SEM Wired

Restrict access to users on WordPress

Have you ever thought of make some content of your WordPress blog available only to certain users? Do you need to restrict access only to a certain type of users to selected blog pages or post? Ever thought of create a reserved area for registered users on your WordPress blog?

Some time ago, while working on a client’s project with a*dult content, I came up with the idea of restricting access only to a certain type of users. This would have avoided any problem with underage visitors. The thing was that he only wanted to use WordPress, because it was the only content management system it was familiar with.

So I started thinking how this could be sorted out. Actually WordPress does not come out of the box with such a feature. What we needed was some sort of plugin able to distinguish between users according to some extra information.

The issue was promtly solved with two different plugins:

• Disclose Secret allows to restrict access to certain pages or posts only to users complying with certain criteria.
• Cimy Extra Fields for WordPress makes some more data available for any users. This extra fields can be used to distinguish in between differents types of users therefore setting up specific access to content

With these two plugins we can manage access to any type of content for any type of users, even feeds, archieves, homepages and search results.

WordPress is indeed versatile and fully customizable. However, if you really want to create reserved areas for users with a secured login procedure, there’s plenty of CMS out there which can do this job pretty well, even through a SSH connection.

Still, if you just want to make sure that you blog is read only by the right people, this might be the best option: simple, easy to deploy and safe enough.

We all know the importance in today web of social networks. Nowadays even seo firms consider specific actions such as social media optimization when working on linkbuilding strategies.

The ongoing democratization of the web is leading the internet towards a collaborative juggernaut which autonomsly decides what’s interesting and what it is not… finally the silent majority of the modern world has got a media to express itself. Therefore, a successful internet entity, whether it’s a company or a personal website, has to be able to manage its presence and reputation on social network platforms, also considering this as a standard metric for feedback.

Beside all this gibberish philosophical intro, the bottom line is: can we track traffic (and other metrics) coming from the main social network platforms with Google Analytics?

VKI studios came out with another great extension for firefox which basically appends at the end of each page report a list of social bookmark website in which the page has been mentioned.

By this time, the report includes the following social bookmarks:

• Reddit
• Stumble Upon
• Digg
• Delicious
• Sphinn (SEO social bookmark)
• Mixx

It also checks the page status on Yahoo Website Explorer. I hope this will come handy, but more importantly, to have your pages on one of these social bookmark

This plugin is available only in english and requires GreaseMonkey.

Gmail Filters made easy

Some time ago Google has made available a new feature by which you can upload filters with an XML file.

The good thing about this is that you can just write down a single file and define all the filters in there and then load them at once.

The file structure will look like this:

<entry>
    <title>Mail Filter</title>
    <apps:property name='from' value='semwired@gmail.com'/>
    <apps:property name='label' value='semwired mails'/>
</entry>

You can easily download, share and upload new filters from Settings -> Filters.

EVen if the hype generated by the released had been soon vanished (and its market share seem’s not improving at all), Google as just released a few tricks to make sure your websites will be displayed properly on Chrome.

I experienced some troubles with Chrome recently, Google has released this tricks right on time for me.

Have you ever wondered of being able to see visitor’s IP addresses with Google Analytics?

It’s actually posssible. It’s an old trick but it works pretty well…

Actually I can think of enough scenarios in which to apply this one:

• we want to track competitors visitors
• we want to exclude our own ip address from reports
• we have to exclude several different ip address on an internal network
• we want to find out who’s posting spam on our blog’s comments
• many more…

1. Getting to know custom filters

The weirdest thing though is that we can easily filter ip with custom filters. While creating a custom filter we can set up the IP address as a parameter… even if Google hides it from us.

When creating a custom filter (click on Filter Manager, then Add Filter and from the drop-down menu select Custom Filter) we have to choos the first parameter (Field A -> Extract A) to which makes our filter work. The IP address option is hidden.

2. Hide & Seek

If we’re clever enough to take a peak into the source coude on line we’ll find this on line 76:

<option value="30">Visitor Flash version</option>
<option value="31">Visitor IP Address</option>
<option value="32">Visitor Geographical Domain</option>

The chance to track IP address it’s right there, but to use it we have to write the line down in the drop-down menu… Anyway. It does not work, but we can sort it out anyway.

Back in 2006 someone found this out, then Google quickly patched it.

Still there’s some way to get what we’re looking for.

3. Gotcha!

Giving the right variable to track to the _trackPageview() call we can store all the visitors IPs.

The PHP code would look like this:

pageTracker._setVar("<?php echo $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];?>");

…it works!

There’s only a problem: it is not legal. According to Google Analytics Terms of Service:

7. PRIVACY . You will not (and will not allow any third party to) use
the Service to track or collect personally identifiable information of
Internet users, nor will You (or will You allow any third party to)
associate any data gathered from Your website(s) (or such third
parties' website(s)) with any personally identifying information from
any source as part of Your use (or such third parties' use) of the
Service. You will have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy and
will comply with all applicable laws relating to the collection of
information from visitors to Your websites. You must post a privacy
policy and that policy must provide notice of your use of a cookie that
collects anonymous traffic data.

It’s a silly restriction honestly. Everyone is still able to parse is own server logs and find out who is who. On the other hand it shows Google’s care for privacy of his users and all internet users. It definetely makes a point for them.

Anyway, it’s a neat trick and still it’s worth to talk about it for the sole purpose of spreading some “hacking” mentality to people working in analytics and marketing.

Disclaimer

This technique is a violation of Google Analytics Terms of Service. This technique might result in Google suspending your account or even worse. I reject any responsability for any consequence of this. This post is intended only for educational purpose.

I don’t mean to break any rules (neither want anybody to do that because of this post) but playing around with code can lead us to interesting discoveries, making us more aware of the tools we use everyday rather than being just simple users… it’s just up to you.