JeffreyMarx.com

Try saying that headline five times fast! Spammers are becoming more aware of the steps us bloggers and developers are taking to keep them of off our blogs and articles.

if you are on WordPress, then you should be using akismet which is a software made by Automattic (the creators of wordpress). That is the best wordpress plugin you can have to stop spam. other plugins and software include: Bad Behavior (use at your own risk, can be very buggy) and Spam Karma, and of course captchas. But these spammers are trying to make a living too, and they are figuring out new ways to get around our defenses. One of the latest trends I have seen are spam messages that seem complimentary to your blog, but actually contain links spam sites that could put malicious spyware in your readers’ computer. They stroke your ego to try and make sure you don’t delete their comments. So keep an eye out for comments that are a little too nice. Here are a couple examples;
“so impressive and beautiful thank you for preparing a site admin.”
“I wish to continue your success permanent”

Mouse over the the author’s name and you’ll most like see a shady-looking url that probably sells Viagara.
Be sure to mark them as ‘spam’ so that your akismet spam filter will recognize these types of messages more quickly in the future.

Not all complementary posts are going to be malicious, but if you have a wordpress blog, this is definitely something you need to watch out for.

The Westchester WordPress meetup group held its first meetup on Tuesday, January 26th at my newspaper’s (The Journal News) offices in White Plains, New York. The audience was comprised of about 10 people looking to learn more about the software. The group was started by Anthony Zeoli , who runs a local web development firm called Digital Strategy Works. We’re joining a cluster of groups that have been popping up to discuss WordPress, an open source blogging system which is becoming more popular by the day. Meetup.com is one of my favorite sites on the internet as it’s main intent is to use the internet to organize the groups that meet off the internet. I’ll talk more about Meetup.com in a future blog post.

Zeoli did a fantastic job walking through the WordPress installation process. He explained the basics of themes, Search Engine Optimization and plugins. The audience was very active in asking a lot of questions. I’m an assistant organizer of the group and would like to think that my experience overseeing a cluster of WordPress Powered blogs is a big help to people who want to understand WordPress better. I chimed in and relayed a lot of good information that the audience seemed to appreciate

Our second Meetup will be held on Tuesday February 16th, also at the Journal News office in White Plains. The agenda is not set in stone yet. Members have said they want to learn more about SEO, Theming, Permalinks and Hierarchy, and just a general discussion around blogging with WordPress and the various opportunities blogging presents. So our plan is to take one of those general topics, and delve much deeper into it for our February meetup. In March, I’m planning on making a presentation on how bloggers can build traffic through link building, and engaging the audience.

if you are interested in attending, please join our meetup group. It is a great opportunity to learn about blogging and WordPress from professionals who are in the field.

Here is a link to Tony’s powerpoint slides from the meeting.