BBpress, the latest project from team WordPress finally reached its first public release a few days ago. BBpress was in development for ages, and I was never able to get early versions to work right alongside WordPress, so I scrapped any ideas of having an integrated forum for Devlounge.

But with the first public release, WordPress integration has been cleaned up, and now it’s our turn to help you customize bbpress like we’ve done for wordpress, in the Ultimate BBPress Guide.

Let’s Install

The installation process for bbpress is incredibly simple, as it is in installing WordPress. The entire process contains of 3 steps: edit config, upload, and run installer. Can’t get much simpler than that.

First, let’s upload the contents of “bbpress-0[1].72/bbpress…” into a folder on your web server. If you plan on integrating the user database with an existing wordpress database, make sure to upload the bbpress folder inside the location of your wordpress install, ie if wordpress is installed under “www.yourdomain.com/blog”, upload the bbpress folder and its contents to “…blog/bbpress/”.

Next, we need to edit the config file. Open either the local or remote copy of config-sample.php to do some editing. You’ll need to have created a mysql database, unless you plan on integrating with wordpress, in which case you’ll need to use the wordpress database information. (If you can’t seem to remember your WP database information, download your wp-config.php file from the server so you can grab the information required.)

Now let’s take a look at the config-sample.php file you just opened up:

<?php

// ** MySQL settings ** //
define('BBDB_NAME', 'bbpress');      // The name of the database
define('BBDB_USER', 'username');     // Your MySQL username
define('BBDB_PASSWORD', 'password'); // ...and password
define('BBDB_HOST', 'localhost');    // 99% chance you won't need to change this value

// Change the prefix if you want to have multiple forums in a single database.
$bb_table_prefix  = 'bb_'; // Only letters, numbers and underscores please!

// If your bbPress URL is http://bbpress.example.com/forums/ , the examples would be correct.
// Adjust the domain and path to suit your actual URL.
	// Just the domain name; no directories or path. There should be no trailing slash here.
	$bb->domain = 'http://my-cool-forums.example.com'; // Example: 'http://bbpress.example.com'
	// There should be both a leading and trailing slash here. '/' is fine if the site is in root.
	$bb->path   = '/';				   // Example: '/forums/'

// What are you going to call me?
$bb->name   = 'New bbPress Site';

// This must be set before running the install script.
$bb->admin_email = 'you@example.com';

// Set to true if you want pretty permalinks.
$bb->mod_rewrite = false;

// The number of topics that show on each page.
$bb->page_topics = 30;

// A user can edit a post for this many minutes after submitting.
$bb->edit_lock = 60;

// Your timezone offset.  Example: -7 for Pacific Daylight Time.
$bb->gmt_offset = 0;

// Your Akismet Key.  You do not need a key to run bbPress, but if you want to take advantage
// of Akismet's powerful spam blocking, you'll need one.  You can get an Akismet key at
// http://wordpress.com/api-keys/
$bb->akismet_key = false;

// The rest is only useful if you are integrating bbPress with WordPress.
// If you're not, just leave the rest as it is.

$bb->wp_table_prefix = false;  // 'wp_'; // WordPress table prefix.
$bb->wp_home = false;  // WordPress - Options->General: Blog address (URL) // No trailing slash
$bb->wp_siteurl = false;  // WordPress - Options->General: WordPress address (URL) // No trailing slash

// Use the following line *only* if you will be loading WordPress everytime you load bbPress.
//define('WP_BB', true);

/* Stop editing */

define('BBPATH', dirname(__FILE__) . '/' );
require_once( BBPATH . 'bb-settings.php' );

?>

As you would with any database backed scripted, you’ll need to fill in the database name, mysql username, password, and host, which is almost always “localhost” and can be untouched. If you’re integrating with wordpress, simply input the WP database information into this area.

Next you’ll need to move to lines 12-17 and set the domain name and then the location of the bbpress directory. Following the instructions in the config file itself will guide you through setting the rest of the variables. When you get down to lines 43 and 44, you’ll notice a note saying that the rest is only useful when integrating with the WordPress database.

If you are integrating with WordPress like I happen to be during this test install, we’ll need to edit the final three config variables dealing with wordpress. The first is setting the wordpress table prefix, which unless you changed it, it will be ‘wp_’. Delete the “false” and replace it with the table prefix name. It will look something like this:

[mysql]$bb->wp_table_prefix = ‘wp_’; // ‘wp_’; // WordPress table prefix.[/mysql]

Next you’ll have to set the blog url and site url, both pulled from the wordpress admin panel under “Options>General”. Almost every time the wordpress url and blog url will be the exact same. In this case it was “http://astereostudio.com/on”, so after setting this in the config lines 47-48 looked like this:

[mysql]$bb->wp_home = ‘www.astereostudio.com/on’; // WordPress – Options->General: Blog address (URL) // No trailing slash
$bb->wp_siteurl = ‘www.astereostudio.com/on’; // WordPress – Options->General: WordPress address (URL) // No trailing slash[/mysql]

When you’ve setup all the neccessary variables, save the file as config.php and upload it to the root of your bbpress install, or if you we’re using a live remote copy, simple save it and rename it to config.php.

Note: If integrating with wordpress, there is a WordPress plugin and BBpress plugin to fix some of the early version problems of bbpress and wordpress user database sharing.

Running the Installer

Head over to the location of your bbpress install in a web browser. Ours happened to be http://www.astereostudio.com/on/forums/, which lead us to a nice message saying it didn’t look like we had installed bbpress yet. This then brought up to the installer, which looks pretty damn familiar to WordPress.

After hitting first step you’ll be brought to the forum setup screen, which will ask you to fill out the forum name and description. If you were integrating with wordpress, this screen will also become very important! If you did everything right, there should be a dropdown menu listing your wordpress admin account username. Selecting this means your integration was successful, and your forum admin login will be the same as wordpress.

After hitting the “Continue to Step 2″ button bbpress will run through and create its tables, and if everythings correct you will be then brought to the bbpress homepage.

On the next page we’ll dive right in and customize this baby!

Say you’ve bought a junker of a car. The car can barely run, gets horrible gas mileage, and can be heard coming from two blocks away. You decide to take the car to a body shop to get all the welts out, as well as give the car a new paint job. You buy new tires and rims for the car, change out the upholstery, and even add in a nice sound system. You’ve invested all that time and money to change out the appearance of the vehicle, but the car still runs and sounds horrible. The car looks great, but will anybody want to drive your unreliable vehicle? At least it’ll look good broken down on the highway.

The same could be said for a particular website. You can spend all the time and energy “souping” up your website to make it look nice, but having a nice looking website isn’t going to prevent visitors from leaving and never coming back. Visitors want something more than just looks.

The Dilemma

Our jobs as designers, programmers, or web developers is never done. It seems that once a design is finished, we start thinking of things that can be tweaked, added, or taken away. It’s even worse with all the Web 2.0 speak and AJAX that seems to be everywhere. We don’t want to be left in the dust.

However, in our efforts to have the latest and greatest incorporated into designs, we may have left someone else in the dust: our visitors.

I ask each and every one of you to take the following questions into account the next time you want to add the latest and greatest feature to your website.

How do your visitors use your site now?

If you don’t know how visitors use your site, please try Crazy Egg to get a good idea of how users use your site.

If visitors are using your site as you expect them to, then there’s probably no reason to add any extra features to “assist” the visitor.

What is the impact on usability?

Usability often takes a backseat when it comes to adding website features. Visitors want your content and want it now; will the feature make it easier or harder to get to your content? Keep in mind that users like to be in control.

Here are some usability issues that may need addressing:

• Loading times
• The “Back” button
• Printing, bookmarking, and other common browser uses

For other usability concerns, please check out this website: Web Site Usability Checklist.

What’s the usefulness of the feature?

What is your site visitor getting out of the new feature? Will it be a one-time “wow” factor, or will the feature be useful for many visits to come? Visitors typically want quick and easy access to the content they are after. Will the new feature get in their way? Furthermore, will the feature even be used? If you can’t see yourself finding the feature beneficial on other sites you visit, it may be a good indication that others won’t either.

Is the feature unique?

In other words, will visitors even know how to use the feature without you telling them how to use it?

It is very unlikely that a user will take the time and effort to learn a feature that is unique to your site.

Conclusion

There are other factors that need to be taken into account when adding in new site features. I encourage the readers of this article to add their own insight in the comments. If there is enough feedback, I will write a part two that incorporates your comments.

Sites of the Week

Sites that caught my eye in css galleries over the past week, now with brief overviews of why I like them. Clicking the screenshots will take you to the entire sites.

C-Ville is a Colorado based initiative to get youths to avoid smoking. The site features an excellent use of flash and xhtml. An amazing combination and great purpose.

October is the official “Breast Cancer Awareness Month”, and as part of this awareness campaign, many sites go pink for the month. Derek at 5thirtyone updated his site with a white / grey / pink design, and released it publicly as a wordpress theme. An excellent way to get the word out.

Apples to Oranges. Clean, crisp design. Explains itself.

Digg Weekly

Design: Using Photoshop CS2 to Create Hi-Res HDR Images
An excellent tutorial on using Photoshop CS2 to create HDR images. Go through every step along with pictures so you can see what you’re doing. My design pick for the week.

Programming: The Difference Between Programmers and Developers
An article that talks about the differences between programmers and developers. A nice read that helps distinguish things between the two.

Application of the Week

I didn’t notice anything new hitting the radar this week. We’ll really go searching for something new for next week. Have your own web application / project you think we should have a look at? Drop us a line today.

Weekly Opinions

This design has been up for a little bit longer than a week now, and so far I have received all good response. We want to know from you what are some topics you want us to discuss. We’re all about listening to our readers and putting out content you want, so don’t hesitate to ask us to write about things, regardless of how silly they may be to experienced developers. If it will help you, chances are it will help others. Drop us a note in the comments.

There are plenty of new designers who are still living in a cave on the latest in the web coding craze, known as valid code, which is the use of Xhtml & CSS. These new designers spend countless hours “in the dark” so to speak, and use prehistoric techniques such as tables to put together designs for themselves and clients who are also out of place in today’s web usability standards.

So how can any of these people, lost in regards to what xhtml is besides html with an x in front, ever be expected to catch up to the rest of us? Of course, they could go out and buy some books, and spend time reading instead of learning themselves. They could always steal source code, and eventually, after being hounded by the design community for doing so, maybe they’d pick something up. Or, they could learn for themselves – in fifteen minutes.

In fifteen minutes? You must be sitting there gasping for breath and splashing water on your face. Did I really say it was possible to learn xhtml in fifteen minutes? Because it is.

Course Introduction

Xhtml should never be looked at as intimidating. Once you learn it, you’ll find its leaps and bounds easier than using tables, particularly with more advanced layouts. The days of using tables for anything more than tabular data are over. Let’s start by going over the basics, including some vocabulary you need to know before we getting going. Get out a pencil and paper if you have to.

Sites for the most part are broken down into three main sections: the header, content, and the footer. The three main sections appear on about 90% of all sites, they can just be displayed in many different ways.

The header is usually the first thing to find its way into the body of a html document (between the < body > and < /body > tags). Headers usually hold such things as the logo, banner, site / page title, and navigation.

Next is the content. Call this what you want, this is where the bulk of the site is contained. A content area is generally flexible, because it tends to hold the entire contents of the page inside it. We’ll get into this a little bit more below.

Finally, there is the footer. Footers can hold “designed by” information, contact information, ads, and possibly anything else. The design setup for all this could be graphically represented like below:

You first have to understand where all this is located code-wise. Create a new html document in Dreamweaver or similar and you’ll start out with something like this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
</head>

<body>
</body>
</html>

Now, that header, content, and footer mumbo-jumbo we just went over? Imagine these as tables. Just like how tables hold data in columns and rows, these three sections will be our base for building a site. Each section with hold smaller sections inside it, to in turn complete the entire site.

Get your cursor to between the < body > tags, and get your typing fingers ready. We’re going to type our first fully valid site, without using design view to we’re finished.

Initial Data

With your favorite html or text editor open and you’re cursor blinking between the body tags, we’re going to begin typing a few simple lines of code. Just three in fact. Follow along by copying what you see below.

<div id="header"></div>
  <div id="content"></div>
  <div id="footer"></div>

In just three lines of code, we have just built the skeleton of a valid site. Three lines! How easy is that? Let’s take a look at our messy table code that would have completed the same thing: (3 rows and 1 column.)

<table width="500" border="0" cellpadding="5">
  <tr>
    <td>&nbsp;</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>&nbsp;</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>&nbsp;</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Seems to me like xhtml works a lot better. If you’ve snuck a peek at a design view of what we’ve done so far, you’ll notice a whole lot of whitespace. In fact, that’s the only thing you’ll see! This is because our three sections have no content inside them, so all you see is blank white space. That is all about to change.

Name: Steve Guberman
Email: info@fifthroomcreative.com
Company Name: Fifth Room Creative
Location: Morris County, NJ
Job Type: Part Time Internship

Job Description:
Seeking Fun, Creative designer to work in design agency in Northern NJ. Must be ready to jump in and learn as you go. Work includes web and print design, advertising, administrative work, etc. Large and small clients.

You’ll also be able to learn about going after clients, estimating projects, writing proposals, project management, and all other nuances of the agency. Bring your enthusiasm and creativity with you!

Skills Required:
A strong sense of Print and Web design aesthetics -some design experience (portfolio required) -Creative, open-minded, desire to learn -Respond to requests promptly, meet deadlines -Strong communication and organizational skills, attention to detail -desire to learn and grow as designer

Technical Skills

• -Photoshop
• -Illustrator
• -Dreamweaver (or ability to hand code)
• -Flash

Application Details:
Email resume to info@fifthroomcreative.com or fax it to 413-502-2455

Name: Joe Falcone
Email: jfalcone@kurani.com
Company Name: Kurani Interactive
Site URL: www.kurani.com
Location: Red Bank, NJ

Job Type: Flash/Interactive Designer/Developer

Description:

Kurani is seeking a passionate Flash/Interactive designer/developer to join our team. The position entails a broad array of work from designing highly usable layouts for websites to developing rich media concepts for online advertising campaigns.

We work with a wide variety of clients within all industries giving our team the opportunity to work on varying types of projects both from a creative and technical perspective always keeping it fresh and challenging. We are looking for a dedicated team player that wants to work in a challenging and fun environment.

Requires experience with Flash, Photoshop, and Illustrator. Ideal candidates should have strong working experience with Action Scripting and XML. XHTML and CSS skills a plus.

Design inspiration comes from all around us: nature, music, personal and public events, and the lives around us. Everyone of us takes our design experience and builds it from the multitude of different places we gain inspiration from.

A connection of life on screens

It always seems to me that I can be sitting in various places and just envisioning things by looking around. As it is at this very moment I’m typing this, the sun is setting behind a few trees, causing a minor glare on my screen. It seems as if as the sun fades away, the upcoming winter fades into view – yet, all I can think about is months and two seasons from now when it will be June.

When you think about, design is nothing more than what we each envision, and many times, it’s our own lives and personal characteristics spilled onto a digital canvas. Those of us that like simplicity and a clean, organized, order to life will output the same in site and graphic design.

True tendencies tend to show up, like someone having disorganized and messy code probably can say and see the same about their workspace.

Habits

Habits come out on graphics and in code. Once you do something one way and you have success at it, you tend to continue doing into the same way into you run into a problem.

For me, this includes starting every design with a few photoshop mocks, then going right into code. Before, I would spend countless amount of time in photoshop trying to perfect the ultimate layout before even trying the code, because coding intimidated me. Now? Exactly the opposite. I spend little time in photoshop, and head right into code a lot sooner, because I know I can continue to work things out and make changes without having to represent it graphically.

Will it ever change? I’m not sure. Since I made my own changeover from being a photoshop dominated designer to dealing mostly with the code itself, I learned more about coding than I had ever known, and I quickly improved my coding time, therefore I’ve eliminated the use for photoshop as often as I had previously used it.

Habits mold a designer a lot, because one they settle in, they seem to stay that way.

Pulling elements from nature

If you’ve ever seen any of my designs besides Devlounge, especially most of the Astereo designs over the past year, you probably noticed a recurring theme in all of them, being ocean and a “summer-like” lifestyle.

Even though my location gives me only three truly warm months (June-August), I tend to convey a summery feeling in most of my designs, even if it’s the middle of January. With the summer being my favorite season, for reasons from being out of school to just having the ability to get out every day and enjoy life, I seem to be unable from stopping myself from including some kind of warm weather element in personal design.

Nature can do a lot more than inspire graphics themselves. By simply looking at things around you, you can pull inspiration for layouts of sites, natural color schemes, and much more. Looking outside is a good place to start if you’re lacking inspiration.

Music and sounds

I myself seem to be able to pull plenty of inspiration out of music. I could probably count the amount of times I haven’t had music playing while sketching, design, and coding all on one hand. For me, it’s just a must. This is because, no matter what kind of music you may like, their always seems to be songs that can match your mood or situation you happen to be in. It’s like music is the connector between life moods & events and design. By simply hearing thoughts expressed in sound, you can turn it into a piece of digital or canvas art.

Inspiration built from the ground up

So, where does all this leave you? It leaves you back at square one – you. If you’re struggling to create something new and unique, try focusing on yourself more and what everyone else says is good design. Inspiration is built individual, based on many factors, because everyone sees inspiration in something else. Sit back, play some music, and take a good look around, and find something to get your creativity going again.

Hello everyone. It’s time to once again premiere a brand new Devlounge feature. This time around, it’s a weekly update on all things design & development. Introducing Friday Focus.

Published every Friday, Focus will highlight 3 of my favorite designs from the week found in various css & design galleries. I’ll also choose my own personal favorite “design” and “programming” article of the week from Digg. These will come from the top dugg stories of the week, but will be ones I believe are well worth the read – not useless stories that just may have received the most diggs.

Not only will focus add a weekly updated segment to Devlounge, but it will allow us to spotlight sites, projects, and articles found on other resources that are useful to you.

Now let’s get started with Friday Focus #1.

Sites of the Week

Sites that caught my eye in css galleries over the past week. Clicking the screenshots will take you to the entire sites.

Digg Weekly

Design: How To Convince a Client Not to Use Background Music
I’ve lost count of how many clients have requested that music be playing in the background of their website. As a professional web developer with a few too many years of implementing ridiculous requests, I’ve acquired quite a knack for convincing a client that music is a bad idea. There are obvious exceptions: such as band websites or sites heavily involved in multimedia. I’m talking about content-rich sites where the user does not expect (or want) a multimedia experience…

Programming: Top 126 AJAX Tutorials
Large link list to various ajax tutorials. Organized very nicely, and contains many accurate tutorials.

Web Application of the Week

This weeks web application of the week goes to Tick. You may remember our preview of the application back in July. Well earlier this week Tick finally made it’s public debut. Coming in six different pricing plans, from $0 to $79, give Tick a try today.

Weekly Opinions

Earlier this week Google released Google Code Search. While there are benefits to a search-able index of code, there are also many disabilities.

Consider you have a few custom scripts built (either by yourself or paid for), and Google then indexes it. Your work on coding is now available to the public to have a free view at. There have also been reports of Google Code Search compromising database passwords by simply showing the source code. Will Google code spell disaster by making too much code available to the public? Post your responses in the comments!

New Internet projects and ideas capture entrepreneurs imagination all the time. If you’re one of these people who dream up the next big thing for the web, then start it but never get it off the ground, you’re missing your shot.

This is because, regardless of the uniqueness of the idea, there will always be a place for it. That’s what happens when billions upon billions of people all use the internet for all different reasons.

Original or Not, There’s Room for You

Of course, project originality helps, and it helps a lot. The first to create a web based application that helps do something no other application has yet to do (and if its executed right) will always dominate over copycats. But still, copycats have their place.

Take a look at Basecamp. The original project management web application spawned the creation of many similar applications, with many of the same features and few of their own. Some were even the same thing, but with just a refocused main purpose.

The same can be seen for just about every web service. These days, it hard to find an original idea – and even when an original idea sprouts up, someone takes it and puts it into their own version, making it harder to figure out “just who was the first to come up with this anyways?“.

With it apparent that there is room for any project – no matter how many of the same there are out there – it seems there’s always room for yours.

Marketing Can Help Anything

In the end, the success a project will or wont have comes down to the execution. Take a look at our buddy Shaun Andrews’ latest venture, XHTMLGenius. Upon a visit, you’ll notice that the entire site is two pages – an index, and a submission page. The purpose? Getting psd’s turned into validated xhtml & css quickly and easily for $250 bucks a pop. As designer and developer myself, when I first came across this site I found myself asking, will someone really pay $250 to have their site coded? I soon found out the answer, as Shaun reported on Mintpages that in two days he had two customers. I consider that pretty good myself, seeing how two customers is about 6 days work and a quick $500.

So how is it successful? I can tell you what, it’s all about marketing. I could see myself launching the same site, and receiving complaint after complaint about the price being way too high – but yet, Shaun can pull it off?

For starters, reading the index takes about 5 minutes, and explains to you in plain English (no technical mumbo-jumbo, because the target audience doesn’t understand it – which is why they need coding in the first place) exactly what the purpose of Xhtmlgenius is about. By having a strong portfolio to back him up, it becomes evident fairly quickly that you’re getting what you pay for – and it works.

Now we could have used many different sites as examples of marketing helping projects and startups get the ball rolling, but we decided to use Xhtmlgenius because it demonstrates how, even in a few days, if you do something right, it will work.

Be Original in Your Ideas & Let Them Flourish

Following these few tactics listed above can help an otherwise useless project find its own in an internet where there’s always a need for something, regardless of what it may be. Who would have known that starting a site for people to buy 1 pixel worth of advertising for $1 would have actually sold all 1 million spots. There is always a need out there, it’s just up to you to find one and put your ideas to work for you.

As you can see, this is our new extras page. Over the next few days it will become the one resource for updates on all our homegrown WordPress templates, free downloads, and much more. Just give us a few days to get this section is check.

As some of you may have noticed (if not apparent enough), the homepage has undergone a significant update! We’ve rearranged things to make it easier to find certain features, and today is just the beginning.

Consider this the Devlounge 3 live testing period.

We still have a lot to be done, including unveiling new article & interview databases, restructuring the comment system, and finishing up integration of all the previous pages to the new layout. If you encounter any layout issues, please let us know. Everything seems perfect in Firefox, and Internet Explorer only smudges the size of the search box.

You’ll notice the extra’s page (not completed yet) has a feature called the job board. We’ll give you more insight on the job board in the coming days after we get the extras page fully squared away, but we hope it will really add some extra value and purpose to everyone that visits devlounge.

Please bare with us over the next few days while we finish things up! And be sure to let us know what you think of the new layout!

Support our work: Digg the new design!

We’ve all seen those anti-piracy ads that Hollywood is so fond of. You know, the ones about stealing cars, DVDs, and purses. The ad tries to tell us that if we don’t steal any of those things, then we shouldn’t pirate movies either. Perhaps Hollywood should add one more item in there along with the cars and purses: “You wouldn’t steal anybody’s web content, right?” If you are a writer for the web, you should be worried about people stealing something that is very dear to you: your content.

Why on Earth would someone want to steal your content — your written text that you have spent hours upon hours creating? The amount of time and sweat that is put into creating content is tremendous; now some creep can come along and steal what is rightfully yours.

An increasing pain among content-generators (aka, bloggers) is the common splog, or spam blog. These blogs can take the form of blogs with randomly generated keywords that make absolutely no sense. They can also take the form of your content with a bunch of ads interspersed. With splogs taking your content and advertising within, that means that someone else is making money on the content you are creating! So what do you do about it?

Fortunately, for those who use the WordPress blogging platform, there are several plugins that assist bloggers against the evil splogs. One of the more notable plugins I have come across is called AntiLeech. I will devote the rest of this entry as a review of the plugin and how it deters sploggers.

AntiLeech Description

As described on the AntiLeech plugin page, AntiLeech does not stop sploggers from accessing your content. The plugin does, however, allow you to control what content the splogger receives.

Installation

Installation of the plugin is relatively straightforward. Just unzip the .php file in your WordPress plugin directory on your web server. From there, you can activate or deactivate the plugin within the “Plugins” Administration Panel.

One thing to note here is that if you have Steve Smith’s(Ordered List ) FeedBurner Plugin installed, now is the time to deactivate it. The reason is that AntiLeech and the FeedBurner Plugin do not play well together. Never fear, because AntiLeech has its own FeedBurner redirect.

Configuring the FeedBurner Redirect

You’ll find all of AntiLeech’s options under the Options Administration Panel. Here are a few steps to follow to make sure your FeedBurner redirect is successful:

1. Edit your feed details at FeedBurner and change the url to: http://www.yoursite.com/feed
2. Under AntiLeech’s plugin options, enter your FeedBurner Address under FeedBurner URL.
3. Select what you want included in the feed.
4. Click “Update.”

That should about do it for the FeedBurner redirect.

Configure the Splog Content

Here is where the magic of AntiLeech begins. You can choose what content sploggers receive.

In order to detect leechers, AntiLeech places a small image that says “ANTILEECH” at the bottom of every feed entry. You can enable or disable this option.

You can also choose not to include links back to your content. This is where everything gets controversial. Sploggers can potentially kill your search engine rank because there is duplicate content out there. The search engines might eventually think that you are spamming as well. One of the ways to combat this is to give the splogger garbled content, but still include a link back to your site. Now will Google punish you if a splogger links back to your site? I leave that answer open for debate. The point is, the choice is yours if you want the splogger to have a link back to your site.

You can also change the content that the splogger will receive. Here is an example of what the splogger might receive using Generated Content. You can also choose to give the splogger Truncated Content (post summaries) or alternatively leave some choice words for the would-be splogger.

Choosing a Splogger

There are two ways you can set up who is or isn’t a splogger: one is by User-Agent, and the other is by IP Address.

You can add a splogger by User-Agent by selecting any User-Agent that AntiLeech has detected. You can also manually add in a User-Agent.

If AntiLeech hasn’t detected any User-Agent, but you have noticed a couple of IP Addresses that are sucking down your pages, you can add those IP Addresses to your splog list.

Conclusion

Overall, I feel that the AntiLeech plugin for WordPress is very well done. One thing I would like to see in a future release is some statistics for the added IP Addresses and User-Agents (such as highest daily page view). Of course I could always view my site stats, but this way the information would all be in one place.

If you have WordPress, hate people stealing your content, and want to get back at the evil sploggers, then AntiLeech should be your anti-splog plugin.