The rather excellent Pogoplug can now be found, for a limited time, for the rather amazing price of £49.99, only available at Firebox¹.

Additionally, today the Pogoplug iPad app is available for free in the iTunes App Store! The new app offers full Pogoplug functionality on the Apple iPad.

Users can now access and share their files or stream their media from their Pogoplug-attached storage, taking full advantage of the multi-touch surface, immersive high-resolution screen and the extreme ease of portability of the iPad.

1. this offer has now ended [↩]

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.

I wrote an article some time ago highlighting ways to implement search improvements to WordPress (and the default search DOES suck). Now, I’d like to update you on where I am, including some further changes that I made last night.

Current Set-up

My current set-up is that I’m displaying 3 posts per page. However, in the case of search results, I’m displaying 12 per page, as I display only an excerpt and restricted social sharing and other output. The idea, like the results from a search engine, is to find the post or page that you’re after and click on it for the full version.

Recommended Plugins

By default,WordPress only allows one “posts per page” value. To achieve this, you’ll need to read my original post which shows you how to override the search results to show more. I still use the Results Count plugin as well, which displays how many search results were returned.

In addition, on all post and page types I use the WP Page Numbers plugin to allow users to easily scroll across multiple pages, rather than use the default WordPress “Next” and “Prev” buttons.

Finally, Search Meter is an excellent plugin for finding out what your visitors are searching for.

Modifying the Search Results

Last night I had a brain-wave. After performing a search myself, I had one result. Except it was the usual excerpt and I had to click on it to view the full version. But, if there’s only one, why do this? Indeed, if there’s 3 or less, why not display the full posts, and only collapse to the excerpt version if there’s more than this?

And that’s what I’ve changed – try it! Look for “wordpress“, for instance, and you’ll find pages of potential results, all displayed as limited excerpts. Look for “avforum” and one result will be returned and the entire post will be shown. Lovely.

To do this I simply compare the results of $wp_query->found_posts with get_option('posts_per_page'). I do this outside of “the loop”.  The former will return the total number of posts being returned and the latter will return the number of posts per page that you’ve your WordPress to. In my case, this latter value is 3.

So, if a search is performed and 1 results is returned out of 3, my theme can make the decision to output the full version of the post instead of the smaller version. I can also make the decision at this point whether to override the number per page to 12 or not (if I’m display the excertp versions).

I hope this makes sense – please comment if you need any further clarity on this.