Remove spam “Likes” from WordPress posts

How to remove spam “Likes” from WordPress posts:

1. “Edit” the post in question, in the usual Post Editor.

2. Look over on the right-hand sidebar, and scroll down.

3. There’s a “Likes and Shares” tab in the Post Editor. Uncheck the “Show Likes” check-box.

4. Scroll back up the sidebar, and click the “Update” button.

This works on both free and hosted WordPress blogs. Be aware that the above is using the Classic Editor, and things may look a little different if the newer Editor interface is being used.

You can also turn off Avatars (personal icons), if those are too spammy. The check-box for that is in: Dashboard | Settings | Discussion | Avatars | Avatar Display.

Carrot2 search – a new script for multi-column results

The Carrot2 search-engine has changed both URL and layout. It was at search.carrot2.org/stable/search and it’s now just at the search.carrot2.org URL. I guess the public-facing search may have come out of beta? This is what their new layout looks like…

Not good, on a widescreen desktop monitor.

Which means I’ve made another custom CSS for it. This slices the Carrot into a multi-column layout suited to a widescreen 1920px monitor. It works in the Stylus browser addon, and you need to tell the script to target the search.carrot2.org site

Yum, crunchy Carrot! All the z-depths are set up nicely, so you can still click on/in the filters and search box.

I like to read the URLs in search-results and so I’ve turned them dark green and wrapped them to make this possible. The results look good with URLs that line-wrap by up to three lines. But it’s unavoidable that some very long URLs will wrap over four lines, and will thus spill over the element below.

In most cases there should be no need for any scrolling.

It only works in Day mode, with the Carrot’s new toggle-able Night and Day mode…

If you want a night mode, you’ll have to manually change the colour chips to a charcoal black on…

body, body.light {

and

div.ResultList

The other drawback is that whereas the old multi-column fix showed about 25-30 results, now we’re down to about 16. If you want it up to 20+ add the following code…


.ResultClusters {
display: none;
}


There’s also the lack of a “more…” button, but this usefully forces the user to use the Carrot’s innovative faceting systems over in the left-hand pane.

---

To install my fix, simply go to Carrot2, then left-click on your icon for the Stylus browser addon and click “Write style for…”.

Then paste in this…


/* ==== CARROT2 - Multi-Columns v.02 Oct 2019 ==== */
/* run this Stylus script on search.carrot2.org */
div.document div.url {
overflow: hidden;
color: #3a7730;
font-size: 110%;
}
body, body.light {
background-color: #ece5db;
}
.ResultList > div > a > span.url {
color: #3f7126;
font-size: 80%;
font-weight: bold;
white-space: pre; /* CSS 2.0 */
white-space: pre-wrap; /* CSS 2.1 */
white-space: pre-line; /* CSS 3.0 */
white-space: -pre-wrap; /* Opera 4-6 */
white-space: -o-pre-wrap; /* Opera 7 */
white-space: -moz-pre-wrap; /* Mozilla */
white-space: -hp-pre-wrap; /* HP Printers */
word-wrap: break-word; /* IE 5+ */
}
a {
font-size: 100%;
}
.SearchForm {
z-index:20;
}
div.ResultList {
z-index:4;
position:absolute;
background-color: #ece5db;
padding-top: 180px;
top:0;
bottom:0;
right:0;
column-count: 5;
width: 70%
}
.ResultList > div > a >div {
font-size: 80%;
}
div.sources {
padding-top: 25px;
}
div.ClusterList {
background-color: #ece5db;
padding-top: 10px;
column-count: 2;
}
div.clusters-tabs {
width: 40%
}
div.clusters {
z-index:4;
width: 50%
}


Tested in Opera, which is a browser that runs on Chrome. It will probably work with other CSS style injectors.

Trigger a keyboard shortcut with a mouse-gesture

Here’s a very simple guide for StrokesPlus freeware users. It shows how to make an easy mouse-gesture that runs a complex keyboard-shortcut. Having such a thing relieves a desktop PC user of the need to do contortionist hand-yoga on the keyboard.

Why is this guide needed? Because StrokesPlus documentation is good but very techie, and it seems impossible for search to find a good basic two-minute starter guide with a couple of clear examples. So here it such a guide.

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1. Open your StrokesPlus menu and go to Actions…

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2. In the StrokesPlus Actions | Global Actions section, choose an un-used mouse-gesture and simply modify it. Here I’ve modified the simple “Last Track” gesture that’s meant for media-players, so that it runs ALT + SHIFT + 4.

acSendKeys(“%+4”)

This mouse-gesture is then used in a Web browser, being invoked with a ‘right-click and drag’ with the mouse. The triggered command then sends my selection from the text of a news story or journal article to my ‘Save as eBook’ addon. (Note that the gesture needs to be in StrokesPlus’s ‘Global’ folder, not its ‘Internet Browsers’ folder, to work for me).

Having this mouse-gesture is especially useful with ‘Save as eBook’ (a great Instapaper replacement, able to grab more types of text and more private). Because it’s all too easy to hit the wrong item in the plain menu… and thus accidentally blank your ebook!

One can even add a command to wait three seconds, then have the ‘Save as eBook’s “OK” button automatically pressed to exit it…

acSendKeys(“%+4{DELAY 3000}{ENTER}”)

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3. In your selected StrokesPlus gesture, write your own command and change the comment. Press APPLY and then OK in that order. You’re done.

Test your gesture and see that it works.

---

“Write your own command? How do you do that?”

Here are the basics of how to write your own command. I’ll use the gesture that works with my ‘Save as eBook’ addon as the example…

acSendKeys(“%+4”)

acSendKeys = do specific keyboard key-presses, in a specific order.

(“”) = always present, to neatly wrap up the keystrokes and commands.

% = the ALT key

+ = the SHIFT key

4 = the number 4 on the keyboard. (This could also be an a-z letter)

The other big keyboard strokes you’ll need for encapsulating keyboard shortcuts are:

^ = CTRL

{F_1} = F1. This can run through to F_9 = F9. Note that the { } brackets are required. Here’s an example that uses them…

acSendKeys(“%^{F_1}”)

This will run the keyboard shortcut ALT + CTRL + F1 when you make your chosen mouse-gesture.

Similarly, such brackets are also required for…

{DELAY 3000} = wait three seconds

{ENTER} = press the ENTER key

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That’s it. Hopefully that’s enough to get you started.

Carrot2 multi-columns Stylus CSS style

Update: Carrot2 changed the layout and a new script is now needed. here’s the fix.

I made a Stylus CSS to have the Carrot2 Clustering Search Engine give its results as a five-column layout showing about 32 results. This is suited to a desktop PC with a widescreen 24″ monitor at 1920px.

On each search result block, I’ve increased the title in size a little, the snippet has been shrunk a little, the URL turned from difficult-to-read grey to a more usual dark green, and the results numbering has been effectively removed by turning it white. Numbering runs down each column and then starts again at the top of the next.

In the straight one-column version, all results come in on a single page and there are usually between 32 and 75 of them. There is thus no pagination (“next page”) in my columnar version. In my version if you wish to see the lower hidden results, right-click your Stylus icon, switch off the style and scroll down. No re-load is needed.

However the lack of pagination in my style may actually be found quite useful. Because it pushes the user toward testing the Carrot2 auto-clustering feature, in order to try to surface stuff that may be down in the inaccessible follow-on results.

Here’s the code. I’ve double-checked that WordPress isn’t blanking some bits of it. To install simply go to Carrot2, then left-click on your icon for the Stylus browser addon and click “Write style for…”.

---


/* ==== CARROT2 - Multi-Columns v.01 ==== */
element.style {
}
div.document div.url {
overflow: hidden;
color: #3a7730;
font-size: 110%;
}
div.snippet, div.document div.url {
font-size: 97%;
}
div.document .rank {
color: #ffffff;
}
a {
font-size: 113%;
}
#documents {
column-count: 5;
}


---

It will probably work with other CSS style injectors.

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Incidentally, DuckDuckGo has a bang! for flicking searches from Duck-to-Carrot: !carrot This can also be embedded in a menu in DuckDuckGo by using the UserScript ‘DuckDuckMenu’ and adding:

http://search.carrot2.org/stable/search?source=web&view=folders&skin=fancy-compact&query={searchTerms}&results=30&algorithm=lingo&EToolsDocumentSource.country=ALL&EToolsDocumentSource.language=ALL&EToolsDocumentSource.customerId=&EToolsDocumentSource.safeSearch=false

How to: Google Search in columns at Summer 2019

There’s now a temporary sort-of fix for the badly broken GoogleMonkeyR browser userscript, the fix being kindly made by IzzySoft. My thanks to IzzySoft, but it still has numerous problems and also doesn’t work at all with News results. One of the worst problems is that results can get ‘sliced’ across columns, with one bit of a result at the foot of column one, and the other bit at the top of column two. It also doesn’t work well with Google Hit Hider by Domain.

For now then, I suggest that someone wanting three-column Google Search and Google Books, on a widescreen desktop PC, should abandon GoogleMonkeyR. Instead try the following, to get Google Search looking like this…

1. Disable any installs of GoogleMonkeyR.

2. Get the Stylus extension. This is a host that enables quick makeovers of the style of a website, via simple style scripts.

3. Then install the Stylus style “Google Search in columns”, after first setting “3” columns in the download options. I could not get four columns to look or feel good.

4. I tried some Google Search makeover Styles, but none could colour the link title and URL separately. I’ve learned to instantly ‘read the URLs’ over the years, and thus want them clearly identifiable at the merest glance. For a fully configurable colours makeover I went to the Dark Theme for Google Chrome addon, which can do such things and which seems robust and updated.

5. Tweak the colours in this Dark Theme addon. It’s fully configurable, inc. in my Opera browser, and you access its options via right-clicking its icon.

This gives you easy ways to set the colours, and you can even set a timer so the dark mode only kicks in at dusk and turns off at dawn.

There’s also a custom .CSS injector which looks interesting, and I’ll tinker with it at some point.

6. Now you want to tell Google to deliver only 9 results per page, by using an access URL with a command embedded in it that limits the number of results. 9 results suits a three column layout, and (once you get rid of other clutter), means you usually don’t have to scroll down to find the “next page” controls.

https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en&complete=0&tbo=1&num=9&tbs=li:1

num=9 is what’s switching you from 10 to 9 results.

7. Finally you use the popular UBlock addon and its Element Picker to perma-block page clutter, as it appears in the Google Search results to mess up your layout. Such as huge slabs of video suggestions, instant answers, and other distracting and often irrelevant auto-fluff. There’s a bit of an art to such blocking, but you’ll get the hang of it. Just keep at it until all you’re getting is what you want — just the actual search results.

8. Here’s what my Google Search looks like on a desktop PC, with this setup.

Google Search. Everything ‘at a glance’, suited to a desktop widescreen, and with all URLs and controls clearly visible. Only the Google Books switch-through link is behind a dropdown menu, but at some point I’ll find a fix to replace “Shopping” with “Books” on the menu.

Google Books.

Nothing seems to budge Google News, in terms of getting results into columns, unfortunately. GoogleMonkeyR used to do that, but it no longer works and the new fix doesn’t do it. Nothing else seems to work on it.

As you’ll see above I use the UserScript “Google Search Sidebar” to get the neat sidebar, JURN in a UserScript to inject a quick search-query passing link into the Google menu. I also use uBlock to block the distracting book-cover thumbnails on Google Books.

I also run Google HitHider by Domain. Which in some cases means results look like this…

The spaces are results from blocked domains, being elegant replaced with a blank block where the result would have appeared, and thus not spoiling the layout.

A GoogleMonkeyR fallback

Within the last 48 hours or so the GoogleMonkeyR UserScript has stopped columnising Google Search results, due to a wholesale revamp of the Google page code. There appears to be no immediate fix, though doubtless one will emerge via greasyfork.org in time. Turn the script off, for now, if applying the suggested fixes below.

The working fallback I found is the Stylish script at Userstyles.org Google Search in columns for the Stylus browser add-on.

This gives you a working two-column layout on results from Google.com and Google Books. You’ll need to manually add https://www.google.co.uk/search? or whatever your national Google is, via the ‘Add’ botton found in Stylus | ‘Google Search in columns’. Google News remains unaffected, it seems, whatever you add. I’m talking about the real Google News, not the ersatz Google News that the clueless masses see.

To get three columns, which is a suitable layout for widescreen desktop PC, you need to open the drop-down on the install page and manually input the number “3” before install.

For a cleaner column look you’ll then also want to clean off all the unwanted fluff that has newly re-appeared (maps, videos, instant answers, suggestions and other distractions) by selecting it with UBlock Origin…

If using the ‘Google Hit Hider by Domain’ blocking script, careful you don’t clean off your hidden results divs, while thinking they’re just blank spaces in the results.

You’ll also want to stay clear of blocking anything with “nth-of-type(1)” or you’ll blank the Google News results. “nth-of-type(2)” doesn’t seem to cause the same problem.

To block distracting cover thumbnails, on results from the new Google Books, pick one with the uBlock element picker, then block them all by manually pasting in…

##*.th

Here’s a look at the newly added items in my block-list in UBlock Origin, on top of my existing ones for Google…

---

The results, in combination with the two-column Stylish script (three columns is also possible, but has to be set at install – see note above)…

Search.

Books.

News (no effect)

Scholar is not affected by these fixes.

Some minimal scrolling is still needed with two-columns, which is wasn’t before. Still, as I said above, this is only a temporary stopgap until a GoogleMonkeyR fix.

Finding and playing public domain sheet-music

Here are some introductory notes on a preliminary search, relating to some new software I was testing and installing as a favour.

* IMSLP/Petrucci Music Library. Free Public Domain Sheet Music, with 140,000 works at May 2019. No preview, and a 20 second delay on each PDF download while an appeal for donations is displayed. It seems they’re not closely tracking Archive.org, as I couldn’t find a couple of newer public domain items I know are on Archive.org.

* Musopen is the other large repository of free sheet music. You get a visual preview of the sheets, and PDF download links are open and quick. But the results from its keyword search is very bad. You’ll do better with a site: search in Google or DuckDuckGo…

site:https://musopen.org/music/ keywords

* Metadata tagging on Archive.org is patchy for sheet music. Thought it will often have ‘sheet music’ or ‘sheetmusic’ or ‘score’ in its title. Theoretically it seems it should have a ‘sheet music’ topic tag, but often the uploaders don’t tag their upload with that. The best initial wide searches are:

sheetmusic AND mediatype:texts keywords

“sheet music” AND mediatype:texts keywords

Which together suggest Archive.org currently has about 10,000 sheet music booklets, nearly all of an age to be in the public domain. Including much 1910s and 20s rag-time, marching music, and popular ditties.

* ChoralWiki has a very large collection of public domain choral sheet music.

* The Mutopia Project has a small collection of classical works.

* Band Music a large collection of American marching-band sheet music.

* American university libraries also have very large online collections, usually general popular and light classical music.

I don’t know of any unified one-box search that will search across all of the above. It might be an interesting project to create one, but I won’t be doing that — so feel free to give it a go.

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* For audio preview of the music score, you’ll first need to get away from your default MIDI sounds driver. Doing this used to be fiendishly complex, but is now extremely easy with the fine bit of Windows freeware called VirtualMIDISynth. Install, and it takes over from your Windows MIDI sounds driver, and then you add a free .SF2 soundfont to it — so that it has the instruments it needs to play a score with.

Then you need to OCR your sheet music into software player-readable form. For sheet music OCR is termed “OMR”. If you’re using the leading paid Sibelius sheet-music player and writer (termed ‘scorewriters’ by those in the trade), then you’ll find that works seamlessly with the leading PhotoScore “OMR” software. PhotoScore uses the SharpEye SDK, widely said by eagle-eyed music industry testers to be the most accurate at picking out and interpreting all the complex fine detail of a music score.

Then you save your successful scan to an .OPT file and Sibelius can load and play this as if it were a .MP3 file. Your new VirtualMIDISynth audio driver and soundfont makes it sound lovely.

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I’d like to recommend some free open source OMR -> Scorewriter software, but I had no success with it and the OMR end of the process is especially lacking and clunky (Java). As someone who’s been away from the world of music for many years, I had the feeling that the robust commercial impetus in the music professions means that it’s hard for open source software makers to stand the pace.

Force Windows to open .txt files with 32-bit Notepad++

Situation: When Windows opens a .txt file it will only launch the 64-bit version of Notepad++. How does the user force Windows to open .txt files with the 32-bit Windows, when both the 32-bit and 64-bit Notepad++ are installed? The usual routes of Windows file association and using the Notepad++ Preferences settings have both failed.

Reason for wanting 32-bit: The user may prefer the older version, for light editing, for the time being. Because it supports useful plugins such as MultiClip Viewer and others.

Solution: Open the Windows Registry editor (Start: ‘Regedit’) and navigate down to…

HKEY_CURRENT_USER/software/classes/applications/notepad++.exe/shell/open/command

There replace the 64-bit file path with the 32-bit path. Which means, for me…

C:\Program Files\Notepad++\notepad++.exe

to

C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\notepad++.exe

… and then exit the Registry Editor.

Some useful regex commands for Notepad++

Perhaps it’s just the influence of Inkle’s new Heaven’s Vault game, with the epigraphy of its mysterious alien inscriptions, but I’ve taken a bit of a shine to regex. My first failed tests with the Notepad++ regex were obviously with the ‘wrong type’ of regex, as I now know there are slightly different versions for Windows, Linux etc. But I’ve now found commands that do work for me.

The following were found by scouring forums and were then tested while learning more about Notepad++ and how it works (it’s a lot deeper than it looks). They’re actual working practical examples, tested and working with the latest Notepad++ on Windows 64-bit. My testing suggests that exactly the same macros run differently in the old 32-bit vs. new 64-bit Notepad++. Since (so far as I can tell) plugin activity cannot be recorded in macros, I assume the difference is due to regex support.

Please note that I am clueless about writing these things, only knowing how to search for, find and test them. So don’t ask me to advise you on their devising or tweaking. My many thanks especially to guy038 at the Notepad++ forum, and many and various others, for writing these and helping others find solutions. I found that the search-engine Yippy, based on Bing, is especially good at finding these things, and will almost inevitably lead you to guy038. But, so far as I know, he has not made a regex ‘keyring’ or a ‘cookbook’ or suchlike. Hence my need to collect some working examples here under practical headings.

All but one of these regexes (regexii?) run in the ‘Find’ or ‘Replace’ box in Notepad++. One needs to run in the ‘Mark’ tab in the same box…

On your keyboard, it’s useful to know that Ctrl + Home will take your text cursor (‘caret’) back to the top of the Notepad++ page, which may be useful if you are building these commands into a recorded macro.

Lastly, using regex to fiddle with public HTML seems to be frowned on, so I suggest the following are useful for certain offline text cleaning and data-swivelling operations, not for mission-critical coding or live pages.

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The list:

The list has to be posted here in plain text as a .PDF. I had a blog post all done and polished, but then found that WordPress.com blogs make an utter mess of posted regex code, even when wrapping it with the code tags which are supposed to protect snippets of code! So here are the working regexes in a handy four-page .PDF file…

regex.PDF

PanWriter – a free open source Markdown editor and HTML-Markdown converter

Pandoc is a useful universal document converter utility. Yet using the free Pandoc on Windows is often assumed to be about typing arcane command lines into a command prompt, and hoping for the best.

But now there’s a nice free and open source front-end for Windows, for those who just want the markdown. The 2019 PanWriter is a delightfully elegant and simple markdown writing pad for the rest of us.¹ It’s a speedy Windows desktop install, and it didn’t even need to be told where Pandoc was on my PC. It just ‘knew’.

Even if you don’t need another sweet text editor, PanWriter also serves as a document importer and converter utility. Just load up a HTML page you saved from the Web, and it instantly converts all the HTML code to markdown. I loaded a few really complex pages and it didn’t blink, instantly presenting a clean markdown conversion.

Why would one want to convert HTML to markdown, you ask? Because it places the HTML and other elements onto single lines, while retaining Web links in place. Such lines are far easier to extract data blocks from. Compared to fiendishly nested HTML code that sprawls across multiple lines.³

Picture: the above web page (just some random Met Museum image search results) in Notepad++ as markdown.

Once the markdown text is in Notepad++, then a macro can have its way with it. This can ‘Find and Mark’ the repeating line-blocks² containing the data you want to extract and clean (e.g. search-engine results). These can then be copied out to a new tab (Top Menu: Search | Bookmarks | Copy Bookmarked lines). Then the macro can run various operations that fix up the text a bit more,^4. before finally saving the cleaned list back to HTML via the user-friendly MarkdownViewerPlusPlus plugin for Notepad++.⁵

So the basic workflow here is:

1. Get your search results and save your Web page(s) as usual. There’s no need to painstakingly select-copy-paste just part of the page.

2. Use a joiner utility (TXTcollector) to join all the saved pages.⁶ Open the saved HTML with PanWriter and it instantly auto-converts into markdown.

3. Open the saved markdown with Notepad++ and run your cleaning and text-sorting custom macro on it.

4. Copy-paste the resulting linked data list as HTML to your blog etc. (Or to .CSV for Excel import and sorting).

The above is a more advanced and robust version of my recent home-brew workflow, which suggested a browser addon and manual copy-paste. That was more suitable for occasional use by bloggers and academics who can’t afford sophisticated data scrapers (and the proxies to run them).

This workflow has the advantage that: i) it’s all free software; ii) it doesn’t need you to pay for and burn through proxies in your paid scraping software; iii) as long as you have the HTML in your browser it can be grabbed, and it basically doesn’t matter how complex and nested the page code is, as it’s all going into Markdown; and iv) collection can be automated with Windows automation software (JitBit) etc, and processing can be automated with Notepad++ macros. But it is obviously not suited to automated scraping of millions of records from multiple shopping sites — if you’re into that game then you should have the cash to buy in those datasets.

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Notes:

1. There are also two old GUIs for Pandoc, over on GitHub. One there is nice and simple, and has batch… but it crashes and fails on 64-bit Windows, as the developer admits in his readme. The other GUI at GitHub was tried and runs on 64-bit Windows, but seems far less user-friendly. There are also a half dozen Python scripts projects that do this.

2. Marking and exporting lines in Notepad++ can’t currently be done for multi-line nested HTML code, which is why a HTML-to-Markdown conversion is so useful. While multi-line block marking can be done between two keywords [ Find | Mark | Regex with Newline | then paste in…

(?<=STARTWORD)([\s\S]*?)(?=ENDWORD)

…this only places a single mark at the top of each marked and highlighted block. It does not run a line of marks down the entire block.

3. Yes, I know about XPath, but with a complex Web page it's: i) fiendishly tricky to do the initial puzzling out of what needs to be captured; ii) often fails to then grab what’s needed; iii) and has even more difficulty in aligning data fields when used as a browser addon.

4. Note that multiline search-replace needs to be done as \n commands not plugins, in macros. Also that Crtl + Home will get your cursor back to the top of the text.

5. Sadly one can’t yet use Notepad++ as the initial importer/converter, as it has no such plugin at present. I’ve looked. There are a couple of possible Python scripts but support for the Python plugin in the latest Notepad++ is a bit of a mess at present, with plugin structures being swopped around and then reverted. So that’s not really an option, unless you want to fall right back to version 5.9 or thereabouts to use a script.

6. Update: If you have no absolute need to keep the saved HTML pages as backup, then Clipboard Magic is lovely little Windows freeware that keeps copies of each clipboard, then when done you “Copy all clips to clipboard” and paste to Notepad++. Or if you still use an older 32-bit Notepad++ you can use the fine MultiClipboard plugin.