RSS Mash-up, Ka-pow!

February 8th, 2010 by Fernando Cuis

If you’re anything like me, a Geek, you probably have more than 1 RSS feed and multiple outlets that you would potentially LIKE to display them in. But most of these outlets (think: Facebook, Twitter, your Blog, etc…) pin you down to just 1 feed.

Allow me to introduce you to ChimpFeedr: enter a bunch of RSS feeds into ChimpFeedr, and they’ll mash ‘em up into one master RSS feed. Then, maybe you can use that master feed for your social outlets!

Very cool.

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Posted in E-commerce, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Technology, Web Design
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Block Bots, Leechers, and Ban by IP

January 19th, 2010 by Fernando Cuis

If you have an offender, always abusing your server or dumping spam through your contact forms… the tutorial below will teach you how to block them from accessing your website. It should be noted, however, that this post is specific to Linux servers with HTACCESS functionality.

Block Bots

The below instructions look for robots that begin with a name of “BadBot” and tells it to go to http://take.a.hike/ which translates to a long walk off a short pier. Adjust accordingly.

   #get rid of the bad bot
   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^BadBot
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://take.a.hike/

Block Leechers (Hotlinkers)

Steeling bandwidth and server resources can cripple your site and ultimately your repeat traffic. No one likes a slow site. To prevent other website from hot linking or leeching your content, use the code below:

   #### BAD SITE REDIRECT ####
   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} badwebsite\.com [NC]
   RewriteRule .* - [F] 

   #### BLOCK MORE THAN ONE SITE ####
   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*badwebsite\.com [NC,OR]
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*secondbadsite\.com [NC,OR]
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*thirdbadsite\.com [NC]
   RewriteRule .* - [F]

The code above will return a 403 Forbidden error to anyone trying to hotlink your images on badwebsite.com. The end result: users on that site will see a broken image, and your bandwidth is no longer being stolen.

Block by IP

My personal favorite… block a person from accessing your website by their IP.

    #### BLOCK BY IP ####
    order allow,deny
    deny from 192.168.44.201
    deny from 224.39.163.12
    deny from 172.16.7.92
    allow from all

All of the examples above are specific to HTACCESS. If you are on a Windows Server, this will not work for you. Happy blocking!


Posted in Web Design
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Wordpress Blog: Exclude a Page from Navigation

January 8th, 2010 by Fernando Cuis

If your Wordpress blog offers drop-down menus, chances are you have pages/links that are appearing in those sub-menus that you may want to hide from the main navigation.

The solution is quite simple:

Open ‘header.php’ file from your themes directory.  Make sure you open the theme that is currently in use with your blog/website!

Find the code below, which should be approximately 3/4 the way down the page.

<?php wp_list_pages('sort_column=menu_order&depth=1&title_li=&exclude=30,47,68,102,113'); ?>

Add the string in green/bold as you see above to your code.

The bold exclude parameter has numbers that trail it. These numbers, represent your pages. Simply add the page number to the exclude parameter, save, upload your file and your sub-links will be excluded from your main navigation.

Note: numbers being used in this example, are exactly that, an example. Remove the numbers that do not pertain to your website.

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Posted in Web Design
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