Maria’s Guides

After over a year of soul-searching, I decide to spin off my book support topics to their own site.

I built my first Web site back in the mid 1990s. It was a simple site, created in HTML, that provided information about me and my books.

A [Very] Brief History of my Web Site(s)

The Internet was young back then — at least as far as the masses were concerned. Few people surfed. In fact, the whole idea of going online was so new and radical back then that my first book proposal, which was about telecommunications on a Mac, was turned down because publishers felt that there wouldn’t be enough people interested in it.

Anyway, as things heated up, I soon saw the benefits of putting more information on the Web. And then, in 2003, I discovered blogging. Surely my personal blog should be separate from what I write to support my books and articles, right? So I spun off a new site, LangerBooks.com, and published plain HTML Web pages with book promotional and support information.

Meanwhile, I fell in love with the whole blogging interface. There was no question in my mind: a blog was a perfect tool for presenting new content while automatically archiving old content. So I got LangerBooks.com into a blog format, with a separate blog for each title.

Back in those days (2003-2004), it wasn’t easy for me. I’d decided to blog with a program called iBlog that had a lot of promise. Unfortunately, its author wasn’t willing or able to keep up with technology. His software generated static HTML documents for each page of a blog. The more you wrote, the more cumbersome the whole blog updating process became. And, as those of you who read this blog regularly know, I can write an awful lot.

So in January 2005, I made the jump to WordPress. It was a big jump indeed, since I knew absolutely nothing about PHP or MySQL and very little about CSS. (What made it even bigger was that I was hosting my own blog on my own server.) I learned what I needed to know. One of the best things about WordPress is that you don’t need to know much to build a really professional looking site.

Around the same time, I decided that I didn’t want to maintain separate blogs for my books. So I brought all the books back under MariaLanger.com and came up with some creative ways to keep Book Support topics separate from the rest of the site. Creative, yes. Effective, perhaps.

One Blog to Rule them All?

Of course, the whole time I was doing this, I was reading from “pro bloggers” about how important it is to keep your blog on just one topic. These guys were blogging to make money, I argued to myself. They weren’t in it because of a need to blog or a desire to provide additional information to book readers. So I pretty much ignored them.

But their advice was eating away at my brain in the back of my mind. After much thought, I realized that having too many widespread topics in my blog was preventing the blog from being more popular. For example, people interested in my flying and lifestyle posts — which, according to a poll on my site, is about 30% of the site’s visitors — were probably bored silly with my Mac OS and Excel and WordPress posts. And people interested in getting book support (16% of visitors) weren’t interested in wading through the other content to get the bits of information that could help them. This was preventing me from getting more site subscribers and regular readers.

So about two weeks ago, I decided to make the split.

Drumroll, Please

The question of how I did it is something I can discuss as a WordPress-related post. Let’s just say that I’ve done the basic work and have enough content in the new blog to open it to the public.

So here’s the formal announcement:

Support for my books and articles can now be found at the Maria’s Guides Web site: http://www.mariasguides.com/.

If you’re reading this post there, you’ve already found it. Otherwise, if you’re interested in articles, tips, and downloads related to my books about Mac OS, Excel, Word, and WordPress, please go check it out.

And yes, occasionally there will be cross posts, like this one. But I’ll try to keep that to a minimum.

Why Maria’s Guides?

A few years back, I made a false start on a line of eBooks. I abandoned the project, primarily because I got busy with other things that were more interesting (and lucrative). I’m thinking of revisiting the idea with shorter eBooks covering a wider range of topics. Maria’s Guides was the working title of the series and I own the domain name, so why not?

Information from Software Update.

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Information from Software Update.

This update supports compatibility with Mac OS X 10.5, improves overall stability, and addresses a number of other minor issues.

Information from Software Update.

The 10.5.1 Update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Leopard and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility and security of your Mac.

For detailed information on this update, visit http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306907.
For detailed information on security updates, visit http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61798.

Marking it as spam isn’t enough to get rid of it.

One of the things I like about WordPress is that it’s impossible to know everything about it. And today I learned something new.

I learned that the spam comments that I marked as spam had not been deleted from my WordPress database. They were just marked as spam so they wouldn’t appear in posts.

How did I discover this? I had to export all blog posts from An Eclectic Mind to a special WordPress-compatible XML file that contained all blog posts and comments. I had to weed out all the posts and comments I didn’t want to import into my new Maria’s Guides site. And that’s when I found all the nasty spam I’d marked for the past 4 years.

Now don’t think this was all of the spam. It was only the spam that was marked as spam using WordPress’s comment moderation feature. When the comment spam situation got out of control, I enlisted the help of the Bad Behavior and Spam Karma 2 plugins. Bad Behavior prevents potential spambots from posting comments at all. Spam Karma catches 95% of the spam that gets past Bad Behavior. I’m left with less than 10 spam comments a day. Not bad when you consider that Bad Behavior alone caught 17,067 spam attempts in the past seven days. The way I see it, anyone with a relatively well-Googled blog who doesn’t use at least one of these tools is doing a lot more comment moderation than they need to.

So there I was, halfway through the process of deleting non-book-related posts and their comments from an XML file, when I realized that much of the file’s contents was spam that wouldn’t appear when I imported it anyway. And that’s when I started thinking about how much database space was devoted to this spam.

The DB-Manager Plugin

I use Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan’s DB-Manager plugin. This plugin puts MySQL database features into the WordPress administration panel. This is a must-use for anyone who needs to get into their database and learn more about it or make changes to it.

So I went into the plugin’s interface and learned that my blog had 1900+ comments. I knew that only 1400+ comments were actually appearing in the blog. That made 500+ spam entries sitting in my database, taking up disk space and making my backups much larger than they needed to be.

(Note: The screenshot here shows the database contents after removing the spam. If I’d known I was going to write about it here, I would have taken more screenshots.)

I wanted them out.

Help on the WordPress Forums

I found help on the WordPress forums. They really can be helpful if you enter the right search phrase.

The topic was Support › deleting over 10,000 spam comments without using moderation page. The story was, this poor soul had left his blog alone for a week and, when he returned, found 10,000 comments on it. He wanted to delete them.

A member named bindanaku came to his rescue with a MySQL query:

DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved='0'

This assumes that you want to delete all comments that haven’t been moderated. This was not the case for me. I wanted to delete all comments that had been moderated as spam. I assumed that the correct query for my situation would be:

DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved='spam'

I was right.

Back to DB-Manager

I went to the DB-Manager administration panel and clicked the Run SQL Query button. That gave me a window where I could enter my query, as shown here. When I clicked Run, I got a message that the query was successful.

Sure enough, when I checked the Database info (see previous screenshot), I could see that 500+ comments had been removed from the database. But the table size was the same.

I used DB-Manager’s Optimize DB feature to optimize the database. That dropped about 400K from the table size.

I should note here that if you’re more familiar with editing a MySQL database, you can do the query with your normal editing tool. I don’t mess with my MySQL database much. I’m always afraid of screwing it up. (Call me a wimp — I don’t care.) That’s why I use DB-Manager.

Conclusion

While all this might seem like a lot of work to get rid of 400K of file size, the situation could be worse on your blog. My blog has about 1500 posts spanning about four years. I’ve been using Bad Behavior and Spam Karma for at least two of those years. So the majority of these old spams were from very old posts. If you don’t use any spam protection software and are manually moderating comments, you could have far more of these spam comments in your database. And since many of them were lengthy listings of porn and ringtone and other URLs, they were quite large in size. If you have a lot of these in your database, it could be taking up a lot of space — perhaps even more than your actual blog posts.

Do I recommend going through this process? It’s up to you.