head.

Read the full article: Url Shorteners: Destroying the Web Since 2002

Via Binny VA

Read the article "URL Shortening Destroying the Web" on WebMaster View

automatic_feed_links(false);

Read the article "WordPress 2.8: Disable automatic feed links" on WebMaster View

And many more features

Read the article "WordPress 2.8 Released" on WebMaster View

You can get it using pear install command or download it. Then code your script like following:

#!/usr/bin/php -q
<?php
require_once 'System/Daemon.php';
System_Daemon::setOption('appName', 'my_script_name');
System_Daemon::setOption('authorEmail', 'me@example.com');
System_Daemon::start();
/*
Rest of your code goes here.
*/

// Stop daemon.
if(some_condition())
{
	System_Daemon::stop();
}
?>

Chmod to make it executable and execute it as root/admin user:

chmod 755 /path/to/your/script.php

sudo /path/to/your/script.php

Read the article "Daemonize PHP script" on WebMaster View

Most popular permalink format among bloggers is date based. But many SEO experts would advise you against it . To make URIs short and keyword rich, they suggest the structure /category/post-name/ or just /post-name/

So, what’s the problem?

Read the article "URI Structure: SEO vs. Scalability" on WebMaster View

If you do not encode special characters in web forms, you run the risk of breaking the search query or the ability to insert malicious code into the database.

Tip: In PHP, always use mysql_real_escape_string function to sanitize data.

Read the article "What an apostrophe can do to your site?" on WebMaster View

The fix: add “200 OK” header.

require('/path/to/wordpress/wp-blog-header.php');
header("HTTP/1.1 200 OK");
/* Your code  goes in here */

Read the article "Using WordPress functions in External Files" on WebMaster View