You may notice some changes to the site occurring over the next couple of days. I’m slowly dropping in a number of new plugins for the blog and adjusting the layout accordingly. Rather than doing them all at one time and having site downtime, I’m implementing them piecemeal so that I can simply drop in the new theme when everything is ready to go.

One of the plugins is called AntiLeech, and it’s purpose is to stop content being stolen via RSS by sploggers and spamdexers. It seems that some of my content has been appearing on other websites, fully ripped from the RSS feeds. Now, while all content on this site is released under a Creative Commons license and can be freely reposted, an attribution is required, and it must be for non-commercial use. The half dozen sites I’ve found copying my content (along with others’ content too) have been using entries to raise their profile via Google, hijacking the content and rewriting the URLs to point to their own site. These sites are using Google Adwords to generate revenue, so I’ve started using AntiLeech to stop this from happening to future content - when content is stolen in the future, they’ll instead post a nice message reading:

This content has been stolen from I Am Teh Bagder. You should visit that site instead, because it’s got a lot of cool gaming deals and opinions.

That should sort them. It’s nice to know that my content is worthy of stealing. I must be doing something right

Another plugin I’ve added is one to count individual page views so that both you and I can see what the most popular articles are. I’ve got access to this information via Google Analytics, but I think it help find good articles (if I every post any) hidden deep within the site.

You may have notice some of the longer posts being split so that you have to click on the article to continue reading the rest. This only occurs on the front page. I’m going to be keeping full RSS feeds, and they show the full content. The reason for splitting posts is that the new theme aims to have the index page be more of an index page instead of multiple screens of content. It’ll also make context-sensitive ads and content much more accurate. That will also hopefully get rid of the scamming free deal ads that appear via Google Adwords a lot and that I personally detest.

More updates as they happen.

Categories: Administration //