We’ve been getting a lot of spam lately. This is partly because Google needs to lock down their Gmail service from being used to generate email addresses automatically. It may also be because we are starting to show up in more search results. Whatever the reason, spam is no fun …

I’m not sure what is going on over at Google HQ but their Gmail services have become a significant enabler of spam. Around three-quarters of the spam I remove from Author Buzz comes with Gmail accounts. It has been quite some time since the last legit signup used a Gmail …

Yes, it might very well be. Once I am confident that this movement (and the technology I am using to join in) is stable, I will roll it out to Author Buzz UK. After all, Author Buzz was created as a social network for authors. So why not decentralise and …

I just finished running a network-wide update. The update went smoothly. Everything looks fine as far as I can tell. However, if there are problems, please report them to the help and support group and I will look into them. Thanks.

Today marks the day when we are sufficiently confident that the transfer from HTTP to HTTPS is complete. To mark this special occasion, we have begun to remove the plugin that was bridging the gap. So far, we have not seen any mixed source error messages. So hopefully we can …

Announcing a way to make your Author Buzz site faster and a way to target mobile users with speically written content. Today we have added two exciting new features – one of which was written by Google. Faster content for better SEO Google make no secret of the fact that …

This months updates include speed boosts, CSS fixes, and better cache use. Improved: ab-in.uk has more aggressive caching (and should be even faster) Fixed: A minor CSS error was making some buttons look broken. Tweaked: Cache system – let me know if anything breaks Updated: Many themes and plugins Removed: …

I have just finished writing and testing a new approach to rendering the front page that should make it faster. The first (of three) updates is about to be uploaded. If anything goes squiffy, it will only be for a few minutes.

This morning I set to the task of de-spamming Author Buzz. There is always a trickle of deeply suspect junk accounts being registered. However, of late, there have been enough spam accounts that the real users have started to notice. It was time to take action. I’m not going to …

This morning I finally got through reviewing a series of Masonry based themes. Masonry is a JavaScript grid layout library. Masonry works by arranging elements in optimal position based on available vertical space, much like a mason fitting stones in a wall. In other words, it makes grid layouts look …