Herself's Webtools

Every so often it’s good to just run a quick pass on your WordPress database and look for troubles.

There are two things I check for: users who don’t comment, and iframes and scripts inside of posts.

You can easily bookmark SQL queries in phpMyAdmin, I do this and try to run the scripts every week or so.

To check for iframes and scripts added to your posts log on to phpMyAdmin and then click the SQL tab and run the following command:


SELECT *
FROM wp_posts
WHERE post_content LIKE '%iframe%'
UNION
SELECT *
FROM wp_posts
WHERE post_content LIKE '%noscript%'
UNION
SELECT *
FROM wp_posts
WHERE post_content LIKE '%display:none%'
UNION
SELECT *
FROM wp_posts
WHERE post_content LIKE '%display:%'
UNION
SELECT *
FROM wp_posts
WHERE post_content LIKE '%ekibastos%'
UNION
SELECT *
FROM wp_posts
WHERE post_content LIKE '%visibility:hidden%';


This looks for hidden things in your posts. If you get any results back you should check that post very carefully for things you did not put in it.

Users who register and don’t comment are likely bots who got through the bot net, or spammers planning to come back later. I delete all users who register but don’t comment soon thereafter.

To check for users who haven’t commented run the following SQL query

SELECT user_login, user_email, date_format( user_registered, '%M %d %Y' ) AS user_registration_date
FROM wp_users
WHERE wp_users.user_login NOT
IN (
SELECT comment_author
FROM wp_comments
)
LIMIT 0 , 30

I’ve also begun checking comments for troubles using the same items I look for in posts:

SELECT *
FROM wp_comments
WHERE comment_content LIKE '%<iframe%'
UNION SELECT *
FROM wp_comments
WHERE comment_content LIKE '%<noscript%'
UNION SELECT *
FROM wp_comments
WHERE comment_content LIKE '%display:none%'
UNION SELECT *
FROM wp_comments
WHERE comment_content LIKE '%display:%'
UNION SELECT *
FROM wp_comments
WHERE comment_content LIKE '%ekibastos%'
UNION SELECT *
FROM wp_comments
WHERE comment_content LIKE '%visibility:hidden%'
LIMIT 0 , 30;


Another optimization you’ll want to make is to delete all those post revisions, they multiply quickly.

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = "revision";

And finally optimize your tables

OPTIMIZE TABLE `wp_comments` , `wp_links` , `wp_options` , `wp_postmeta` , `wp_posts` , `wp_terms` , `wp_term_relationships` , `wp_term_taxonomy` , `wp_usermeta` , `wp_users`;

I’ve been wanting a magazine style template for my main website splash page for about six months. And I’d been wondering how those scrapers, scraped you rss feed into their blog. Sometimes procrastination is a good thing when I finally got around to looking into it all I found most of the pieces had already been written.

Herself’s Green Things picks up the rss feeds from all my websites, turns them into blog posts and posts them in a magazine style theme all automatically.

I tried all the magazine themes I could find on the WordPress theme pages. The Magadine theme was the one that was most stable and easiest to hack so that’s the one I choose. Colors and fonts are very easy to change as are the number of columns and rows. ( change rows and columns in index.php )

<?php
if($count == 2 ) {
echo “<div style=’clear:both;’></div>”;
$count = 0;
}else{
$count += 1;
}
?>

count == 2 will give you 3 columns, count == 1 will give you two, count == 3 gives you four columns.

There are several WP plugins that will turn rss feeds into posts.  I chose Syndication which appears to have been pulled by the author because he/she didn’t want spammers using it.  That’s a shame, maybe if you ask nicely the coder will give you a copy, I’ll respect the coder’s wishes and not provide copies.  I like it best because it turns the title of the post into a link back to the original blog.

There are about a half dozen other choices available on the WordPress plugins site.  Try them all see what suits you best. I thought WP-o-Matic and FeedWordPress also did excellent jobs.

After activating your syndication plugin you tell it which feeds to pull and all the ones I looked at gave you several options for credit, links how much of the feed entry to post ect.

Now you shouldn’t have to be told you should only be pulling your own content as I’m doing, or content from other blogs where you have permission.  It can be a great way to consolidate your blogs or promote other’s blogs.

You should also only use partial feeds to keep the search engine gods happy, and clicking on the title of the post should take your viewer to the original entry not wandering around the consolidated site.

One problem I had is that I couldn’t fetch 4 of my 13 feeds. I have no idea what or why so what I did was great a Yahoo Pipe of all my blog feeds, then have the syndication plugin grab that feed.