Rob Spencer

Programming and Web Development

One Wordpress Installation For All Of Your Domains

If you have a lot of wordpress sites like myself, you are probably annoyed with having to update each and every install on all of your domains. Not to mention that having so many installs takes up a lot of unnecessary hard drive space with all of the duplicate files for wordpress and all of the plugins we seem to use on every blog install. Wouldn’t it be nice to just upgrade wordpress and your plugins one time and have it reflect on all your domains? Well you may be surprised by how easy this actually is to accomplish. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Auto Update Wordpress Without FTP

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade Asking for FTP Information

When using the auto update feature to update wordpress to the newest version or to update your plugins, some users wonder why they need to enter ftp details when others don’t. Or maybe you have to enter the ftp information for your wordpress install on one server but not another. Not only do you have to enter your ftp details to use the automatic upgrade feature, you also have to chmod your wp-content folder to 0777 or 0775 rather than the default 0755 just so you can use the image uploader. If you have root access to your server, I will show you how to fix that.

[Read the rest of this entry...]

Quick and Easy Way to Keep Bots Off Your Forms

A lot of people ask me how to keep bots from spamming their contact forms. Here is a simple way to do it without implementing a captcha code or other complicated security measures.

Most bots will fill in form fields they recognize with the data they are spamming. When they come across an unknown field, they will usually fill it in with a random string just so the form is submitted without error. This is where we can take advantage. [Read the rest of this entry...]

It has begun!

Welcome to RobSpencer.net. If you cannot tell from the domain name or the large title above, my name is Rob Spencer.

This is a site I been planning to build for the past few years and finally getting around to it. I plan to talk about the things I do in my everyday work as a webmaster and web programmer. I will be providing tutorials, code snippets, maybe some free wordpress plugins, some blackhat and whitehat SEO, general rants and bitches, or whatever else I feel like talking about. Some topics may be advanced concepts while others will be noob stuff.

I am usually pretty busy with my programming and site development and I don’t really enjoy writing, so don’t expect daily updates. If I start a multi part tutorial and say the next part will be available tomorrow, it probably won’t be available until next week. If you like what I write about, feel free to stick around, post some comments with your opinions or experiences, subscribe to my rss feeds, or whatever else floats your boat. If you don’t like it, just click that little back arrow button at the top of your browser. I can’t please everyone.

In all actuality, I will try to provide something useful for everyone. I hope you enjoy it and decide to stick around.