Abhishek Deshpande

Category: WordPress

  • How to Prevent AI from Mining Your Site’s Data

    How to Prevent AI from Mining Your Site’s Data

    Do you want to share your website’s public content with AI robots for Generative AI or other Artificial intelligence for AI Training? If No, then this article is for you.

    Disclaimer:

    The insights in this article are based on information available at the time of writing. As the digital landscape evolves, so may the relevance of this advice. I encourage you to do your research to stay informed. I’m not liable for any changes after publication or the content of external links.

    In the past few days, there has been a rumour about Tumblr and WordPress.com being in talks about a deal with AI companies like OpenAI and Midjourney. The deal is about the blog’s content for AI Training. For now, there is no official statement from any of the companies, according to TheVerge

    WordPress ecosystem has two sides.

    One is WordPress.com, run by Automattic, which has a privacy option that disallows AI bots to parse the data. Read more about the Privacy Options.

    wordpress.com privacy settings

    Those who do not use it might have already shared or will share the data with AI Training.

    The second side is WordPress.org, which the WordPress Foundation manages. Self hosted WordPress has no privacy options for the bots yet.

    I’m a self-hosted WordPress user, I don’t worry about it. But if you think it’s important to protect your data from AI Bots, you can use the following two ways.

    1. Using robots.txt
      If you have ever updated robots.txt, use Darkvisitors robots.txt builder to generate AI bots-related agent data and update your robots.txt to add one layer of protection from bots to your site.
    1. Using ai.txt
      ai.txt is specific to AI Bots and works on the same mechanism as robots.txt. Check out the Spawning ai.txt generator that restricts or permits using your site’s content for AI training.

    In my opinion, anything published to the public should be open to all, whether it be a bot or a human. In the end, humans are using Generative AI for various activities.

    Happy Blogging 😉

  • Disable the Gravity Forms Widget in WordPress Dashboard

    If you have too many gravity forms and too much data in form entries, you might face a 5-6 sec slowdown.

    Adding the following snippet to your code snippet or function file to remove the dashboard widget will resolve the slowdown.

    function ad_remove_dashboard_widgets() {

	remove_meta_box('rg_forms_dashboard','dashboard','normal');
}
add_action('wp_dashboard_setup', 'ad_remove_dashboard_widgets' );
  • WP Curtain Raiser 0.2 Released

    WP Curtain Raiser 0.2 Released

    Two years ago, I released a plugin on the WordPress repository which adds Curtain Raiser feature to your website for the Inaugural Ceremony.

    In India, an inaugural ceremony for Official Website is the most common thing for NGO’s and Government. This plugin is for those who need to add curtain raiser feature to the website for such an Inaugural Ceremony.

    What’s New in Version 0.2
    Version 0.2 has Solution for Static Home pages.

    A year ago Arvind, Friend from Mumbai WordPress Community Called me and shared the Issue. Version 0.1 works well with the site with a blog index as a homepage. When you load static page as the homepage, it loads curtains but loads blog index instead of the static page. Samir shared quick snippet to resolve it, and there is 0.2 available for Download.

    I look forward to hearing your feedback on it.

  • Free Resources for your next blog post title

    When it comes to writing down an article or a blog post, Title is the most crucial part of the piece you are writing. Here are some free tools to generate and analyse Post Title.

    SEMrush Title Generator
    Let the Apple fall on Newton’s head for some crazy Ideas. Just hit some of your keywords for the title Ideas. SEMrush title generator is a new addition in SEMrush tool based on their topic research tool. It will surely get some unique titles for you.

    CoSchedule Headline Analyzer
    You know your blog post is the solution for what your audience is looking. So mostly your title will be Solution to their problem, how are you going to standout the title if the same solution is available across the web. You might have to understand the sentiments of your reader. Headline analyser checks for Emotional quotient and powerful words. More the merrier.

    If you use any other free tools, Please do drop in a comment.

    Happy Blogging 🙂

  • WordPress 5.0 Survival Kit

    WordPress 5.0 – Codename Bebo (for Cuban pianist Bebo Valdés) was released a day before yesterday. With many changes in WordPress Core, New Editor – Gutenberg replaced the Old classic TinyMCE Editor, which is an excellent move towards easy editing.

    Yesterday I upgraded my websites and Clients website to WP 5.0. With No Hassle, everything seems working fine to me. But I found little distress in Users about change in Interface, which is widespread resistance to change behaviour. Also saw some developers spreading rumours about Gutenberg is going to break your website. So here’s my Survival Kit for those who feel they can’t upgrade to 5.0.

    Following methods are for your Safely transition to WordPress 5.0

    1. Install a Classic Editor Plugin

    This one brings back the TinyMCE editor to your Latest Version of WordPress.

    2. Update the WordPress Settings to use classic Editor and don’t allow any of your user to switch to Gutenberg. Settings is available in Dashboard Left Menu > Settings Section > Writing.

    3. Install another Plugin: Fatal Error Notify

    This one will Notify you if you have any Errors in your website. So once you update to 5.0, this plugin will keep track of upcoming Errors. Don’t Forget to enter your mail id in this Plugins notification section.

    WordPress Releases are not just about features, and it comes with many security and bug fixes if you are one of those, who are not upgrading to WordPress 5.0 with fear that Gutenberg is going to break your site. You are keeping yourself vulnerable.

    With above three things you can continue your WP Journey without worry. Let your developer think about what mess he has developed that is not compatible with Latest release.

    Happy WordPressing 🙂

  • Resource for your Next WordPress (Theme) Site

    I don’t know How I left this Post pending in draft, While starting another project was searching for this post, and it was it Draft. In Jan 2018, when I was done with #WPMeta Website, I drafted this one.

    Here are some resources I used to code #WPMeta Website.

    1. Underscores (_s) – Starter theme
    Underscore is starter theme with all latest standards of WordPress system. Components provide the choice of multiple structures.

    2. Coolers – Color Scheme Generator
    Not Being Designer, I have a bad taste in colour combinations. Last time I was coding a theme, I used Kuler by Adobe, pretty complicated to use. Coolers.co, way to easy compared to Kuler.

    3. Mixfont – Font Combination generator
    Fonts combination is another UI part where I lack a lot. Mixfont is easy to go, test multiple Google fonts with each other.

    4. Fontello – Icon fonts generator
    Fontello is open source icon fonts generator. Remember the moment when you load font awesome library just for two icons. You are wasting your & users bandwidth. Just select your desired icons, build

    Do let me know what tools you like to use for your custom theme development.

     

  • Developing WordPress Frontend with Chrome Developer Tools

    This is a proposed outline for WordCamp Mumbai 2018 Speaker Application.

    I’m yet to post about my talks at WordCamp Kanpur and Ahmedabad, both are in the draft along with a long list of heading items that need detailing. So Instead of putting topics in the draft and piling them, decided to publish and continue as a series of Blog posts.

    Intended Audience: Designers / Developers
    Level of Understanding: Beginner / Intermediate

    The audience may already be familiar with the basic features of the Chrome Developer Tools: the DOM inspector, styles panel, and JavaScript console. But there are a number of lesser-known features that can dramatically improve workflows.

    This session will be demo based, will cover DevTools demo around following Topics:

    • Console Tricks for Debugging
    • Event Listeners
    • Accessibility checks
    • Workspaces for quick local development
    • Network throttling for testing your web on low-speed users
    • Performance tuning of a web page
    • and some tricks from Animation, Sensors & Rendering Tabs of DevTools.

    Whether stepping through JavaScript, Debugging CSS, Testing REST API calls, or auditing page performance, the window of Chrome’s DevTools is there to help.

    Whether I’ll be speaking or not at WordCamp Mumbai is not sure as its always hard for Organizers to Select sessions amongst so many awesome topics maintaining Attendees Flow of learning. I’ll make sure to post these tricks here on my blog.

    [Update – 06-04-2018]

    I had One hour Session at WordCamp Mumbai 2018, it was great experience for me, Thanks to Organizing team and Attendees. I’m yet to write detailed post about these tricks but you can find code demonstrated at my Github Repo. Please refer Notepad Point.txt (it has the flow we used in session)and Codes folder (for actual codes).