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Who is anticrawler.org and is it safe

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I noticed I got referred from anticrawler.org on  my Piwik analytics.

Obviously suspicions were immediately raised, but required some further investigation.

The site, anticrawler.org  just has a simple request for you to add some javascript to your website.

See screen shot of anticrawler.org

who is anticrawler.org

 

There is no further information, so trust level has to be zero.

So I looked up their domain, and not surprisingly the identity is hidden.

anticrawler.org is a scam

 

They want you to run a program that is totally hidden ( anticrawler.php runs server side) so you have no idea what it is really doing, so adding this code could do anything.

I would guess it is actually going to ping lots of bad bots to start attacking your site or giving you fake traffic or serving you ads or something not good.

My advice is not to add this code, unless you are an expert and really going to investigate and monitor the impact and what happens, in which case, please leave mea comment and let me know.

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How to inspect element in Safari like you can in Chrome

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When developing or tweaking a website ‘inspect element’ is an essential tool to see what is going on, especially when adjusting CSS.

Chrome comes automatically with ‘right click’ inspect element, and I was trying to do this in Safari but it didn’t seem to have this feature.

However, it does actually, but inspect element isn’t automatically turned on on Safari.  You can turn it on and itis simpel once you know how.

First go to ‘Apple’>System Preferences>Advanced and tick developer tools

Safari Inspect Elements

Then ‘right click’ will reveal ‘inspect element’ in the pull down

Inspect Element right click Safari

And then that will reveal all the markup you need

Safari developer tools

Having a custom functions or styles per individual WordPress multisite site

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If you are running a multi-site and you a have common theme sometime is becomes a requirement to add specific styling and functions for an individual site or two.

The traditional way is to create a child theme and apply that to the site, and this works fine, but this method allows you to create individual functions or css per site easily and relatively quickly.

The idea is that within the theme  (actually  a child theme as you don’t want to be updating the functions.php of a parent theme as you will end up losing you customisations on updates  see http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes ) to add some code to functions.php  that uses the child theme folder.

So we create   wp-content/childthemename/blogs/{id}

where {id} is the blog id  and add a functions.php in that directory

With the code below, at the top of your functions.php  (after comments) this file will be picked up and executed just for the specific multi-site.

 

 

 

Most themes have an inbuild CSS option but if not you could also  try this, it should work, but this code is currently untested

 

 

JQuery easy cycle

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Cycle 2 is easy to use

see http://jquery.malsup.com/cycle2/

To use in WordPress add this code (or similar, chnage links and images as required) to a text widget

And you will need to enqueue this library after jquery  (see the codex)

With Woothemes Canvas you can use hooks>wordpress as a lazy way to avoid writing the enqueue in your functions.php

 

 

 

 

Adding Share By Email to WPMUDEV Floating Social

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To add to WMPUDEV’s floating social an add to email button you can add the following code to Settings> Floating Social > Add New Custom Service > Code

The button will open the default mail client and construct a message that includes the post’s URL.

You may need to tweak the floating social css to position the icon correctly.

You will need to modify this to point to your own (or some one else’s icon for email)

 

Android email client eats bandwidth.

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Originally I had some issues with the Android email client supplied on my LG phone running Android 4.1.2 so I installed the mail client K-9 (see Google Play )  which was very good.

However, recently I decided to switch back to the Android email client, for reasons that are a bit difficult to explain.

All was well, or so it seemed. I rarely am out of Wireless range so don’t use much data.  However last week I had to go away for a few days.  After a day, I was shocked to  get a message that my monthly allowance of 500MB had been used up.  As I couldn’t be without email I purchased a top up of 500MB.

The next day I was totally shocked to get a text warning me that I had used up 90% of my increased allowance.  I needed to investigate, so looking at the data used I could see that over 80MB had been eaten by the mail client.

At that stage, rather than buy yet another half a gig, I re-installed K-9 email client.from here .   And guess what, over the next 3 days I used less than 50MB.

Maybe there was some setting that was wrong on the Android email client that I should have changed, I don’t know, but for now I’m firmly leaving K9 in place.

If you have had similar experiences, or know how to stop email clients eating bandwidth, why not leave a comment.

Who is Semalt.com | How to block Semalt.com

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Later in this post I tell you how to block semalt.com.

I recently notice strange referral traffic from semalt.com.   So a quick investigation, by visiting their site I see that they are some sort of analytics tools. Offering a free sign up for 7 days but no pricing, suspicious or what?

At this point I realised I had been ‘had’, thats exactly what they wanted, me to visit their site, by definition because I’m looking at my analytics I must be interested in analytics, so they have dragged me to their site by dubious marketing.

Worse still, if I just post something about them they are getting more viral publicity. Clever eh!

Except I don’t like their wasteful and deceitful traffic so I block it. And I’ll show you how to block semalt.com referral traffice too.

Simple add this to your .htaccess file

 

 

of course I can’t take any responsibility if this stops your site or anything, its up to you to test it, not me. But it works for my sites.

If you want to test semalt.com being blocked, I think you just have to watch your analytics to see if semalt stops getting referred to you.

Repairing MYSQL database after a crash

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With linux, its a good idea to monitor your disc space carefully as if you run out of space you can create all sorts of problem.  Elsewhere I will post a disc space usage script that you might find useful.

So you had a crash due to lack of space it is highly likely that if you are running an active LAMP server you will have ended up with corrupted database tables. These need to be fixed.

These can be fixed one by one by going into mysql (using phpmysqladmin if you like) and doing

However, you probably want to go through all your tables, and indeed if you have multiple databases, all your databases and repair them all.

How to do it is documented here, however the command line command you want is (on one line)

Of course you need to identify and change  ‘path_to_database_files’ on Centos you will probably find this is  ‘/var/lib/mysql’ so the command line you want for Centos would be