CompuSkills Blog

Just to let everyone know that Compuskills will be closed from 1230 today until 0900 on Monday, 5 January 2009.

Ongoing projects will be worked on as previously agreed over the period, but no new work will be accepted during the close down. Customers with maintenance and support contracts will still be able to request assistance.

Thank you for your custom in 2008 and we wish you a great new year.

It seems that Compuskills Web Design Blog is now ranked as “Number 1″ in the world by Technorati! I am sure there are lots of you who wont believe this, and it may even no longer be the case by the time you check but, to prove the point, we have taken a screenshot:

(Note: We are aware this is almost certainly down to a technorati error — it seems like they regularly break, which is reassuring for people investing in webservices for their office programs… — but it is nice to pretend once in a while!)

This is a general post to let people who are using Harmony and WhyDontYou themes that for a variety of reasons we are no suspending further development on these until further notice. This does not mean we will not respond to user requests, but that we are not going to carry on further adjustments without user requests. Normally we would wait until version 1.0 had been released for this, but in this case we feel is appropriate to do it now.

If you are a user of one of these themes and you have any bugs or problems which you would like solved, then please let us know and we will try to fix it as soon as possible and, as always, normally free of charge.

[tags]Web Design, Compuskills, Frequently Asked Questions, FAQ, Themes[/tags]

Harmony 0.5.2b Wordpress Theme Available for Download

Following on from our previous theme release, the new theme designed for the WhyDontYou Blog is available for download (free, released under the creative commons licence). It is not a “sponsored” theme, but there are links back here in the footer which we request you leave in place. In addition, there is a section in the footer which explains who created this theme and where it was made for - you may edit this if you wish.

This is currently at version 0.5.2 beta but is largely stable. It requires Dunstan’s Error pages as a separate download (or you can edit the 404.php file, or if you want, we will do it for you) and has been set up to work with UTW and Share This. Read the rest of this entry »

We are in the process of making new themes for WordPress, where appropriate these themes will be released here for free download.

If you have any requests or would like a theme tweaked in anyway, please let us know. Depending on the work involved these will probably be carried out free of charge. You can get in touch with us via the Compuskills Contact form.
[tags]wordpress, themes, design, Compuskills, Web Design, Theme Design[/tags]

Download the Why Dont You Blog WordPress Theme.

The Word Press theme designed for the WhyDontYou Blog is now available for download (free, released under the creative commons licence). It is not a “sponsored” theme, but there are links back here in the footer which we request you leave in place. In addition, there is a section in the footer which explains who created this theme and where it was made for - you may edit this if you wish.

This is currently at version 0.9.8 beta and has a few teething issues, especially in Internet Explorer 6, but is largely stable. It requires the UTW plugin and Dunstan’s Error pages which need to be downloaded separately.

This theme is widgetised and has been tested on WordPress 2.1 and 2.2. Read the rest of this entry »

After quite a wait, Wordpress 2.2 is now available for download and install.

While we think this is a good thing, Compuskills are currently advising customers who have a WP 2.1.3 installation to hold off for a little while before doing the update. If you give it a few days, people will have the chance to check out the new code, hopefully also identifying potential problems and pitfalls.

Unless your system is really “not critical” and you dont mind the risk of potentially considerable downtime, do not update straight away. If you do choose to update (now or at a later date), please ensure you make a full back up of your system - just in case. If you have any problems with this, please contact us and we will assist you.
[tags]Wordpress, Blog Software, Software, Compuskills, WordPress Upgrade[/tags]

Although it is very early to make any conclusions, it is worth noticing that in the 24 hours since we instituted a small change to the .htaccess rules on one of the blogs we manage (talked about in previous post), the volume of spam comments being held by Akismet has dropped by almost 75%. Comparing the last 24 hours with the same 24 hour period over the last six weeks (all we have data for at this time) it seems the spam comments have dropped from around 240 a day to around 70.

Now, we are not for a second saying that blocking out LayeredTech.com is the sole reason for this reduction but it is the only change we have instituted. We will continue to monitor this and report any other findings as and when they occur.
[tags]Wordpress, Spam, Bot, spam bot, LayeredTech, Akismet, Technology, Badbot, Spammers, Compuskills[/tags]

Recently we were reviewing the measures we could take to reduce the spam hitting the email accounts we manage and the blogs we are responsible for overseeing. It will probably come as no surprise to most of you, but it was very easy to identify some obvious trends. Fortunately a response was equally easy. By and large, with wordpress blogs, plugins such as Akismet work wonders and prevent mountains of spam getting through. The concern raised with us was bots searching for email addresses or other such information. (Ideally, the blogs will not have this sort of data available, we always recommend using a properly designed contact form rather than leaving a contact email address)

In a nutshell, we reviewed the site access logs and blog plugins such as “Firestats” to identify anything which seemed to be unusual activity. While this is not easy to determine with 100% accuracy, the things we looked for were along the lines as the same IP address hitting a page every fraction of a second (faster than a human could read), IP addresses which spoofed a user agent (UA) string (the most common example of this seems to be a UA string which presents itself as a random string of letters), and IP addresses which are already identified as posting spam comments / trackbacks.

During the early stages of looking at this, one of the things which immediately jumped out at us was the “owner” of the vast majority of the IPs which were being flagged. On one of the blogs, hits were being generated by a UA which was identifying itself with variations of “Sentxmcuk nlbhr crtyoqb” (and other strings of letters, another example used “Himq nwfjrztb dtsuw”). The way this UA was visiting was certainly different from the more normal user agents and there was a massive similarity in the IP addresses. By and large they were coming from 72.232.234.xxx and 72.232.83.xxx (for example the Sentxmcuk UA used IP address 72.232.234.138.)

These addresses belong to a company called LayeredTech, and a quick google search brought up two posts on Village-idiot.org (post 1 and post 2), which went a long way to confirm our initial suspicions. It seems lots of people have been getting quantities of spam from IP addresses which resolve to LayeredTech.com.

At the moment, we here at Compuskills are using a reactive policy of dealing with this: in the .htaccess file we have a section which reads:

order allow,deny
…
deny from 72.232.234.
deny from 72.232.83.
…
allow from all

and we would strongly recommend you institute a similar approach on your site if you have not already done so. Obviously this is hampered by only blocking the addresses after they have been detected hitting the site, and has the risk of blocking genuine visitors, but until we can collect more data it seems overkill to block all of LayeredTech’s IP addresses.
[tags]Wordpress, Spam, Bot, spam bot, LayeredTech, Akismet, Technology, Badbot, Spammers, Compuskills[/tags]