Digging into WordPress book review

A few days ago, Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr released their awaited WordPress book named Digging into WordPress and I was lucky enought to get my hands on a copy generously given by the authors.

So, what’s inside? After reading the whole 400 pages of the book I just wrote a review to help you getting a better opinion on the book and see how it can help you to enhance your WordPress skills.

Now, let’s have a look into what you’re going to learn in Digging into WordPress.
The book is divided in 8 chapters :

Chapter 1 : Welcome to WordPress
Chapter 2 : Setting Up WordPress
Chapter 3 : Anatomy of a WordPress Theme
Chapter 4 : Theme Design and Development
Chapter 5 : Extending Functionality
Chapter 6 : Working with RSS Feeds
Chapter 7 : Working with comments
Chapter 8 : Search Engine Optimization
Chapter 8 : Maintaining a Healthy Site

A wonderful book that any serious web developer should have in his collection.

How to protect your blog from content thieves

There are variety of content scrapers out there looking take the content you have worked so hard on and steal it.  Blog content scraping is an act usually performed with scripts that extract content from numerous sources and pulls it into one site.

Here’s how to stop them:

Search Your Post Titles (with quotes)

Doing a manual search for your post titles is tedious, but it will allow you to find any piece of content that has been stolen.

Get a Premium Service

The automated version of the above solution is to pay for a service like CopyScape that does this for you with just a few clicks.  In my opinion, this is definitely the way to go as the cost is not very much and it can save you hours of time, particularly if you make this task an ongoing thing.

Once you have found the scrapers…

The easiest thing to do is just to ignore the scrapers, but this can be detrimental to your site’s rankings.  Instead, it’s recommended that you send a DMCA takedown request to the offending site’s hosting company.  Most reputable hosting companies take these seriously and the content will removed in a matter of days.