One of the newest and biggest revolutions in content consumption is streaming on audio. Audiobooks are one way to consume content, but involve a fairly substantial investment of time to actually finish a complete book (longer than actually reading it). Podcasts are a more low commitment and convenient way to stay up to date with your industry of choice, while learning new skills in the process.

Podcasts can be played in the background of doing tasks that don’t consume your complete attention, and you can use podcasts to stay updated on the latest WordPress news and topics that may help you and your business. Listening to audio can easily fit into your life during a commute, waiting before an appointment, or even during a gym session.

Regardless of how you decide to fit podcasts into your life, here are the top WordPress podcasts to listen to for staying up to date with the WordPress community.

1. MATT REPORT

Matt Medeiros, the founder and host of Matt Report, started his podcast in October of 2012 with the goal of connecting to the WordPress community and helping them to start and run their digital businesses. On Matt Report, he interviews consultants, bootstrappers, and business owners.

Some topics he’s discussed during his podcast include general online business considerations, like:

• How to build an online community
• How to find an angel investor for small startups
• Creating an online course

2. THE WORDPRESS CHICK

The founder and host of this podcast, Kim Doyal, is also known as The WordPress Chick. Doyal started the podcast in 2013 with no grand plan, just a commitment to show up and do things her way.

Through The WordPress Chick, Doyal shares her passion for business, geeks out over tools and plugins, and casts a spotlight on others in the same online space. She also uses her podcast as an opportunity to transparently document her own online business journey.

Some of the topics Doyal discusses during the podcast include a focus on tactics, such as:

• Organic Facebook marketing
• Content planning & creating
• General WordPress development tips
• How to run social campaigns

3. WPWATERCOOLER

WPwatercooler is a podcast created specifically for WordPress developers. Its creator and host Jason Tucker interviews people from the community each week to talk about WordPress and how it’s changing businesses and people’s lives.

WPwatercooler topics always come back to WordPress, focusing on specific activities like:

• Managing events using WordPress
• Structuring your data in WordPress
• Structuring your WordPress projects
• Documentation for your WordPress project

4. WORDPRESS WEEKLY

WordPress Weekly is a WordPress-related podcast run by WP Tavern’s founder Jeff Chandler and mega-marketer and WordPress genius Marcus Couch. Together, Chandler and Couch talk about the latest community news and conduct interviews with well-known members of the WordPress community.

The WordPress Weekly podcast topics focus on current events and different individuals, but you can expect the conversation to include things like:

• WordPress Meetups, events, and WordCamps
• The latest WordPress news
• Themes, plugins, and WooCommerce

5. OFFICEHOURS.FM

OfficeHours.FM is a WordPress podcast that targets freelancers, small business owners, and other related parties providing WordPress based products or services. Its host, Carrie Dils, interviews people from the WordPress community to talk about their stories and what they’ve learned throughout their careers.

Many of the topics covered on OfficeHours.FM include a focus on general small business processes and productivity, including things like:

• Project management strategies and tactics
• Providing ongoing client services
• Onboarding clients for success

6. KITCHENSINKWP

kitchensinkWP is a podcast about everything WordPress. Its host, Adam Silver, wanted to find a way to give back and share the things he has learned about WordPress throughout his career, and a podcast was his ideal medium for doing so.

Through kitchensinkWP, Silver talks about the latest news and events in the WordPress community, interviewing popular WordPress professionals in the process.

Some of the topics that come up during kitchensinkWP include things like:

• Setting up redirects
• Building a site with an iPad
• Handling ownership and licenses of premium themes and plugins

Here’s a kitchensinkWP episode featuring the writer of this article.

7. POST STATUS DRAFT

Post Status Draft is a WordPress podcast that covers general news and information for WordPress professionals. Hosts Brian Krogsgard (creator and editor of Post Status) and Joe Hoyle (co-founder and CTO at Human Made) set forth interviews, conversations, and editorials for the WordPress community.

Topics covered on Post Status Draft run the gamut, but have included things like:

• Maintaining legacy WordPress websites
• Editing and customizing core focus areas
• Building a healthy remote company
• The art of being a self-employed web consultant

8. MASTERMIND.FM

Hosts Jean Galea (founder of WP Mayor, and creator of the WP RSS Aggregator and EDD Bookings) and James Laws (co-founder of WP Ninjas) are the masterminds of this WordPress podcast. Mastermind.FM is where Galea and Laws share wisdom from their own experiences, as well as those from other successful entrepreneurs.

Mastermind.FM could be described as a podcast perpetuating WordPress business thought leadership, covering topics such as:

• Business analytics
• The theme market
• Growth hacking: create, connect, deploy, succeed

9. HALLWAY CHATS

Hallway Chats is somewhat of a new podcast that shares the stories of marketing consultants, content creators, project managers, designers and developers—all with some sort of tie to WordPress.

Hosts Tara Claeys and Liam Dempsey share advice, tips, stories, and experiences from the people in the WordPress community that empower listeners to understand that their own challenges are shared by a wider community, regardless of the specific roles they play.

Some of the topics they’ve discuss during podcast so far include:

• How to use processes and software
• Managing content and community projects
• Web literacy

10. YOUR WEBSITE ENGINEER

Your Website Engineer is a WordPress podcast that aims to help listeners create a great looking website. Host and creator Dustin Hartzler is a huge fan of creating podcasts, which is why he spends his time creating this type of content. Each show focuses on just one topic so you can drill down on picking up a new skill.

Some of the topics covered in Your Website Engineer include things like:

• Setting up and configuring a custom email address
• Exploring hooks, actions, and filters
• WordPress template hierarchy
• WordPress.com for business

11. APPLY FILTERS

Hosted by Brad Touesnard (founder of Delicious Brains) and Pippin Williamson (creator of Easy Digital Downloads), Apply Filters is a WordPress podcast that covers everything from development in WordPress core, to plugin and theme development.

During Apply Filters, hosts Touesnard and Williamson share their own stories in the development world and also invite guest developers to share their stories.

Some of the topics discussed during Apply Filters include things like:

• WordPress development challenges
• Advanced Strategies vs. Just Shipping
• How to build a batch processing process
• Growing through strategic acquisitions

12. WPINNOVATOR

WP Innovator is a podcast about WordPress, marketing, strategy, and agency life. Host Lee Jackson interviews entrepreneurs and agency owners about their experiences.

Some of the podcast topics published so far include things like:

• Page builder frameworks
• Systemising for profit
• Making more sales with Woocommerce

TOP WORDPRESS PODCASTS FOR STAYING CURRENT WITH THE COMMUNITY

By tuning into one or a few WordPress podcasts, you’ll be able to stay up to date with the community during your downtime. The trick is just focusing on a few, as trying to follow every episode of all podcasts listed may not be relevant to you, and will certainly consume a large chunk of your time. Pick and choose the WordPress podcasts that best fit your current (or aspirational) position.

The post 12 Best WordPress Podcasts appeared first on Jayatechnology.

Reasons to avoid using Akismet

1. It’s only free for personal use; otherwise you have to pay from $60 a year for each site up to $50 a month (“for publishing networks, agencies, hosts and universities or multiple sites”). Part of the problem with that concept is that they don’t really define what they consider a “commercial” website. Is a commercial site a mommy blogger with a few Adsense ads or is it only true commercial enterprises that sells a product or service?
2. A lot of obvious spam gets through.
3. Doesn’t actually block the spammers. Akismet might flag their comments as spam but it does nothing to keep them from dumping 100 spam comments a day on your site. All of that junk uses your bandwidth, disk space and clutters up your WordPress database.
4. False positives. Akismet has a reputation for flagging good comments as spam. That means you’re still going to have to slog through all 1,248 comments in your spam folder to make sure it is all truly spam.
5. It can ignore comments made by legitimate visitors. I’ve seen several articles about this and experienced it myself. You leave a thoughtful reply to a blog post and when you hit submit there’s no notice of the comment awaiting moderation, no posting of the comment and no outward sign that what you took the time to write was actually accepted. Akismet may have simply blocked it.

Ah, but wait, Akismet is supposed to send suspicious comments to the spam folder. Apparently, not only does it send some legitimate comments to the spam folder, it doesn’t let some comments even into the system. Through the mysteries of their algorithm and reporting system, one of my email addresses was apparently placed on a spammers list. I don’t do a lot of blog commenting and when I do, it is usually several paragraphs long and they are always on point and would contribute to the conversation. In researching this article for Olaf, I found several folks theorizing that a denial of a trackback or even a single blogger tagging a comment with a particular email address can get that email banned in Akismet. I had always just assumed something went wrong between my lousy Internet connection or the blog I was commenting on. I don’t spam. It never occurred to me that I was on some sort of blacklist.

Even allowing for some false positives and blocking of legitimate comments, Olaf and I still don’t use Akismet. If I’m still going to have to review every comment being left on my blog, manually delete them AND never even see some potentially great comments; what’s the point?

So, if we don’t use Akismet anymore, what do we use?

Alternatives to Akismet

There are a number of free alternatives to Akismet that are more effective and are simply a better way to save you time, keep garbage from getting into your database in the first place and block bad bots before they have a chance to leave comments.

First off, Olaf and I don’t think there’s a single answer for fighting comment spam. The spammers are constantly changing their approach and there just doesn’t appear to be a 100% solution available. But, that might be a good thing in the long run. Perhaps some of the reasons why Akismet is not as effective as it once was is that in trying to be a sole solution, it can’t focus enough on each issue we face from spammers.

As a rule, Olaf has been using a three-pronged approach against spammers – filtering the bad traffic, blocking bad bots and automated comment post scripts and a more traditional comment-based spam blocker.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare has become our first line of defense against comment spam. They maintain their own blacklist, use 3rd party lists like AVH and it can be configured to block known spammers by their IP addresses. Once CloudFlare has noticed a new attacker, Cloudflare starts to block the attacker for both the particular website and the entire Cloudflare community. Olaf tells me that Cloudflare has the fastest and most secure network that he has ever worked with. He’s also noticed, across dozens of sites that he owns or operates for his clients, that Cloudflare has measurably decreased site load times. Cloudflare has also been known to recognize and repel brute force attacks against a site.

AVH First Defense Against Spam Plugin

AVH is a good alternative to the protection provided by Cloudflare. This plugin uses external lists (Stop Forum Spam, Project Honey Pot and Spamhaus) to block bad bots and users from even accessing your site. With AVH, you can also create your own blocked IP list.

5G Blacklist

5G Blacklist creates something of a firewall for your WordPress installation. The folks at PerishablePress.com believe the best way to stop those who wish to harm or exploit your site is to evaluate request strings and simply block them from even accessing your site. 5G helps reduce the number of malicious URL requests and protects against evil exploits, bad requests and other garbage.

5G isn’t a plugin. It is a bit of code that you add to your .htaccess file. If you don’t have direct access to your .htaccess file, you should consider changing hosts. But, in the meantime, you can make changes to your .htaccess file via one of the tools in the WordPress SEO plugin from Yoast.

Antispam Bee

This is a gem of a plugin that has not received the attention it deserves. It is the closest thing to a free version of Akismet except it doesn’t have the problems with false positives and saving all of the spammy comments for review. Antispam Bee blocks virtually all of the garbage from getting into your database in the first place. It doesn’t stop the spammer from leaving the comment; it just deletes it before you ever see it. Of course, you can change the settings to allow the comments into your Spam queue for individual review.

This plugin has a strong and loyal following. When the original developer had to beg off the project, members of the WordPress community have rallied behind him to keep this powerful plugin alive.

Stop Spam, Stop Wasting Time

All in all, the best defense against spam is to utilize a system that begins with preventing access from your WordPress site and then properly handling anyone who manages to get past that first line of defense. We don’t use Akismet anymore because it lets the spammers gain access to the site and may delete legitimate comments. Flagging comments as spam lets the spammers leave their garbage and the blog owner still has to review each comment – a total waste of time.

Deploying an approach that begins at the server level and denies known spammers and hackers from accessing your site in the first place is far more effective. Add to that a plugin like Antispam Bee and you will see your spammy comments virtually disappear – we did.

The post Why We Don’t Use Akismet appeared first on Jayatechnology.