I've started to work as a External Consultant for Equens Worldline, who lately merged with Atos – a French multinational information technology.
As the company is mostly into the financial business and as any company that is involved with OLTP Online transaction processing , an information systems that typically facilitate and manage transaction-oriented applications, e.g. in a mortal language takes care for a numerous companies Credit / Debit card online payments.
Of course the technologies used both on a Server / Data Center level and for Employee personal used are a bit old fashioned. In that relation, most of the computers, I've seen used by Worldline – Atos including my work PC notebook is still running a custom version of Windows 7.
Once I had the Computer ready with the OS from the HelpDesk colleague, then it was ready to install, unfortunately, I didn't have administrator account on the Lenovo L serie laptop so I couldn't install applications. To get around this I've used PortableApps – the world's most popular portable software solution allowing you to take your favorite software with you with no need for any Installation and on Win OS computers, where you have limited access.
PortableApps is fully open source and free platform, it works from any synced cloud folder (DropBox, Google Drive, Box, etc), from your local PC on an internal or external drive, or on any portable storage device (USB flash drive, memory card, portable hard drive, etc). Because the applicatons are installed without being really binded to the Win OS, once the PortableApps ported Application is installed it can be easily moved by simply copying between PCs.
PortableApps.com is currently used by millions of users all over the world and is the Largest Portable full collection of open source and freeware software, compatible commercial software, and partners in hardware industry for Microsoft Windows.
As I do often with the Windows fresh installed Windows machines I have to work on, install the great set of tools prior described in must have software on any fresh installed Windows OS as this is essential if you're a sysadmin or Advanced user for the daily work with the WinBlows
OS Graphical Interface simplicity is a crucial thing to me, cause if I have to work with Windows and spendan 8 hours each day 5 days a week in front of the Computer Display with this Complex unnecessery coloring (that Windows 7 / Windows 10 default Theme introduced), together with the visual aids on the Window Minimize and Maximize, puts a useless additional eye strain and besides that "fries" the brain (as the brain has to process all this mambo-jambo "virtual" reality graphics turning all down and up and mixing up the gamma of unreal colors for nothing …
So far so good I've set the needed software from above list and continued further to Change my Windows start menu to look like Windows 2000. Start menu and Theme To be the Classic Theme.
After setting up the Windows Classic Theme (which by the way is unfortunately, no longer available in Windows 10), I love to set my Windows Background picture to be a Sold Black Color, I do this as Black color is the less exhausting for the eyes – as one views the desktop picture thousand times and this is extra unnecessery work for the brain.
However next, unpleasant thing faced is even though now my Windows Start and Windows borders looked old-fashioned in the Windows 2000 Server, "wooden" style, the order of my (Open) Running applicaitons on the start menu bar were not isolated but were mixing, with the rest of my Pinned Program Starter icons
! Notice the Windows Media player icon being in the middle between the Lync, Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer line … !
I spend some time to rewind some memories on how I did make the pinned program to distinguish itself (separate) from the rest of the Opened Runnign Windows, and had in mind that I used some kind of separator added custom Toolbar, but the bad thing was I couldn't remember exactly how so I spend some good amount of time to Google around.
And found few articles on the topic proposing to add a new Custom empty launcher program of cmd.exe and change the icon of the empty launcher to a | graphical string
I've tried a lot of this approach but it didn't work and after some experimentations, finally I figured it out. The way to do it is to add a New Toolbar that is Pointing to a Directory with a list of Programs whose icons you want to have listed with icon launchers next to Start menu.
Here is step by step what I've done to achieve configuration of Hard Separator Delimiter between my Program Launchers and Running Applications.
1. Create a New Folder somewhere under your User Home directory, lets say:
C:\Users\Username\TaskbarPrograms
2. Add a shortcut or copy the programs starters (icons) to the TaskBar Programs
3. Unlock the Windows 7 Taskbar
E.g. Click over on any of the empty space on the taskbar after Windows Start menu button and untick Lock the Taskbar
4. Remove any Pinned programs (you have placed there earlier)
5. Again On an empty place on the Taskbar press the last button Mouse (Rightest button) to open Taskbar properties menu and
Go to ToolBars menu and Choose (New Toolbar)
6. As a location for the new toolbar place C:\Users\Username\TaskbarPrograms
The result should be that all the programs in the selected folder will appear in the Windows pane
8. Now go over the empty space of the Windows start menu bar
and untick Show Text / Show Title
9. Hold over the Taskbar Programs holder and drag and drop it constantly holding the left mouse button
and place it over the default separator Holder (for clarity marked in below screenshot as Marked over here).
10. Move the default separator that will appear on the left close to the list of shown applications
(shown in screenshot)
11. Open any of the applications (e.g. Firefox, Chrome, MobaXterm, Opera, RDP, VLC) the result should be a fine ordered icons. Hooray !!!
12. To make more space for the Opened Active (Running) Windows, a good hint is to stretch the start menu pane field – this is done by holding a right mouse button on the edge of the gray line, like shown in below screenshot.
Note that, you will need to remove any icons that are left over binded to the default separator (holder).
13. Finally on the Taskbar (empty space) menu with the Mouse, click again right mouse button and tick on the Lock the Taskbar
That's it now your Windows 7 start menu bar will look pretty much like Linux's GNOME 2.x and GNOME Mate, and if you're a a long years Linux Desktop user you will feel at home even on Windows 7.
To further tweak the Taskbar a very useful Program is Windows 7+ Taskbar Tweaker
"7+ Taskbar Tweaker allows you configure various aspects of the Windows taskbar which can't be tweaked via registry or taskbar properties. The tweaker is designed for Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10.
I install it mostly because one single feature Combined Grouped Buttons which makes similar Windows to group together. Just having a number of Windows of the same type floating around the Taskbar is really irritating and becomes really confusing once multiple windows.
For example if you have opened 10 Windows of Explorer they will be group under the same window title pointer.
To make the Windows even more bizarre and feel more like a Linux powered Box go on and install MobaXterm as a substitute for Linux's gnome-terminal as well as the rest of things such as CygWin / GNUWin32 / GVim etc.
Also some good start up list of software I do install on new Windows Desktop PCs is described in my previous article Some standard software programs to install on Windows to make your Windows feel more like a Linux / Unix Desktop host
This time I did not needed that but on other locations another Windows useful hint I use every now and then is to set some custom programs (Lets say a PortableApps program) to Automatically run – described earlier in my earlier article how to add startup Windows 7 / 8 program run on startup.
P.S. I've tried to setup the same Classic Theme and Start menu button with the same order on Windows 10 OS, but even though a similar interface could be achieved, I've had problems with setting up the proper Running application Ordering, due to a different behavior of the Delimiter / Separators in Windows 10.
For me this Custom Windows interface and Window ordering works pretty well it saves me a lot of the eye strain and brain overcalculation for nothing.
After all, Lets not forget that God is in the Simplicity ! 🙂
Remove URL from comments in WordPress Blogs and Websites to mitigate comment spam URLs in pages
Friday, February 20th, 2015If you're running a WordPress blog or Website where you have enabled comments for a page and your article or page is well indexing in Google (receives a lot of visit / reads ) daily, your site posts (comments) section is surely to quickly fill in with a lot of "Thank you" and non-sense Spam comments containing an ugly link to an external SPAM or Phishing website.
Such URL links with non-sense message is a favourite way for SPAMmers to raise their website incoming (other website) "InLinks" and through that increase current Search Engine position.
We all know a lot of comments SPAM is generally handled well by Akismet but unfortunately still many of such spam comments fail to be identified as Spam because spam Bots (text-generator algorithms) becomes more and more sophisticated with time, also you can never stop paid a real-persons Marketers to spam you with a smart crafted messages to increase their site's SEO ).
In all those cases Akismet WP (Anti-Spam) plugin – which btw is among the first "must have" WP extensions to install on a new blog / website will be not enough ..
To fight with worsening SEO because of spam URLs and to keep your site's SEO better (having a lot of links pointing to reported spam sites will reduce your overall SEO Index Rate) many WordPress based bloggers, choose to not use default WordPress Comments capabilities – e.g. use exnternal commenting systems such as Disqus – (Web Community of Communities), IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, Vicomi …
However as Disqus and other 3rd party commenting systems are proprietary software (you don't have access to comments data as comments are kept on proprietary platform and shown from there), I don't personally recommend (or use) those ones, yes Disqus, Google+, Facebook and other comment external sources can have a positive impact on your SEO but that's temporary event and on the long run I think it is more advantageous to have comments with yourself.
A small note for people using Disqos and Facebook as comment platforms – (just imagine if Disqos or Facebook bankrupts in future, where your comments will be? 🙂 )
So assuming that you're a novice blogger and I succeeded convincing you to stick to standard (embedded) WordPress Comment System once your site becomes famous you will start getting severe amount of comment spam. There is plenty of articles already written on how to remove URL comment form spam in WordPress but many of the guides online are old or obsolete so in this article I will do a short evaluation on few things I tried to remove comment spam and how I finally managed to disable URL link spam to appear on site.
1. Hide Comment Author Link (Hide-wp-comment-author-link)
This plugin is the best one I found and I started using it since yesterday, I warmly recommend this plugin because its very easy, Download, Unzip, Activate and there you're anything typed in URL field will no longer appear in Posts (note that the URL field will stay so if you want to keep track on person's input URL you can get still see it in Wp-Admin). I'm using default WordPress WRC (Kubrick), but I guess in most newer wordpress plugins is supposed to work. If you test it on another theme please drop a comment to inform whether works for you. Hide Comment Author Link works on current latest Wordpress 4.1 websites.
A similar plugin to hide-wp-author-link that works and you can use is Hide-n-Disable-comment-url-field, I tested this one but for some reason I couldn't make it work.
Whatever I type in Website field in above form, this is wiped out of comment once submitted 🙂
2. Disable hide Comment URL (disable-hide-comment-url)
I've seen reports disable-hide-comment-url works on WordPress 3.9.1, but it didn't worked for me, also the plugin is old and seems no longer maintaned (its last update was 3.5 years ago), if it works for you please please drop in comment your WP version, on WP 4.1 it is not working.
3. WordPress Anti-Spam plugin
WordPress Anti-Spam plugin is a very useful addition plugin to install next to Akismet. The plugin is great if you don't want to remove commenter URL to show in the post but want to cut a lot of the annoying Spam Robots crawling ur site.
Anti-spam plugin blocks spam in comments automatically, invisibly for users and for admins.
Plugin is easy to use: just install it and it just works.
Anti bot works fine on WP 4.1
4. Stop Spam Comments
Stop Spam Comments is:
Stop Spam Comments works fine on WP 4.1.
I've mentioned few of the plugins which can help you solve the problem, but as there are a lot of anti-spam URL plugins available for WP its up to you to test and see what fits you best. If you know or use some other method to protect yourself from Comment Url Spam to share it please.
Import thing to note is it usually a bad idea to mix up different anti-spam plugins so don't enable both Stop Spam Comments and WordPress Anti Spam plugin.
5. Comment Form Remove Url field Manually
This (Liberian) South) African blog describes a way how to remove URL field URL manually
In short to Remove Url Comment Field manually either edit function.php (if you have Shell SSH access) or if not do it via Wp-Admin web interface:
Paste at the end of file following PHP code:
Now to make changes effect, Restart Apache / Nginx Webserver and clean any cache if you're using a plugin like W3 Total Cache plugin etc.
Other good posts describing some manual and embedded WordPress ways to reduce / stop comment spam is here and here, however as it comes to my blog, none of the described manual (code hack) ways I found worked on WordPress v. 4.1.
Thus I personally stuck to using Hide and Disable Comment URL plugin to get rid of comment website URL.
Tags: article, bloggers, btw, data, interface, lot, page, php, platform, problem, running, Search Engine, SEO, spam, Spam Robots, Stop Spam Comments, theme, URLs, use, website, Wordpress Comments, wordpress plugins, wp
Posted in Curious Facts, Various, Web and CMS, Wordpress | 2 Comments »