I try to keep maxpower pretty cruft free — no banners, no flashing hit the monkey games, popups or popunders. As a websurfer, I hate those types of advertising and as website owner I would never employ them. In order to keep the site afloat and pay for itself I seek out web sponsors that would be interested in employing text ads here on MaxPower.

I feel that any website I advertise or endorse on MaxPower should have some utility (aka be useful). COLOURLovers meets this utility criteria and I am pleased to be able to help promote it and I am genuinely a fan.

//// COLOURlovers™ is a project focused on providing its audience with colour (color) inspiration & information. it’s purpose is to allow creative individuals to share colours & palettes they love as well as submit news and comments for others to read. the COLOURlovers community is regularly updated with current color trends & news articles along with interviews with top creative professionals.

If you are a theme designer or web developer, or want to paint a room in your house I can think of no better place to start dreaming than at the top Colour palette’s section of the website where various colour palette’s created by users are on display and ranked. A few schemes I wouldn’t be caught dead with, but the overwhelming majority are beautiful. Its a great place to start your next CSS reboot.

Thanks COLOURLovers for providing a valuable service and for helping to keep maxpower cruft free. Here is a screen grab: » Read the rest of the entry..

This plugin adds buttons to the WordPress editor that correspond to special classes used in the Sawchuk scheme for K2. K2 is a theme for WordPress that has too many feature to mention here (visit Getk2 for details) other than to say one of the most prominent features is the ability to change the look of K2 completely using only CSS. » Read the rest of the entry..

All bloggers detest spam and splogs. Spammers attempt to co-op your website into advertising for them while stealing your bandwidth, and splogs cut right to the chase by stealing your words and reposting them with their own ads. We’ve got plugins like Akismet, Spam-Karma that stop comment spam while other plugins like AntiLeech and Digital Fingerprint help you fight the rebologging splogs.

All these plugins are great at helping to defend your website from the nefarious types, but the greatest tools in the fight against splogs and spam are elbow grease and a discerning mind.

One thing I know most webmasters (including myself) don’t do enough of is sift through our weblogs. Website logs collected at the server level can tell us a myriad of things but most importantly, they can help us pinpoint who is stealing our bandwidth (via out of control robots and comment spammers) and who is stealing our content. A tiny bit of hard work, the ability to follow directions, some familiarity with excel, and a keen eye for the out of place is all you need to figure out who is stealing from you by looking at your logs. Let me show you. » Read the rest of the entry..

Over the last little bit a few visitors to MaxPower have let me know about a couple important issues / problems. This is my chance to thank them in a public manner:

Drunkey Love creator Kevin Wetzels alerted me to someone that had copied an entire post of mine, reposted it on their own site, and claimed it as their own original work. For shame. Kevin is a talented graphic artist and has created a great set of free icons (Drunky Love) as well as a very beautiful WordPress theme. Check out both at his website, Drunkey Love. Thanks Kevin!

Matt Oakes sent me an email to let me know that a page I had on MaxPower was now mysteriously disappeared. Turns out, somehow, it became marked as a private. I never noticed a problem because I could see the page fine (as I was logged in). Anyway, problem solved! Matt is a talented Javascript programmer who write plugins that use the jQuery library. I think his Catfish plugin is particularly intriguing. Thanks Matt!

Mosts posts you see on MaxPower have been crafted over a number of days (possibly even weeks). Sometimes the research takes a long time to complete, sometimes not. Still other times I just don’t want to write anymore on a subject and never end up publishing the post. What follows is a brief overeview of some of the stories that never got published and that I’m sick of seeing in the ‘Drafts’ pile. Consider the two shorts stories that follow kind of like blooging bloopers (except no laugh track). » Read the rest of the entry..

With the rampant rise of plagiarism, lawsuits, and just the general state of affairs around the blogosphere it seems that sooner rather than later, every blog should put up a Legal Notice / Terms of Use page. A Legal Notice page for your blog is like alarm company stickers on the windows of your house, they doesn’t really do anything other than alert visitors that you mean business. Professional burglars are still going to break in and steal things just as unscrupulous Internet visitors / scrapers continue to repost your content with their ads. At least you are giving the bad guys the heads up that you are serious about your work.

My current legal notice is copied from Elliott Back (by his permission). I changed the name and website in the text of the notice and added my own little blurb about RSS use and the theme that provides the look of this website (sawchuk). Once written the way I liked, I then published Legal Notice as a WordPress page (instead of a regular post).

Now, its all fine and dandy that the Legal Notice had been published, but I wanted it to be visible at the bottom of every page ever published on MaxPower.ca. I wrote a quick plugin to do the job and I thought that maybe others would find it interesting as well. So here is a quick how to / how it works:

» Read the rest of the entry..

I have been running my recently released plugin, digital fingerprint, here at MaxPower for about 3 weeks. By week three, I discovered that my content is being ripped off (via the rss feed) and reposted on another site in a semi-abbreviated format complete with all the tags I have used. In effect, the splog is stealing all the keywords and SEO of every article I write. No doubt, this post will probably show up there too. » Read the rest of the entry..

Entrap: To lure into performing a previously or otherwise uncontemplated illegal act.

With the recent release of AntiLeech, an anti splog plugin for WordPress by Owen Winkler, there finally exists a real method of fighting back against content scraping thieves. AntiLeech is a plugin for WordPress that attempts to serve up fake content to known splogs. The plugin identifies splogs by either their User-Agents or IP address (user supplied). From the plugin page:

What does AntiLeech do? AntiLeech does not prevent the splogger bots from accessing your site. No, it does better than that. It produces a fake set of content especially for them that includes links back to your site (and mine, too, ok?) and sends it only to them.

AntiLeech also offer up the option of creating custom content to serve up only to splog bots. This option is how I now wildly progistcate on how to entrap would be splogers. By using AntiLeech, a splog will publish on their site a fake piece of content that you or I write. This content can be anything…. » Read the rest of the entry..