Tag: wordpress

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Koko Analytics Recording SBInstitutionsBot/0.1 Requests as Visitors/Page Visits · Issue #296 · ibericode/koko-analytics by nafnlj (GitHub)
My Set-Up I run the non-pro version of Koko Analytics on my WordPress site. I disable cookies and exclude visits from all logged-in users. What Happened? On two separate days, Koko Analytics was sh...

On March `12 and 19, I received a highly unusual number of visitors and page views on The New Leaf Journal according to Koko Analytics. By “unusual,” I mean about 10X as many visitors as expected. No individual article had an unusual number of views and my Koko Analytics stats showed the usual list of referrers (mostly search engines) at usual referral numbers. I checked by server logs on the 19th and determined that the likely culprit was SBInstitutionsBot/0.1 (it appears to be a Japanese web crawler for AI), which was hammering my site with requests as I was seeing unusually high visitor numbers. I used Jeff Starr’s BBQ Pro firewall plugin to block the bot. My Koko Analytics stats quickly returned to normal. I reported the issue to Koko Analytics on GitHub, so I hope the relevant IP addresses are added to the do not count list if it turns out that my diagnosis was correct. (In any event, one of my former visitors, PoorlyConfiguredWebCrawler, was much better behaved than SBInstitutionsBot.)

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I noticed when reviewing my server logs that the comments feeds for individual posts were receiving hits. This is undesirable since the only “comments” we have are pingbacks and webmentions. I wanted to remove the comments feeds from the head. I found a solution in a 2018 Stack Overflow post combined with an addendum from another user. I added the following code to the child theme functions.php both here and on The New Leaf Journal:

add_filter('feed_links_show_comments_feed', function() {
return false;
});

[Solution Source: Users leoauri and Ivan Shatsky on Stack Overflow]

(PS: I am not a WordPress developer. Please do your own research and double check your work before messing with your functions.php, but it seems to be working here. If someone has a better solution, do tell.)

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I came across Gautam krishna R’s blog-post-workflow repository on GitHub last night (being January 2, 2025). In short, it is a GitHub workflow for fetching RSS feeds and adding them to a GitHub profile README.md file. I created a profile repository (I had been meaning to for a while) and added three feeds: My ATOM feeds for this site and The New Leaf Journal and my Buttondown newsletter feed. Everything worked, but symbols in headlines for this feed and New Leaf Journal were being rendered oddly. I tried switching both WordPress feeds from ATOM to RSS. Now everything works perfectly. It is possible that I could have fixed the formatting using the available configuration options, but for this purpose (for mosy purposes, really), there is no difference between the WordPress RSS and ATOM feeds. You can see my GitHub profile with the feeds here.

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Blogger Chris Lovie-Taylor wrote about using WordPress Reader as his social network. I am only mildly acquainted with WordPress Reader because it is a part of wordpress.com instead of wordpress.org and both this site and The New Leaf Journal are powered by the WordPress software on a VPS. However, I do have a WordPress.com account and a created a single-page personal feed aggregator site (which could use a touch-up), so I have an idea of how WordPress Reader works. As Mr. Lovie-Taylor explains, you can automatically discover and follow WordPress.com site and add any site with an RSS/ATOM feed to your list of follows. I very much like the concept and appreciate that it allows following non-WordPress.com sites (.org sites can appear with the help of the Jetpack plugin but I am not running Jetpack on either of my sites). What I do not like is that it is tethered to WordPress.com. I think there is an idea here, however, for a “social” media site based on following external sites and sharing posts, maybe even with some Hypothes.is functionality.

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My writing setup by James (jamesg.blog)
At this week’s Homebrew Website Club, I asked everyone what tools they use for writing. Participants shared a range of tools, from BBEdit, a text editor for macOS, to “Written? Kitten!”, a web-based text editor that shows a photo of a cat after you have written a certain number of words. Delig...

Back in December I bookmarked a post on James Coffee Blog titled “My Writing Setup.” The post outlines one writing set-up and invites people to share their own via webmention. My writing set-up for full articles over at The New Leaf Journal is similar to when I wrote about my writing workflow in December 2021. I draft my articles in markdown using Ghostwriter and then export them into LibreOffice Writer (as .odt files) for final edits and transfer to WordPress. Since the 2021 article, I have added Yoga Image Optimizer to my workflow for compressing images and now use Shotwell instead of Nomacs for basic image edits. On this more humble site, I usually use the WordPress editor (note I use the classic editor) here instead of drafting the posts externally. There are some ancillary components of my workflow. For example, why am I responding to a post from 10 months ago? At some point, I saved it in a folder I created in my Zotero library for future article ideas.

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I had been planning to use the Gwolle Guestbook plugin here (I cannot use it on The New Leaf Journal because it relies on JQuery, which I disable over there). However, I decided that it was too heavy for what will probably be a light use-case. Over on The New Leaf Journal, I had briefly tried a comments-based Guestbook with an open source spam blocklist. However, we did not get any legitimate entries in that Guestbook before I shuttered it on account of the fact that a small number of spam comments were  somehow showing up as published despite my requiring moderation in the WordPress settings. Wanting a Guestbook, I decided to give it a try on both sides while adding Antispam Bee, an entirely local anti-spam plugin, to my set-up. I also added a Block List Updater from the same developer to keep the open source-sourced blocklist up to date without my manual intervention. Finally, I use a plugin called Plugin Load Filter with allows me to explicitly limit Antispam Bee to specific pages. For example, this means that Antispam Bee only functions on the Guestbook page of The New Leaf Journal at the moment. We will see how it goes. But the way, while this site’s Guestbook looks solid (if I do so humbly submit myself), take a look at what I did on The New Leaf Journal side of things.

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The top WordPress plugins are… a little sad? by Chris Coyier (chriscoyier.net)

This is a little negative-nancy-ish, so if you aren’t feeling that right now — just close this tab 😜. It struck me recently how this list of plugins I saw in the 2023 Annual WordPress Survey wasn’t full of fun and interesting plugins that do interesting and unique things, they mostly just fix boring problems […]

In November 2023, Chris Coyier published his thoughts on the 20 most popular WordPress plugins as of July 2023. I run two WordPress sites: this one and The New Leaf Journal. Between the two, I use a good number of plugins. Surely I must have thoughts on the list! Well first, let’s see the plugins:

  • Yoast SEO
  • Monsterinsights Google Analytics
  • WordPress Importer
  • All-in-One-WP-Migration
  • Wordfence
  • Contact Form by WPForums
  • Elementor Website Builder
  • Duplicate Page
  • Akismet Spam Protection
  • Contact Form 7
  • WooCommerce
  • Classic Editor
  • Google Site Kit
  • Yoast Duplicate Post
  • Really Simple SSL
  • WP Mail SMTP
  • All-in-One SEO
  • UpdraftPlus
  • Jetpack
  • LiteSpeed Cache

I only use two of these plugins. I use UpdraftPlus on both this site and NLJ (see my post on using it for migrating to a new host). I use the Classic Editor plugin on this site but not on The New Leaf Journal.

There are a few that I used a long time ago. I used Yoast SEO from summer 2020 through the end of 2021 before switching to the lighter, more performant, and less annoying The SEO Framework in 2022 (see my post on its humane site maps). I shamefully used Monsterinsights Google Analytics four about two months in 2020 (before I knew better) before switching to the local and privacy-friendly Koko Analytics in 2020. I discuss my Koko Analytics stats in every edition of our weekly newsletter and in The New Leaf Journal’s year-end article rankings (see 2023). I accept an invitation from another post to give it my high recommendation. I briefly used Wordfence in 2020 before quickly moving away from all-in-one security suites. I will note separately that neither Monsterinsights nor Wordfence cleaned up after themselves well, leaving a ton of options behind. I believe I also used Realy Simple SSL for a time early on before figuring out how to set the requisite headers in my site’s .htaccess file (hat tip to Jeff Starr and his myriad free resources at Perishable Press). I never tried the other plugins. I will note with regard to caching that I have used WP Super Cache since late June 2020 and have been consistently impressed by it.

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I installed the Hum link shortener on The New Leaf Journal and I like it thus far. Now I just played around with the ActivityPub WordPress plugin settings so I am trying this post to see how it looks from Mastodon. Don’t mind me. (I should also figure out why my New Leaf Journal posts stopped showing up through the AP plugin but that’s another matter.)

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Integrating Koko Analytics stats by Mikko Saari (relevanssi.com)
It’s possible to integrate all kinds of external data to Relevanssi weights. Koko Analytics is a great analytics plugin. It collects stats about your visitors and stores them in the local database, which means those stats are available for Relevanssi. For some sites, this makes a lot of sense. For...

I have been using Koko Analytics on The New Leaf Journal since 2020 and I also use it on this site. Moreover, I use Relevanssi Light to improve on WordPress’s (sub-standard) default search after having briefly used the much heavier and more robust Relevanssi plugin. While I plan to stick with Relevanssi Light because it is good enough for my search-improvement purposes, I was still interested to read a 2022 post by the developer of the Relevanssi plugins about “[i]ntegrating Koko Analytics stats as a factor in the weight calculations [fior Relevanssi Premium].” In short, he demonstrates a PHP snippet that would allow Relevanssi Premium users to slightly favor popular posts in searches. This is very neat and I would definitely try it if I were running Relevanssi Premium. For those of you with less intense search needs or limited resources, however, I recommend giving Relevanssi Light a try — it is as good as it is simple.

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URL as a sentence by Adam Newbold (Neatnik Notes)
I wondered about the idea of a URL being a complete sentence, and I picked up the domain newbold.is as the basis for my goofing around with the concept.

I came across an interesting post by Adam Newbold about “the idea of a URL being a complete sentence.” He picked up a domain specifically for the purpose (name.is) and created some sentence-style URLs with note-length content. While this domain is not purpose-built for that, you will note that I wrote the URL of this post in the form of a question about URL sentences. The post made me think of one WordPress-related area where these fun sentence URLs could work well; I reviewed a simple extension for having a WordPress site produce a TWTXT feed (see it in use here and on The New Leaf Journal). By default, it each post is represented with the title and short URL. However, if one went all in on Mr. Newbold’s sentence URLs and modified the TWTXT plugin to make each feed entry the full URL of the post and nothing else, it would work very nicely (note that this could be done with non-WordPress sites, I am only focusing on WordPress since that is what I use for my two projects).

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This site and The New Leaf Journal are self-hosted WordPress sites. I have never really used WordPress.com. However, I made a WordPress.com account around the time I started The New Leaf Journal in 2020 for some reason I no longer remember (maybe it had to do with Gravatar, although that is moot now). I gave up on maintaing my now-former Osmosfeed aggregator on GitHub because figuring out why it was not building required too much time and effort for a project that I want to be low maintenance. Instead, I decided to finally take advantage of having the ability to make a free WordPress.com site. Behold, my free WordPress.com aggregator site that shows off my supreme full site editor skills: The Pressed Leaf Reader.

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If you have a WordPress site, you can subscribe to yourself on Minds and Minds will recognize your WordPress account as a follower. In order to this, you need the ActivityPub and Friends plugins, both available in the regular WordPress plugin repos

After both are configured, go into your Friends admin menu and add a new friend. Add your Minds account in the following format:

@[username]@minds.com

From the WordPress side, you can “subscribe” to your Minds account. I checked from the Minds side and it recognized my WordPress site as a new subscriber/follower.

Caveat: There is a quirk with multi-user WordPress sites. I set my default user on my site to my administrator account (not hidden in this case so not a big deal) and subscribed with my user account. From the Minds side, it recognizes admin account as subscriber even though from the WordPress side I subscribed as user.

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Birthday Gift by Matt Mullenweg (Matt Mullenweg)
Publish a post. About anything! It can be long or short, a photo or a video, maybe a quote or a link to something you found interesting. Don’t sweat it. Just blog. Share something you created, or amplify something you enjoyed. It doesn’t take much. The act of publishing will be a gift for you and me.

I came across a blog post titled Just Blog by Frank Meeuwsen. This post alerted me to an interesting “birthday” project by WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. Mr. Mulenwig asked for people to blog for his birthday and link to his post. Ideally, the links should show up as pingbacks on his article. His post said that pingbacks would be closed on January 11 (unfortunately I only read Mr. Meeuwsen’s post on the 13th), but I figured I would try sending one. I like what Mr. Mullenweg is doing and it is making me think of some interesting ideas in the blogroll/webring sphere. If this pingback happens to work — this site is for my short-form writing. My long-form writing is available at The New Leaf Journal. Both sites are powered by WordPress and hosted on a Hetzner VPS server.

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Show Pages ID (WordPress Plugin) by YYDevelopment (YYDevelopment)
Description Show Pages IDs is a plugin that will show allow you to view the IDs of pages and posts in wordpress. With Show Pages IDs plugin you will be able to views the pages and posts IDs in the top admin menu bar and in the back-end admin panel as well. Show Pages IDs Plugin Features Reveal pages...
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I use YYDevelopment’s free (including of cost) and open source WordPress plugin, Show Pages ID, both here and on The New Leaf Journal. I received a dismissible banner on my plugin page asking for a WordPress review. What about an on-site review? Show Pages ID is a very simple plugin that adds a field to the WordPress admin screen for posts that shows the post’s numerical ID. It also covers pages and custom post types. Not every site needs to know post IDs, but I have at least one plugin on both of my WordPress sites for which I need post IDs. The plugin is lightweight (only adds one option to the site) and written in pure PHP (see details). I recommend it if you need an easy way to see post ID numbers as of December 7, 2023.