Switching to Google Analytics

For years I crunched server logs with WebLog Expert to obtain visitor statistics for my website. During the last four months I also ran my own Referrer Filter to cut down on referrer spam. It was laborious but I thought I was getting a pretty accurate picture of human visitors, without the kind of intrusive … Continue reading “Switching to Google Analytics”

Cleaning WordPress Databases

WordPress is a fine blogging software but the standard package lacks a disturbing number of basic features, even including Akismet and Jetpack. Yesterday I discovered that WordPress, which automatically saves post revisions for every edit and preview, never ever deletes them! Not only does WordPress not delete old revisions automatically, it does not even offer … Continue reading “Cleaning WordPress Databases”

Eternal Sunshine of the Spamless Blog

About eight months after I opened this weblog, spam comments were approaching 100 per day. The very reliable Akismet caught most of them, but checking the rising flood for false positives was getting tiresome. Requiring commenters’ names and e-mail addresses is useless because spammers automatically generate those anyway. Short of shutting down comments entirely, the … Continue reading “Eternal Sunshine of the Spamless Blog”