First kill, woot!

Background:

If you’ve been following my Twitter, you know I recently lashed out against a scraper who was stealing our content, removing the copyright link from the feed, and hotlinking our images. In the past, I had tolerated scrapers because as long as they kept the copyright link, the effort of fighting scrapers outweighed the benefits. I didn’t want to turn off hotlinking, because that screws with legit fans reading our posts in feed-readers. Fortunately, rather than use a whitelisting strategy, one can use a blacklisting strategy against specific scrapers.

Sorry Raichu, but no amount of crying will wash the image from your mind's eye

The strategy I used has been employed before against hotlinkers, but (compared to some other types of blogs) anime blogs have an advantage against scrapers in that the images are both numerous in and very important to the post. Most scrapers simply hotlink because it’s easy, and this makes them vulnerable to .htaccess protection that switches out the image they were trying to steal for the image of your choosing.

Fighting Back:

The process is quite simple.  Create a .htaccess file with the below code, and upload it to the directory where your images reside (probably /wp-content/uploads).  It will protect all your sub-directories, too.

You can add as many sites as you want.  Notice you have to use the backslash to escape the periods in the URL of the Rewrite Condition.  Remember to insert your own URL for the image you want to redirect the scraper to.  I think you may have to match image formats, to avoid confusing the browser.  Depending on what FTP program you are using, you may have to name the file htaccess.txt, upload it, and then rename it to .htaccess to get the file to upload correctly.

Additional Thoughts:

Target acquired

You can redirect the scraper to hotlink the disgusting image or an annoying blinking image on someone else’s site. I’ve seen first-hand that nice warning images do not stop scrapers, as they don’t have any problems stealing animeblogger.net posts and images.  Blinking animated images are supremely annoying and don’t get curious readers into trouble.

The best part about the .htaccess redirect is that it only serves up the nasty stuff to the specific sites you mention, so rather than build a wall that keeps a lot of people out, you defend yourself by dropping laser-guided bombs on your enemies.  Plus, scrapers often have to remove the defaced posts manually, and the lazier they were in the first place, the harder your images will be to remove.  I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed watching the scraper that inspired this article try to remove our posts one by one, only to get shut down by WordPress before the horror had been completely exorcised.

Suddenly, the Uncommon Uses feature in Feedburner becomes so much more useful.  Most scrapers don’t credit the author anyway, so this process might not ruin your good name as quickly as you think.  Is this childish?  Yes.  Is it deeply satisfying and amusing?  Yes.

©2010 Sea Slugs! Anime Blog. All Rights Reserved.

1. Cap an Image

I am a Kappa

I start with a full-screen image, take a screencap, and then paste it into my image-editing program.  Although many video players have a native screencap function, I prefer to use Print Screen to avoid double JPEG compression.  It’s not really a big deal, though, and if you take a lot of caps, it’s probably easier to use the native screencap function and then browse the screencap folder later.  If you are using a newer version of Photoshop, take note of the Adjustment layers which I will be using later on.

2. Sharpen the Image

I prefer The Sharper Image

I find that using a Sharpening tool on the image before resizing can really improve the quality of the image.  Here I go into the Filters menu and use the Smart Sharpen tool, but most general Sharpening tools will do a fine job.  I don’t go overboard, but because I Sharpen before I resize the image, I don’t have to worry about the lines getting too jaggy/pixelated.

3. Resize and Check the Curves

Note the weak shadows and bright highlights

At this point I resize the image to a width of 600 pixels, because that’s the size that our theme is optimized for.  Resizing the image in a real image editing program (i.e. not Paint) usually yields far superior results.  I then click on the Curves Adjustment Layer button that was shown in the first step to add a layer for (surprise!) adjusting the curves.  Some may find this step intimidating, but the effect is similar to increasing the contrast through a Levels tool or simply fiddling with the Brightness and Contrast tool.  Using the Curves tool, however, gives you much finer control.

4. Adjust the Highlights and Shadows

S for Sea Slugs

For most scenes, you will probably only need to bump up the highlights slightly and lower the shadows slightly, to give the new curve a slight S-curve.  Overdoing it can give the picture an over-saturated look.  You basically just click on that central diagonal line in the curves tool to set a point to edit, and then move the point up and down, or left and right, to adjust the contrast.  Try experimenting with the Curves tool a little and you will see it is not that scary.  I prefer to use an adjustment layer instead of directly editing the curves, just because it’s easier to go back and make changes later.  Here I darkened the shadows and mostly held the highlights steady.

The Results

Wow that's awesome, let's date

So here is a comparison shot.  A lot of anime scenes tend to look a little washed out, especially with lower-budget slice-of-life or comedy shows.  This treatment can make the caps look better and make it easier to tell what’s going on in the scene.  If you use Photoshop, you can turn these steps into a macro.  I went into the Actions menu and recorded all these steps right up until the curves adjustment, so that I can do all of the previous steps with a simple tap of CTRL + F12 (you can bind it to a different key combination if you like).

Obviously this adds another step in putting together a post, but for me it’s worth it.  Let me know if you find this useful, or if you have suggestions on how to improve the workflow.

©2010 Sea Slugs! Anime Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Now with extra Nama-ko

As I previously mentioned, I’ve been working on a redesign for 2010.  It took some extra time to get started because Apache wouldn’t start in Xampplite; it turns out some other programs were using the necessary ports.  I haven’t yet enabled that many of the new features, but I wanted to get the new design up to see how readers liked it.  There’s only one header for now, because I don’t want to have to remake a ton of headers every time I update the header image’s template.

I know the page CSS is wonky, but that’s because I’ll be redistributing the information on the various pages.  I’ll also be reactivating various sidebar widgets, so don’t worry if your favorite widget isn’t there yet.

Notes on the redesign: Show ▼

©2010 Sea Slugs! Anime Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Three, that's the magic number

I was reading some news about what is planned for WordPress 3.0 and 2010, the new default theme, and I realized it’s been over a year since the last redesign.  As much as revamping the site is a chore, things change and new features arise.

SS!AB is a pretty large and old site (as far as anime blogs go anyway), which poses challenges for navigation.  We can’t simply just list all our archives directly on the side, and it can be a pain to sort through the archives.

If there’s a feature you’d like to see added to the SS!AB design, please let me know in the comments!

Things To Add

• Custom Menus: This is the feature that excites me the most about WP 3.0.  This will eliminate multiple plugins from our list, and will greatly simplify adding more effective navigation.  This could make it easier to list out current series being blogged, without having to wrangle a lot of code or screwing around with category hierarchy.  Too bad I’ve heard that this feature might not quite be ready and might be pulled back till 3.1 or so.
• Drop-down Menus: I am going to wait and see if I want to go with a child theme of Thematic or 2010, but either way I think it’s time to utilize drop-down navigation.  This has become much easier to do in recent years, so I’d like to try it out.
• Author Profiles: When I go to other team blogs, sometimes I cannot figure out who wrote the article.  Then, sometimes it’s difficult to connect with all the various authors.  Now that we have so many authors, I might make a little author blurb be a part of each post.

Other Notes:

• I expect that the overall look of SS!AB will remain similar.  Unlike changes in the early years, the last few iterations have retained the blue and green color scheme that I’ve come to associate with SS!AB.  I’ve been trying to build the brand of the site, if you will, and I think our mascot, Nama-ko, should help that.  I like the size of the various blog sections (fits nicely on my 1024-pixel wide netbook screen), the front will mostly be a freshening up with some revamped navigation.
• One of my main goals is making older content easier to locate.
• I am experimenting with conditions on ads to hide them for regular visitors (who generally never click anything anyway) and show them more obnoxiously for people stumbling upon the site from Google.  Smart Pricing is a biatch for sites serving ads.  This could be a win-win for regular visitors and SS!AB, as it would free up a lot of sidebar space and make the site look better without decreasing overall ad revenue.  Interestingly, it also decrease the page loading time by 60% as ad fetching was a bit of a bottleneck.
• It might be a while before I start/finish the redesign.

©2010 Sea Slugs! Anime Blog. All Rights Reserved.

I swore I set the Roper alarm!

With the automatic upgrade features in WordPress now, I didn’t give upgrading WP 2.9 a second thought.  Unfortunately, the next day Epi alerts me that one of his scheduled 12 Days of Christmas posts had not been published.  Imagine my surprise when I went into the Posts area and see the post with a Missed Schedule alert next to it!

Obviously this was pretty surprising, considering it’s not like the post has to catch a bus or drive in traffic (web traffic, wa ha ha~) to arrive on the front page.  How could it miss the scheduled time?  Even worse, updating the publish time didn’t fix the problem, and the post kept missing deadline after deadline.  Did someone tag the post as Jesus159159159 (ok that was mean, but I had to ^__~)?  Turns out this has been a bug for a few versions now, and the solution required a quick edit to the core files.

Essentially, the default cron timeout limit is too short and so I had to change a line in wp-cron.php to increase this limit.  In my case (WP version 2.9), I changed line 229 from:

to:

After I increased the limit to 20 seconds, the post still missed the schedule at first, but after a short while, it published correctly.  Hopefully this gets fixed soon, because I don’t want to have to manually edit the core files every time I update.  On a semi-related note, I’m liking this Code Snippet plugin.

©2010 Sea Slugs! Anime Blog. All Rights Reserved.

OMG implants!

A couple people have asked me about this, and it turns out that it is actually fairly easy to merge blogs.  Step 1: Backup your database.  Step 2: Admit you ignored step 1 and this time backup your database for real.  Ok, now you’re ready to proceed.

6 months ago I thought I would start a manga blog and post so much that I would need a separate blog.  Then I found out it took me much longer to write a post than it did to read a chapter, and I found myself with less and less enthusiasm.  However, I didn’t just want to waste all that work.  And so, like a sand goby, SS!AB consumed Manga Mosaic.  For the purposes of this tutorial, I refer to MM as “source_blog” and SS!AB as “dest_blog“.  For additional reading, refer to: 1, 2, 3, 4.  If you’re timid, note that you should not need to muck around with any code or databases directly in this tutorial.  All work is done with plugins or within the WordPress admin area, and the whole process took about 1.25 hours (which included time for me to read instructions, eat a sandwich, and read my email as well as some ESPN).

Prep Work

1. I had some identical categories and tags at source_blog, so I renamed all of them with an
   M_

   prefix.  You could just name the categories/tags whatever you want them to appear as on dest_blog, but doing it this way is a tad safer.  You may also want to delete all pages, or at least rename them so it’s easy to tell which are duplicates.  You want to be able to quickly find posts/categories/tags from source_blog and edit them once they are moved to dest_blog.

2. I then put source_blog into Maintenance Mode and backed up the database.
3. Create a temporary user in dest_blog.  You will be assigning the posts from source_blog to this temporary user, which again will allow you to make global changes to the imported posts more easily.  I named this user Temp.

The Crime

1. The WordPress Importer and Exporter tools have come a long way.  On source_blog go to Tools and then Export.  Export the blog and save the file.  This shouldn’t take very long.
2. Back up dest_blog just in case anything goes wrong.
3. On dest_blog go to Tools and then Import.  Select the file you want and set Temp as the author of the new files.  I also checked the option to download all file attachments.  This step took the most time, about 30 minutes for 43 posts.
4. In my case, source_blog only used the WP media uploader to upload files, so I can’t guarantee that this will always work.  However, when I finished importing, I was pleasantly surprised to see that all pictures from source_blog had been downloaded and then uploaded to dest_blog and all the pictures loaded correctly because the URLs had been automatically corrected to point to dest_blog files.  If you uploaded images with FTP and this doesn’t work for you, don’t despair, because we have a few more tricks up our sleeves.

Cleaning Up

1. Back up again, so that if you mess up a search/replace iteration you won’t have to do everything again.
2. If you have some tricky find/replace jobs to do, you can whip out the SQL queries, but otherwise, installing the Search and Replace plugin on dest_blog will probably be all you need.
3. I replaced all instances of
   source_blog.com

   with

   dest_blog.com

   and then checked to make sure everything was correctly changed.

4. If necessary, rename the tags and categories from source_blog to what you want them to be in dest_blog.  Do any searching/replacing necessary to get old links to work.
5. If the Import didn’t pull all your pictures from source_blog, then manually upload them to dest_blog and do any searching/replacing to make sure that the pictures that you imported display correctly.
6. When you are sure that everything worked, delete the user Temp and attribute all of those posts to the appropriate author on dest_blog.

Bribing the Officials

Check to make sure everything works.  Now it’s time to make sure old visitors always go to dest_blog to read the posts and also to insure that Google doesn’t smack you down for having identical content in two locations.

1. You will want to check to see how the permalink structures differ.  In my case I had to go from
   http://www.source_blog.com/YYYY/MM/DD/title

   to

   http://www.dest_blog.com/archives/YYYY/MM/DD/title

   in order to make the links match up directly.  This is because my two blogs had different permalink structures.

2. Install the Redirection plugin on source_blog.  This is a pretty cool plugin that is also useful on your active blog if you make a lot of changes to the permalink structure.
3. Use the plugin to automatically redirect (with a 301) all attempts to visit posts on source_blog to the corresponding doppelganger on dest_blog.  Go to dest_blog and try to click some of you posts to try it out.  You can use the Regex option in this plugin as sort of a wildcard.  Caution: Don’t be stupid like me and redirect the root of dest_blog.  I did this and found myself unable to access the WP admin area.  I had to go into the database and delete the corresponding Redirection plugin option in phpMyAdmin to get back in…
4. I redirected
   http://www.source_blog.com/YYYY/to
   http://www.dest_blog.com/archives/YYYY/

   for all years.  I’m not 100% sure this is the best method, but it worked.  I made sure to add

   http://www.source_blog.com/YYYY/

   as an exception path in the Maintenance Mode settings so that attempts to access front page of dest_blog reached the maintenance page but attempts to access individual posts went through and were redirected.  This can be tricky, so here’s a guide and a bunch of regex cheat sheets.

5. Don’t forget to redirect feeds.  You can do this with Feedburner.

Well, there you have it.  It was actually much simpler than I expected.  Let me know if you see any errors with this writeup, and I’ll do my best to clarify or correct steps.

©2010 Sea Slugs! Anime Blog. All Rights Reserved.