Fixing Page Size Issues Caused by Jetpack for WordPress

Recently when analyzing my own web site I discovered that the pages sizes on my web site were coming in at around 1.2 MB to 1.5 MB total in size. These page sizes completely shocked me! I don’t use an overabundance of graphics, nor did I consider my content to be extremely heavy, so I was a little concerned about what was causing the increased bloat. So, to begin, I started looking at the possible culprits, and worked to identify what was causing the insanely high page sizes, and I encountered a shocking find. A single plugin was contributing to the shocking page sizes, and that plugin was Jetpack for WordPress.

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Subscriptions Now Enabled!

As I have seen the audience and traffic grow for this web site, I have wanted the ability to better stay in touch and inform visitors and readers of new articles, updates, and other news. Therefore, I have enabled subscriptions.

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Fighting WordPress Comment Spam with a Nonce

Fighting WordPress Comment Spam with a Nonce

In addition to blocking the comment spam bots that don’t include a HTTP_REFERER header indicating the request came from your web site, as indicated in a previous posting Fight Back Against WordPress Comment Spam with a HTTP_REFERER Check, additional steps can be taken to combat comment spam. This post will discuss the addition of a nonce field to your comment form that verifies the request came from your web site and not from somewhere else.

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Fight Back Against WordPress Comment Spam with a HTTP_REFERER Check

Fight Back Against WordPress Comment Spam with a HTTP_REFERER Check

For those that use WordPress, comment spam is a huge problem. There are lot of good ways to combat comment spam, and many plugins that help with the issue; however, they don’t always stop the spammer before they submit the comment, and generally rely on categorization into appropriate areas for further moderation or removal. I decided to leverage the following Apache rewrite directives that take advantage of the HTTP_REFERER header to ensure that comment submissions are actually originating from my web site.

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