ContentRobot

Hate seeing trackback spam intermingled with your blog’s comments?

It used to drive us nuts, too.

After some searching, we stumbled upon this great WordPress add-on: Simple Trackback Validation Plugin.

According to the plugin author, it performs simple but very effective tests on all incoming trackbacks to stop trackback spam.

When a trackback is received, this plugin:

1. Checks if the IP address of the trackback sender is equal to the IP address of the webserver the trackback URL is referring to. This reveals almost every spam trackback (more than 99%) since spammers do usually use bots which are not running on the machine of their customers.
2. Retrieves the web page located at the URL included in the trackback. If the page doesn’t a link to your blog, the trackback is considered to be spam. Since most trackback spammers do not set up custom web pages linking to the blogs they attack, this simple test will quickly reveal illegitimate trackbacks. Also, bloggers can be stopped abusing trackback by sending trackbacks with their blog software or webservices without having a link to the post.

There are several options available, including:

• Enabling logging to get all actions
• Selecting how to treat spam trackbacks (do not save in the database or mark as spam or place into moderation, and more)

It’s a great plugin because it makes for a cleaner, faster, better looking blog. We encourage you go try it today.

Today, Jason Calcanis mused that Corporate Vlogs are the future of PR .. Why? He cites his experience with adding Mahalo Daily videos.

Since they started, the videos have gotten four million views. Of those four million, say two million people, have come in contact with the Mahalo brand. And don’t discount the archival value of the shows, where you can add another 2-4m views over their lifetime of the video.

He expects that the videos can pay for itself easily after one year. Consider if you were to pay for four million 15 second spots on the web, the cost would be $25 for each 1,000 views–or $100,000. Their initial $250,000 investment in the Mahalo Daily a year will bring in–if the growth continues–somewhere between 15-30M viewers a year.

Why did they add a video component? The Mahalo team wants to:

1. Entertain people
2. Inform people
3. Represent and build the brand
4. Be a creative outlet for the team

Finally, Calcanis projected that in another three years, every company will have not only a corporate blog but a corporate vlog. The New York Times, JetBlue, American Express, and Apple will communicate with their leading customers with regular videos.

Do you agree with Jason? Will you develop a video-based strategy?

GrokDotCom reports that Google Optimizer has shed its beta status:

Google Website Optimizer can now be accessed by anyone with a basic Google account. Even if you only have so much as a Gmail account, you can start testing your website — for free — regardless of whether you’re running a paid search campaign. (No worries, AdWords users, Website Optimizer still works seamlessly with the rest of the Google product suite.)

Ready to test headlines, copy, images, and other conversion points? Don’t forget to check out:

• GrokDotCom’s free resources
• ContentRobot’s Google Website Optimizer Plugin

PSST! Did you know that up until recently that ContentRobot’s company website had been running atop of *gasp* Drupal? Yes “the WordPress experts” finally converted to this superior platform when we launched our “naked theme” site last month.

While we were hoping to be farther along and show off parts of our new look, we decided to continue to work on the blog-powered website’s underpinnings first. So, we have bitten the bullet and upgraded our site to version 2.5 (and found that the conversion was rather painless).

We are ready to offer upgrades to our clients and feel confident working within the new environment. It does have its foibles, but we are pleased overall with this latest effort from Automattic.

As the weather warms here in the Northern Hemisphere, we hope you are also warming up to WP 2.5. Let us know your experiences so far. We hope our lack of design doesn’t leave you cold - the melt comes soon!

Over the weekend, WordPress launched version 2.5. We have been playing with a beta copy and have been very impressed. If you check out WordPress.org, you’ll even see new site design that aligns with what the software looks like. According to WordPress (and a bit of commentary by ContentRobot), here are the goodies you can expect:

User Features

Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard — WP determined what’s most important in the dashboard and rearranged it elements to allow you to focus on your blogging efforts. Curious to see if it will be easy to get used to the new “admin” - but it looks great.

Dashboard widgets — These (customizable!) widgets can show you stats about your posts, latest comments, people linking to you, new and popular plugins, and WordPress news.

Multi-file upload with progress bar — Select a whole of folder images or music or videos at once and it’ll show you the progress of each upload.

Search posts and pages — Search now includes pages too, a great boon for those with blog-powered websites.

Tag management — Add, rename, delete, and do whatever else you like to do with tags from inside WordPress without plugins.

Password strength meter — Helps you to pick a strong profile password. A great feature for us lazy password creators!

Concurrent editing protection — For those of you on multi-author blogs, WordPress will lock and prevent you from overwriting changes if others have the same post opened at the same time. This is a mature step for the software.

Few-click plugin upgrades — For some of the latest plugins in their stable, WordPress can download and install an upgrade for you. However, this is still dependent a little bit on your host setup, so let ContentRobot continue to help you with all your of plugins.

Friendlier visual post editor — WordPress claims that the new WYSIWYG, which uses version 3.0 of TinyMCE,  “doesn’t mess with your code anymore.” This could be the best feature of them all.

Built-in galleries — The new shortcode will allow you to display all your thumbnails and captions; each can link to a page where people can comment on the individual photos.

Cool Developer Features

Salted passwords — By using the phpass library to stretch and salt all passwords stored in the database, it makes brute-forcing them impractical.

Secure cookies — Cookies are now encrypted.

Inline documentation — The vast majority of the new code displays inline documentation that explains the functions and documents their arguments.

Shortcode API — Shortcodes are little bracket-delineated strings that can be magically expanded at runtime to something more interesting. They give users a short, easy to type and copy/paste string they can move around their post without worrying about messing up complex HTML or embed codes.

Ready to Upgrade?

Upgrading is similar to versions past, but of course you have to worry about plugins that have been left behind. We’ll be letting the bugs shake out and then offering an upgrade path to existing and new clients alike.

Seth Godin wrote a post today about “managing urgencies.” In ContentRobot’s world, if a client site goes down, it’s our urgent responsibility to stop whatever we are doing to get their site fixed and back online.

Yesterday, a highly trafficked, highly customized blog-powered website, was hacked. We tracked it down to a malicious script that has been making its way across the Internet and exploiting holes in older WordPress installs.

This talented fellow has made a short career of being able to silently penetrate deeply into the server to leave the site with blank home pages, turn off critical plugins, and not allow posts to be written and/or saved.

Thank you, hacker, for diverting the energies of three companies from being able to do what they had planned for that day.

But one of the things Godin asked was: Do you have a plan? Determined to learn from this frustrating event, ContentRobot has actually developed a plan to combat hacks along. This three-pronged approach encompasses:

1. Keep WordPress updated to the latest software release as feasible.
2. Be aware of what theme customizations / plugins might be affected.
3. Lock down the install.

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Just when you thought we forgot about our affiliate blog … We took the plunge and began signing up for some affiliate programs with publishing accounts this week.

Chitika
We headed over to Chitika because they are so blog-centric with their advertising. We were especially impressed with their Chitika | RPU program that brings related products right within a product-oriented story. We were approved for a Chitika | eMiniMalls account, which provides relevant content and comparative shopping information. We found it simple and easy to apply to Chitika and highly recommend it.
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No sooner did we report our initial impressions of Open Ads, they rebranded themselves as OpenX today. According to their blog:

After news a few weeks ago of our new investment and the beta of the hosted version of our ad server software, we’ve got more news to share. We did it again, we’ve changed the name of Openads to OpenX.

In the past few months we have spent lots of time with folk in our publisher community to understand better what you want from us. Simply, you want us to make it easier for you to make money online. We’ve already started, launching the beta of the hosted version of our software which we’re scaling as fast as possible to meet the overwhelming demand we see (publishers from over 60 countries have signed up for the beta program!).

This is just the first example of how we plan to move with our publishers beyond our core open source ad serving software. That will always be our heart and soul. But as we start to roll out our hosted service and look towards the future, we thought the time was right to evolve our name to reflect the suite of services we hope one day to offer our publisher community.

ContentRobot expects we will recommend OpenX ad serving software to our clients when we can.

We spent our day yesterday kicking the tires of OpenAds. While a bit of an overkill for some bloggers, this is a great piece of software for those who are committed to serving ads, tracking click-thrus, and making some money.

What is OpenAds?

It’s free ad serving software that allows you to choose banners (from animated GIFs to Flash), campaigns and terms that you define. It includes a sophisticated tracking system means that helps you to gather statistics and optimize campaigns. Note: it’s also big, so it will take a while to download and then upload to your server.
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We hightailed it over to Smashing Magazine’s list of 83 Beautiful WordPress Themes You (Probably Haven’t Seen) to find our affiliate blog theme.

We decided on BlogDog’s Green Dog Theme. Here’s a preview and click here to download it.

One thing that you’ll notice is that the theme is in Russian! Thankfully we have enough experience with WordPress themes, so it didn’t take too long to translate everything into English.

We are enjoying working out its kinks and customizing it for our use. We are really looking forward to launching our (first?) affiliate blog.
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