Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Category: wordpress

Scraping sites

Current list of IP addresses I have banned, for scraping, using WP-ban

72.249.103.154
69.41.230.8
74.50.109.2
69.93.233.66
74.86.179.154
72.52.244.148
78.110.160.130
216.255.185.178
74.86.186.66
70.87.226.18
207.226.183.66
74.52.59.130
74.52.67.146
69.89.31.61
72.36.144.34

Most persistent scrapers are, with number of attempts:-

69.41.230.8 110
74.50.109.2 4
72.52.244.148 2
74.86.186.66 4
207.226.183.66 9
78.110.160.130 6
70.87.226.18 2
74.52.59.130 4

Thank goodness for the excellent plugins like Spam Karma and WP-Ban.

A good list of comment spammers can be found at Scott McGeriks site.

Picture Posting Feeds

Bottoms UpJust installed the rather cool Flickr Photo Album for WordPress
plugin by Joe Tan of Silas Partners.

It makes posting images from Flickr a cinch whilst also creating my own flickr page on this blog (over at geoffjones.com/flickr). You are allowed to select from 5 image sizes to pass to the editor.

The image is of a swan feeding on the River Cam snapped by me whilst on the walk to Ely over the Christmas week.

New beginnings

After 2 years of procrastination I have finally transferred this site over to WordPress . My first WordPress site was for the Our Social World conference in September 2005, which I think is just about when WP was released to the public.

Geoff trying to smileSince then I have set up quite a few WP blogs for friends. Ellee’s being the first and more recently Sally’s

I have been very impressed at the rate of development in the WP community and the huge range of plugins available. WP also seems very stable and forgiving of novices like myself.

If you are interested in WP then a good blog to read is Lorelle on WordPress where she offers tips and advice.

Please let me know of any broken links (all links take you to the home page – no 404’s here!) or unexpected behaviour.

Looking forward to see how the change affects my google ranking for Geoff and Geoff Jones.

Changeover process

I have now imported all the posts created in the past few years created using blogger . These were ftp’d to my site hosted by domain direct. I couldn’t do it the import direct from my old site, so I republished the 697 posts onto a blogger hosted site and then imported them to this WordPress site using the integrated import utility.

I then used the Advanced Permalinks plugin from John Godley which neatly allowed me to adjust permalink structure on the 697 posts imported to be identical to their previous blogger structure.

Using John’s other plugin, Redirection, then allowed me to use a permanent redirection from my old url’s to the new wordpress ones . I can now use html pages or wordpress pages on this site and the users including Google can’t spot the difference from the old site.

Redirection also allows me to automatically correct any 404 (page not found) errors that my users might get, by sending them straight to the home page – whilst also letting me know of the precise error – so I can correct it with a 302 (permanent page redirection).

Its all looking good, so far, with no help from the folks at rentacoder either :-).