Webstractions - Web Development & Design News
Commentary on new events and information concerning web development, design practices, search engines, SEO, tools, news story headlines and what's new at WebStractions.
After a long drought in the blogging arena, I am back. Yet again. While I have been creating and launching blogs elsewhere on the web, I just haven't had time to actually post anything other than simple 'testing' posts.
I have just relocated this website to a new server at GoDaddy. My old hosting company was not bad, they were just too pricey. I am getting more than I had before for a quarter of the cost. Yes, more for less. Cannot beat that.
Technically, you can consider this just another 'test' post. I want to make sure that Blogger is publishing via FTP correctly.
Speaking of Blogger. That brings up another subject. I will also be switching blogging platforms to WordPress very soon.
An astute reader would begin to wonder why in the heck would I go through the hassle of making sure that Blogger FTP publishing is working correctly? If I tend to move to WordPress, why would any of that matter?
All very good questions. But the answers will have to wait. Actually, it will become very self evident over the next couple of weeks.
Time to push the Publish Post button. If all goes well, you will be reading about it right now. If not, forget I even made this post.
I have just relocated this website to a new server at GoDaddy. My old hosting company was not bad, they were just too pricey. I am getting more than I had before for a quarter of the cost. Yes, more for less. Cannot beat that.
Technically, you can consider this just another 'test' post. I want to make sure that Blogger is publishing via FTP correctly.
Speaking of Blogger. That brings up another subject. I will also be switching blogging platforms to WordPress very soon.
An astute reader would begin to wonder why in the heck would I go through the hassle of making sure that Blogger FTP publishing is working correctly? If I tend to move to WordPress, why would any of that matter?
All very good questions. But the answers will have to wait. Actually, it will become very self evident over the next couple of weeks.
Time to push the Publish Post button. If all goes well, you will be reading about it right now. If not, forget I even made this post.
Labels: blogger, blogger ftp, blogging platforms, blogspot, godaddy, server move, wordpress
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.
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
Filling in the comment forms for blogs can be tedious. Name, email, website over and over again. Some blogs will remember the information for you if you have submitted at least one comment, but if you like to spread your comments into new territory -- then it becomes laborious.
Greasemonkey scripts are perfect for this type of pain. The Pre-Fill Comments script will auto-complete the fields for author, email and Url and put the focus on the comment textbox itself. While this was designed to work for WordPress blogs, it should work with other blogs that use the same ID's for their fields. Even so, I think a little tweaking under the hood (if you are good with that type of thing) may extend it to other types of blogs.
Via Techie Buzz
Technorati Tags: greasemonkey, script, pre-fill, form, comments, wordpress
Greasemonkey scripts are perfect for this type of pain. The Pre-Fill Comments script will auto-complete the fields for author, email and Url and put the focus on the comment textbox itself. While this was designed to work for WordPress blogs, it should work with other blogs that use the same ID's for their fields. Even so, I think a little tweaking under the hood (if you are good with that type of thing) may extend it to other types of blogs.
Via Techie Buzz
Technorati Tags: greasemonkey, script, pre-fill, form, comments, wordpress
Labels: comments, form, greasemonkey, pre-fill, script, wordpress
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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