My plugin for shortening URLs has been updated (finally!) – I’ve been working on it for a ridiculous amount of time and have finally got around to completing the debugging and releasing it.

It should really be version 2.0 as it’s now far off a complete re-write of the main code! Instead of using its own caching it now makes use of my WP Plugin Cache plugin – for caching to work you have to install this as well.

It also introduces new shortening services, new debugging facilities and bugs have been fixed too.

The website planetOzh has an excellent post about blog posts that attract spam.

In it, he provides not only a piece of SQL that you can run to see how your site is affected, but even provided a PHP script that you can upload to your website to graph the results. Mine is to the right. I have my spam cleared out quite regularly, so the results are only recent ones.

As you can see, one of my posts was generating nearly 47% of all the spam. This is usually due to keywords within the article – the fact that it’s about a forum is possible a key. The second place “magnet” is a my review of  a Microsoft keyboard. I have no idea why, maybe because of it being Microsoft related.

I’ve resolved the first post by simply closing off comments (it was an old post and I think everything that needs to be said has been). The review, well, I’m not sure what to do there. I want to keep comments open on reviews. Others are mainly WordPress pages, which I need comments available for feedback and support. However, the fact that the plugins are related to PayPal, Facebook, AdSense, etc, I’m sure is no coincidence, and probably help to attract the spam.

So, not a huge amount I can do (having said that, I’ve reduced my potential spam input by 47% – assuming they don’t just target another one of my posts!), but interesting to know none-the-less.

Having said that, I’ve never really thought about closing comments on posts before and it’s something I will do in future – especially when I announce new or changed plugins, as comments can be placed on the main page itself.

Update: A WordPress plugin has been released of the code to produce the spam charts.

There are quite a few sites around that offer money off vouchers and coupons for online retailers. Quidco, however, not only does that but, if you visit the retailer via them, you can earn money back as well. Indeed, it’s this last operation that Quidco was originally set up to provide – vouchers and coupons is only a recent addition.

Simply sign up – it’s incredibly easy to do – and then search for an online retailer. Click on the link and you’re taken to the relevant website. Buy your item and you’ll find Quidco “tracks” a certain amount of cashback – this is listed on the site under your profile details, where you can also see payments (which occur regularly direct to your bank account).  The amount of cashback is dependant on retailer and is listed along with the retailers link.

I regularly use it, for instance, when buying from Play.com. The one notable omission is the lack of Amazon for cashback.

Never-the-less, I’ve recently got £40 back from a £200 home insurance and my wife last night bought a new phone on contract and received an extra (on top of cash back from the retailer) £40. It’s free money, basically.

If you use Firefox, Chrome or IE 7 or 8 you can even add Quidco as a search engine – making the whole process even less hassle.

Quidco WordPress Shortcode

Quidco offer a “refer a friend” service. If you go into the “Referral Earnings” screen, they will provide you with generic Quidco links to add to your site, but also specific links for retailers. I’ve therefore created my own little shortcode that will add this to my site.

Here’s the code, which needs to be added to functions.php…

add_shortcode('quidco','add_quidco');
function add_quidco($paras="",$content="") {
    extract(shortcode_atts(array('alt'=>''),$paras));
    if ($alt!="") {$lookup=$alt;} else {$lookup=$content;}
    $lookup=strtolower(str_replace(".","-",$lookup));
    return '<a href="http://www.quidco.com/user/xxx/yyy/'.str_replace(" ","_",$lookup).'" title="'.$content.'" title="'.$content.'" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">'.$content.'</a>';
}

You’ll need to replace xxx and yyy with the user specific information that’s shown in the “Referral Earnings” screen. Now simply placed [quidco] and [/quidco] around any shop names, and it will an automatic link to the appropriate Quidco referral screen. Hopefully. Dots are replaced by dashes but, obviously, if you write the shop name different to how Quidco refers to them, it may not work. In this case, specify the name as an additional parameter of ALT.

e.g. Two ways to link to play.com, both will work the same – [quidco]play.com[/quidco] or [quidco alt="play-com"]play.com[/quidco]

Note that when using the ALT parameter, you must specify the shop name as Quidco uses it in it’s link (e.g. with the dots converted to hyphens).