Webstractions - Web Development & Design News

I am not impressed easily by plugins in general, simply because there are just too many of them. But Lucia's NoOldSpamLinks Plugin for WordPress will get my award for Best Plugin of the year when it comes to be. The NoOldSpamLinks Plugin is in its infancy right now and a lot of work needs to be done to it still, but what I have seen so far is all good.

The premise behind NoOldSpamLinks is it will enable you to 'grandfather out' links to a domain that you have already posted about. Add the link to your NoOldSpamLinks list and everywhere that link appears in your posts will auto-magically change to NoFollow. Future enhancements of the plugin will account for any links in your Dofollow comment area as well.

Why would you want this plugin?
Simple. Imagine, if you will, a nice lady's blog GrannyMay. GrannyMay blogs about the retirement years and how to be financially well off when the time comes. She is a very hip senior citizen babe and knows her stuff, you have been blogging about her enthusiastically for years. Plus she has legs up to here, Chuck!

Then one day GrannyMay dies. It is sad and the blogging world mourns the loss. What is even sadder is that XXXpRoN.com just bought her domain for $1251.69 at auction, what a steal! GrannyMay has a PR6 site with hundreds of thousands of backlinks. Now everyone is linked to a hoochy-coochy site catering to Grandma fetishes. We always fantasized about GrannyMay, but this is just plain sick and you spend the rest of the day speaking to Ralph on the white telephone.

That is okay, you have NoOldSpamLinks handy and get rid of your attachment to GrannyMay by Nofollowing the links. At least in the eyes of Google, they will not be considered. It may take Google a little time to come around, but rest easy that it is taken care of --- the drastic change at GrannyMay will spur them to reassess those backlinks.

Keep an eye on the progress of this plugin. Drop by Lucia's blog, install the plugin and give him some feedback.

Labels: blog, blogging, links, nofollow, plugin, wordpress

Labels: blogger, blogging, list, top

For all of you in the BUMPzee community, Carsten Cumbrowski of Online Revenue News has provided three tiny goodies for your blogging pleasure. Two of them involve enhanced search capabilities for BUMPzee affiliated blogs.

The other goodie, and one that I think is more important, is a bookmarklet to Bump the post of a fellow member who does not have the Bump widget included for their posts. Some bloggers do not have the expertise to install the widget on their blogs, and this is an easy & great way to help show your love.

Labels: blogging, bookmarklet, bump, bumpzee, tools

After trying to save a draft to my Blogger account, I was presented with a word verification test. My first thoughts were -- did I change something in my settings while prudently sipping beer last night or is there a new publish setting that I am not aware of. It was neither.

Apparantly the word verification on the posting form is meant to be a spam reduction mechanism for BlogSpot in general and there are two potential causes. One is that my blog has been flagged as potential:

...word verification is applied to certain potential spam blogs by an automated system. Because this is automated there will necessarily be some false positives, though we're continually working on improving our algorithms to avoid these. If your blog is one of the false positives, we apologize. Having the word verification on your posting form does not prevent you from publishing and does not mean that your blog will be deleted or otherwise punished if it is not actually in violation of our policies.

Just great. First I am errantly flagged at Technorati which leaves your feed un-updated for days at a time; and now this. Then there is the pounding in my head from that last sip of beer last night -- isn't always that last sip that you should not have partook?

I can click on the orange question mark to take me to page where I can request a review of my blog. Funny thing is I got that little help tidbit by clicking on it the first time. Clicking on it again just takes right back there. This time, on the form at the bottom of the page where it asks "Was this information helpful?", I answered f*** no it wasn't helpful.

Another possible reason that I need word verification is if I have a high post rate.

If you make a large number of posts in a single day, you will be required to complete a word verification for each one, independent of whether your blog has been cleared as a potential spam or not. If this happens to you, simply complete the word verification for each post, or wait 24 hours, at which point it will be removed automatically.

This restriction can also be in place to control the load on BlogSpot servers as to prevent explicit spam. In this case, there is not a whitelisting review process to exempt individual blogs from it. Okay, this is the lesser of all the evils -- and hopefully that is the case.

One other thing this may be caused from was the labeling of tons of old posts from 2004, basically the same thing as tagging. In 2004, they did not have labels and I wanted to update some of these old posts. On my first run, I labeled around 80 or so posts with a "repub" tag -- my thoughts were that they are still useful enough to compile into categories and rereference them in a new post for each.

If the action of labeling/relabeling posts constitutes a publication to be issued on those posts, I did not see it take place. The only pages I would no of being actually published would be the page for the links to the labeled posts themselves. I only applied three or four labeling processes though.

Anywise, I am off to find this so called review request page. Maybe it will take me a day to find it and I will be dropped from the blacklist.

Labels: blogger, blogging, blogspot, spam, technorati

Here we go again, shades of Nigritude Ultramarine. If you all remember the SEO contest from the past, which is probably one of the major reasons for the adoption of the Nofollow microformat -- it looks like there is another one on the horizon. Actually it is coming from another horizon, Indonesia, and it is called Ngadutrafik 2007 and there close to 95,000 results in Google right now.

I just spotted it in the Technorati WTF not more than a few minutes ago, and it is hitting the Hot List. Preliminary checking shows others are setting up profiles there, and looking at the SERPS a number of blogs are being set up as I speak.

There is also an entry in the Wikipedia announcing the contest, which started last April.

Ngadutrafik 2007

* Dates: 22 April 2007 – 30 July 2007
* Keyword: "Ngadutrafik 2007"
* Sponsor: www.masterseo.web.id
* Target Ending:Ngadutrafik 2007 is the topic of an SEO contest held by Adsense-Id Forum members. Ngadutrafik 2007 is a non-prized activity that challenges the members and Indonesia SEO professionals and amateurs to rank themselves among the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN using certain keyword(s)
* SEO Ngadutrafik 2007 Championship SEO professionals and amateurs to rank themselves among the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN using certain keyword(s).

One blogger with a hosted WP.com account has been suspended by Matt. Evidently a gal named Nenda ratted him out, citing abuse of the service. The controversy between the two and the aid of another blogger calling attention to it, did not hurt Nenda in the least -- her blog took a steep hike in visitors during that period

What gets me, is if these people are SEO's -- don't they know about Nofollow? Or will Nofollow really matter. They are hitting Technorati, which is nofollow. Some of the blogs they are setting up, they are actually commenting in. All of which have nofollow links. At any rate, this contest may just show us how effective (or ineffective) it is for combatting spam and whether it will curtail it or not. This will be a great opportunity to see them all out in the open like this.

In the meantime, I suggest you keep an eye on your commenting areas, forums too. It may be time to batten down the hatches before the main force blows ashore.

Labels: blogging, google, microsoft, nofollow, seo, spam, technorati, wordpress, yahoo

What do you get when you cross a blog directory with a forum discussion area? Throw in some social gizmos along the lines of adding a blogger as a 'friend' and joining 'neighborhoods' -- you get BlogCatalog.

Before I get into BlogCatalog too much, I just have to say that I found out about it on my way over to apologize to Chris for referring to he as a she -- and hopefully I can get back over to add him as friend really quick before I get a bad name in my neighborhood.

Why you should be in the BlogCatalog
Outside of the obvious reasons for getting your blog listed in a directory, there are perks to go along with BlogCatalog. You can truly hook up with like minded blogs very easily, and there are a lot to choose from. Also the discussion area is quite active and a great place to go for information on wide range of blogging subjects -- or just to shoot the breeze.

This place is great way to build your network of blogging buddies with. That in itself, is probably worth the price of admission -- did I mention that it is free.

Signing up was a breeze. Even though they say it would take 24-48 hours, I was in under 15 minutes. And within minutes of being approved, I had visitors and comments coming in. How cool is that?

So if you decide to check out Blogcatalog, stop by my place and say hello.

Labels: blogcatalog, blogging, directory, networking

In a follow up to Ping-less in Technorati there was a post from Ian Kallen that may have foretold the indexing problems they are experiencing right now. This post coincides with a lot of the Support forum queries that I observed concerning the glitches.

Even after a month, Ian still has his hands full. Only hope it lessens in the days to come.

UPDATE: Seems that I am not being indexed again. Going to bump this post and see if it may trigger it.

Labels: blogging, ping, technorati

I had problems getting my blog to update at Technorati last Tuesday. When I post to the blog it automatically pings them, but nothing happened. I tried to manually ping it, and even though I got the customary "Thank You" message ... still nada.

Well after a couple of days of this, I check out the support forums and find that there are literally dozens of people with the same problem. Some have been pingless in Technorati for days, weeks, even months. well.

There is a tech guy there named Spidaman(Ian Kallen) who works at Technorati on the back end technical software. He is taking them one at a time, and every pingless problem is somewhat different.

If you are a WordPress blogger, this may interest you, actually probably would apply to most blogging software. If you use the option to publish with Gzip on an Apache 2.2 Server, then it might choke the Technorati crawler, Spidaman said. This problem appeared to happen on a few WP blogs.

The crawler is using python's native gzip library (which I believe is also linked against zlib) and I think it is the culprit, other HTTP client implementations I've tested don't have this problem. I plan on implementing a workaround soon, I suspect this is inhibiting a small but not insignificant number of sites from getting indexed.

Spidaman was helped out immensly by wa7son(Thomas Watson Steen) on the other end. Made for quick debugging. Good job.

A Joomla blog did not have a discoverable feed. Adding a link alternate tag for Real Simple Discovery should fix it.

Two WP blogs fixed themselves and another WP blog needed a support ticket opened, something "glitchy" about crawling it. [Aside] This glitchy blog is anti-Microsoft, complete with the stock warning about using a *compliant* browser right at the top of the page. Funny thing is, the CSS uses extensive hacks for IE5 involving the underscore in front of element names. Pffft[/aside]

Six blogs at Blogspot magically fixed themselves, while another four where "errantly flagged". I am assuming the same issue applied to the both.

Make sure you ping us directly, not through Pingomatic or some other third party. Please understand, our automated systems process millions of blogs everyday. The automated flagging keeps a lot of splogs out of our searches but it also makes mistakes which we regret and try to remedy as fast as we can.

The Url's from a My1Up blog are problematic because of the HTTP redirects. Will be investigated later.

One problem with Feedburner. The feed had not been updated since Friday the 13th. Spidaman suggested that he exorcise the feed daemons (verify that the feed was up to date) or take Feedburner out of the picture and ping again.

Dozens of others were answered with a simple post from unknown Admin figure who simply stated that "We've made the appropriate adjustments so that your blogs should be indexed succesfully from now on." Presumably it is another errant flag that is built into the indexing routines.

As for me, by the time I was ready to put in a support ticket my feed was magically indexed. Isn't that always the case? It is like the days when you were able to smoke in restaurants and when you got tired of waiting 52 minutes for your meal and decide to light one up.

Labels: blogger, blogging, blogspot, ping, technorati, wordpress

Name in Lights was a competition to find a name that will be created in giant illuminated letters and installed on a prominent UK landmark building. The competition is part of the Fierce! Festival 10th anniversary commission to artist Joshua Sofaer, who devised the concept and will be doing the installation.

The idea is to find the name that will be created. Entries were taken for names, alive or dead, and up to 150 words as to why they would want to see that name in lights.

The contest is closed now and next week a panel of judges will pick the lucky winner. Then that name will be fabricated as a massive illuminated sign (as you see below) beaming out across the city, from Birmingham Central Library.

Go ahead, get your name in lights too and share it with a friend. Flash is required.


I got my name in lights with notcelebrity.co.uk

VIA: Larry Hnetka

Labels: blogging, graphics, misc

In the wake of the NoFollow fiasco, honest commenters (eg: non-spammers) have had a rough go in developing deep links with like minded individuals in the blogging community. Some people may be drifting off into link-comaland and having near death experiences ... wait, what is that I see? Just go towards the LIGHT!

The alarms on the cart next to your bed sound off. Code Blue is announced over the com, and in rushes Dr. Dosh Dosh (or as his bevy of nurses call him,Kawaiikuma Honey). Years of experience tell him that you have just gone into cardiac arrest --- he reaches for the TechnoFave™ paddles, applies them to your chest and gives you a jolt that would of killed you if you were not already half there.

Dosh orders the nurse to inject you with 1cc of Linkittohim to stabilize rush you just received from all of that adrenaline pumping thru your veins --- not from the TechnoFave™ paddles, but the nurse that just gave you the injection has the nicest rack that you have ever seen. Obviously Dr. Dosh Dosh is a plastic surgeon as well.

Road to Blog Recovery

During rehab, Dr. Dosh taught me everything there is to know about taking my blog vitamins to keep up link strength, and I am recovering quite nicely.

Being a born-again blogger of late, I would like to pass on some of the wisdom that Dr. Dosh bestowed upon me. The world would be a better place if we all would just Fave each other and Link hands.

Therapy Process

I think most of you already know the recuperative powers of Dr. Dosh's miracle therapy:

1. You fave me and link to this post.
   
2. Post a Comment below with the URL of your post that has my link to this post on it


3. Also include in comment, how to Fave you back. If you forget, don't worry -- I will find you with my divining rod.

I will verify very quickly and return the treatment. Since this blog has comment moderation set to on, you will know that my healing hand has done its job when you see the comment appear below and rise to an altar in the following table.

... and now. Back to our regularly scheduled program "Yoga With Bertha" already in progress.

Participants Who Completed Treatment

Hear what these happy people all have to say about the Dr. Dosh Miracle therapy. Testimonials abound by clicking on their links.

Dosh's Exchange Primer [Show your love]
Show Me the Money [Show the Love]
Azazil.net [Show the Love]
India PR Blog [Show the Love]
Technacular [Show the Love]
Design Adaptions [Show the Love]
Life in the Fast Lane [Show the Love]

Labels: blogging, nofollow, seo

If you do a lot of forum posting or blog commenting, most of it is done online with a provided textarea box from within a form. The textarea boxes are usually very tiny to post any extended length of commentary and causes you to continually scroll up, down, and even sideways just to review what you had just typed. Of course there is the "preview" option, but if there is a correction to make -- you still have to locate it inside of that miniscule box.

Enter Two Extensions to the Rescue

First there is the quick and dirty Resizeable Textarea extension which lets you resize virtually most textarea form boxes. The other, more bells, is a Resizable Form Field extension for textareas, as well as select boxes, text fields, and even iframes.

I use the Textarea only extension, and it works quite well. A little buggish at times, seems it will not work if open the form up in a new window. Another user reported the same thing, citing Gmail as an example, works well when composing in the main window, but doesn't work for the text area if you click the "open in new window" icon.

Have not tried the other flavor yet, and as of this post, there are no reviews. Asa Dotzler likes it though, even though there appears to be some abnormal behaviour with it -- such as form fields getting resized in other tabs.

Labels: blogging, extensions, Firefox

I disappear from the Web for a couple of years and come back to this Nofollow thing from Tom Christensen.

"... a lot of SEO types were posting about nofollow again. The new twist is they’re trying all sorts of plugins and gadgets to selectively pass or bar following links from their blogs for PR.

People, this is getting really old. And really stupid. Just turn the damn thing off already."

I am going to have to agree with Tom on this. It is really stupid.

Also, the whole Wikipedia decision to add Nofollow to outbound links is stupid. And Andy Beal's campaign to Nofollow Wikipedia is stupid, even though it looks like he is Following their lead when it comes to trackbacks and comment links. Not quite calling the kettle black, but close to a very dark grey.

Carsten Cumbrowski opines:

The hope is that the return for spamming Wikipedia will be so low that it does not even make any sense for those spammers that don’t need much return to be happy.

You can live perfectly fine in India for $1 a day for example. If Spamming Wikipedia reduces that down to $0.25, the spammer will probably look for other targets. And those other targets will also go away eventually, but that is a complete different story.

Well isn't that special! Keywords here are "other targets" (eg: You, Me and Dupree). And just how will those other targets eventually go away?

And why is it a completely different story? It is the story. Wikipedia effectively kicked the spammers out of their yard and they are coming to a neighborhood near you. Is it just me, but how does this combat spam?

Its okay to follow NoFollow. Follow?

When Google first suggested Nofollow back in 2005, it didn't take long for a spec to be drafted up by Technorati. MSNSearch and Yahoo!Search jumped quickly on board supposedly, along with scores of blog software developers and proponents.

The spec abstract has nothing to do with not following a link, just applying no weight to the link itself:

By adding rel="nofollow" to a hyperlink, a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink SHOULD NOT be afforded any additional weight or ranking by user agents which perform link analysis upon web pages (e.g. search engines). Typical use cases include links created by 3rd party commenters on blogs, or links the author wishes to point to, but avoid endorsing.

When the big three of search come out and say "they will respect Nofollow", what does that mean really? After reading dozens of comments to this regard, I am under the impression that spiders can and will follow the links if they so choose ... they just will not apply any weight to the link. A link is a still a link then.

Is SPAM the cholera epedemic of the Internet?

Should we burn down an entire village of Wikipedia huts just to eradicate a plague, only to have that plague show up in somebody elses village? Where does it stop? I think with all the Doctors and Chemists at Google General, they can come up with a better cure than this.

My hat goes off to Slashdot who use heuristics, karma and other factors in combination with nofollow to combat spam. Also, to Blogoscoped for their "fading nofollow" policy. And to other like minded bloggers who are just saying NO to NoFollow.

This is the kind of responsible forward thinking that we need to be doing, not to mention doing the SE's job for them to boot. It seems to me that any SE should have the ability to differentiate between a blog post and a comment and not apply too much weight to the comment anyway. Why should we have to tell them this?

Labels: blogging, google, microsoft, nofollow, spam, yahoo

Blogger's posting interface and some other pages are soon to be made available in other languages says Biz Stone in today's Google Blog. As time goes on native speakers of French, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, and Korean will see an increasingly familiar version of Blogger in their own languages when they sign in.

Labels: blogging

Bloglines has announced the addition of the Bloglines Firefox Center. The announcement is due in large part to the continuing success of Firefox and its abilities for RSS discovery.

"Over the past few months, we've watched users steadily switch away from Netscape and Internet Explorer to Firefox. Back in July, while Firefox was still in beta, it had grown to over 5% of our traffic. Today, Firefox represents 20% of requests to Bloglines."

The Bloglines Firefox Center is a one-stop shop for getting started with Firefox, RSS, and Bloglines. They created the Firefox Center to support the many Bloglines members that have switched to Firefox as their preferred browser.

From the Firefox Center you can download the latest version of Firefox, find a list of the current extensions that use Bloglines Web Services (currently two, Bloglines Toolkit and LiveLines), plus several links to learn more about Firefox.

Labels: blogging, Firefox

For the third time this week, Blogger Status is reporting database server problems. This time it is determined that there are a number of queries running on this server which are adversely impacting performance. Previous hassles included performance issues and aging hardware which prompted them to migrate data off of the troubled server.

UPDATE: It is reported that they have solved one problem with the database servers by pushing out new code which should help. But now there is another issue. They have to temporarily disable stat data collection. They plan to restore this functionality in the short term but have needed to stop collecting the information for now in order to stabilize the database servers.

Labels: blogging

Svein Høier and Jon Hoem have put together an excellent tutorial on video blogging with Blogger. The tutorial includes template code changes and php/javascript code to launch a dynamic pop-up window for your video, as well as, general tips about video compression.

Once your template changes are made, posting the video is a snap. Enter the path to the video in your URL Link text box (this can be activated in your Blogger Settings), then upload your video via an attachment.

It dawned on me that you could also use this as a method for doing simple image blogging as well. By using this technique, you could just as easily have pop-up windows for your images.

VIA: Weblog Tools Collection

Labels: blogging

Adam Kalsey has a handy online tool to create those little buttons that everyone is so fond of. The tool uses Bill Zeller's button maker script which is written in PHP, so you could host this application yourself with without much trouble.

UPDATE: It does not appear that the script is available on Bill's site.

VIA: Band of Gonzo Forums

Labels: blogging, css, repub

Ping-o-matic hit it's 20 millionth ping sometime today.

Them's a lot of pings, but I am sure it is just the beginning of a lot more to come. Congrats guys!

Labels: blogging