I used WP-SyntaxHighlighter, I tried some others, but the simplest and most expedient plugin I found for highlighting code in my blogs comes from Dmytro Shteflyuk’s Code Colorer.
Like most of them it’s based on the Geshi Generic Syntax Highlighter … much easier syntax.
I recommend this one for bloggers who wish to include code in their posts.
I’ve been getting an amazing number of comments on some of my blog entries coming from Russia – and they’re in the Russian language in Cyrillic. I expect there’s some kind of rss-feed going on, I do have several subscribers to this blog who’s personal data indicates their home page is in .ru domain or their email address comes from a .ru domain.
Using the Vistor Maps and Who is Online plugin I’m able to see where my visitors are coming from, at least the country where their IP address is located. Most of the .ru commentors are actually coming from Latvia … from Preili Latvia in particular.
Maybe they’ve put my site on some social networking location in Russia? How is it they’re able to write comments to my blog without appearing in my google analytics report? Why aren’t they writing comments in english, my language? Are my blog entries being translated to Russian where these people are reading them, and if so how good a translation is it?
Since so many of the comments coming from Russia are spam I’ve had to place the .ru domain in my Aksimet filter, but just as many seem to be honest comments coming from regular people. So I go through the comments flagged as spam this way, and on occasion will approve them for the post. I go to translate.google.com to see what they are saying, and to have a look at the website they claim as home page.
Often some innocuous comment such as “good post” comes with a link to some porno or warez site, so I just delete those.
But a they are in Russian, I have to translate all of them this way. So I’m going to try something new. I’ve done a google search for “wordpress google translate plugin“, and have arrived at the following two plugins (links open in new window):
It looks like the Global Translator is more fully developed, and able to use 4 different translator engines (at least claimed on the plugin site), so this is the one I’m going to try.
There is a pro version available, but let’s see how well this plugin works on a site such as mine, with these Russian-language and cyrillic charset comments.
….
Ok, I’ve installed the global translator and I have to admit, it doesn’t do what I want in this case. I only want to be able to translate the comments, not the entire website. The Global Translator has lots of nice options, and it might be useful for my readers who come from those various countries to get a translation of my website in their language, but hey – than can do what I’ve been doing, go to translate.google.com and enter the URL and see the translation.
So I’m going to deactivate that plugin for now, and try the Google Ajax Translator.
….
Very nice. This does what I want. I’m not offering translation of entire pages or posts, I only want to see for myself what these Russian comments are saying. So we’ll see how it works.
And if any of you commenting on my blog entries would like to tell me – where are you seeing my blog? Are my entries translated into your language, is this why you’re writing comments in Russian? I’d like to read your comments about these questions.
I discovered this interesting idea today, see the website at www.gravatar.com
Play the video on the front page, it explains it quite well.
Basically here’s what’s going on with it: You sign up for a free account, you attach your favorite avatar – image of you or a cartoon character or a symbol or whatever, just so it’s an image – to that email account. Now any website that supports gravatar (such as any wordpress blog out there) where you register with your email address will show your avatar next to your comments.
Here’s a better explanation, though a bit technical for those not so tech-oriented.
Any place which supports gravatars, such as here on my own wordpress blog, any comment I make on the posts will show my gravatar image. Sign up if you want to see your gravatar on comments in this blog, or any other wordpress blog you visit.
I’ve added a sample comment to this blog entry to show you.
I just installed this wordpress plugin: Visitor Maps and Who’s Online. Free, and informative. Find out who’s online at any one moment, including bots and crawlers if you want.
It’s easy to install. It downloads a database of geolocation information, see www.maxmind.com for that.
Informative – shows visitor IP address, country, which url they were visiting. A map is provided. Very nice.
I’ve been getting a load of Russian-language comments on my blog in the past couple of weeks. Yet my google analytics doesn’t report any visitors coming from Russia. How can this be?
Google Search for “russian comment spam”. Apparently this is a common habit for spammers coming from Russia. The only real way I have to block it is to block all posts coming from the .ru TLD, which is unfortunate because I actually have received friendly comments from people in Russia.
The spams usually have some non sequitur kind of thing to say, occasionally praising the author or the validity of the post – with the user’s home page being a link to a porn site, a pizza delivery site, a movies download site … etc. I paste the comment into translate.google.com to see what it says, usually I can understand what the translation means. I ask my girlfriend what these comments say when we’re both home from work (she’s fluent in Russian).
So this is the choice I have had to make. Any post in Russian cyrillic is marked as spam. Any post coming from a .ru domain is marked as spam. I can apologize to my real readers coming from Russia, but I’m not going to put up with this spam bullshit any more. Blame the spammers in your country.
How to send email in WordPress using Gmail’s SMTP server
I was googling around for a way to set up my php sendmail stuff to work, using my account at gmail. This blogger at that link has found the answer for me!
I’m using a wampserver, so I had to be sure to have the php_openssl extension turned on. I’ve used gmail’s smtp server settings for other email clients so I’m vaguely familiar with how to set that up.
I’m going to be developing a wordpress installation for Zlatina, for her school. I’m looking for education-oriented themes, and I really needed a way for her to manage an email newsletter and notification kind of thing. The first thing I needed was this plugin and this information.
Thanks very much to Sudar.
expat-blog.com, I’ve submitted my blog for inclusion on the expat blog for Bulgaria.
I suppose I could do some blogging over there, and I still might. I don’t know whether I should consider myself an expatriate at this point. This is my fourth trip to Bulgaria, I am hoping to gain citizenship here and am taking steps to pursue that.
But I’m not a citizen of an EU country, gaining a second citizenship in this EU country will not be anywhere near as easy as it would for someone from Britain for example. But time passes, I am in my second year living here … though not continuous to be sure … and I do want to stay.
Will I return to the US any time soon? Only to visit. I’ve lived in more than 10 states there, have been to all but 5 of them. Been there and done that, it describes my attitude about returning there permanently. We’ll see.
Date: 4/15/2006Views: 26
Date: 10/8/2005Views: 14
Stop Forum Spam
Do you ever wonder why your blog is receiving comments in Russian cyrillic? Get the visitor maps plugin, and bookmark the stopforumspam.com site. You can enter the commentor’s email address, the home website they claim, even their IP address – which you can see in the visitor maps plugin. Every single one of these russian commentors shows up on the stopforumspam website, without exception.
These people, mostly from Prieli Latvia in my case, are trying to increase their SEO visibility by adding comments to our blogs. Don’t let them. I have my akismet spam filter set to mark all comments coming from the .ru domain as spam.
Akismet -
You can register with Akismet (wordpress.com actually) without having to sign up for a blog. They will email to you an API key (a short string of numbers and letters), you configure your Akismet plugin with this. It costs nothing, I have never received any email from Akismet nor have been bothered by them in any way.
[Translate]