NoOldSpamLinks Plugin for 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.

Testing Nofollow Fix

This is a simple test post for the Nofollow hack I wrote.

The testing is now complete, and I can announce that I have fixed the problem with unquoted Blogger variable tags. Pretty simple.

Will post the solution later this evening. Thanx for you patience on this matter.

Blog Link Erosion : Interlinking Headed for Extinction

While nofollow is firmly entrenched into virtually every blogging platform, there are other forces at work that continue to hammer away at the now delicate interlinking structures of blogs. Interlinking, which made blogs a formidable search engine ranking powerhouse in the past is now headed toward the endangered species list with the latest method of wrongly advised SEO madness --- PageRank leakage damming.

Whether you call it link hoarding or PR dilution, PageRank leak theories have been around for years. There have not been any solid provable studies on the effects of external links in regards to PR leakage and its relationship to how that may affect your ranking in organic search engine results. PR leaking has always been an over-hyped link baiting topic used by SEO-types who just want what you want --- more links.

The leakage theory is too overly simplistic in nature. Even the gullible find it easy to understand and that is what makes it an easy sell. As most of us know, it is more complex than that. Many variables go into the making of a search engine algorithm and the actual engineers behind the programming are not going to reveal how it works.

The latest breed of WordPress plugin allows you to set up a post or page that will hold a set of links to external websites. The linking data is conveniently maintained in the WP database. Possible uses for this plugin could be for lengthy lists of categories, archived posts, etc. But it is being promoted as the Blogroll Page Plugin. Say what?

The Blogroll Page is another erosional approach to undermine blog interlinking and some are tacking on the added value of PR leak reduction to sell it. I have no doubt that this plugin will become popular over-night due to some responses I have seen.

I don't want to be an alarmist, but if Nofollow was to fluorocarbons then Blogroll Pages are the cow flatulence that will further decay the interlinking ozone layer. Interinking is what made blogs work. When people start to over-analyze and question every link on their pages in this manner it tends to lead to paranoia. This will become problematic for not only their blog, but also to their intricate interlinking structure.

In an effort to improve the blog in the name of the almighty PageRank, they are in effect biting the hands that feed them --- the Blogroll members. And of course reciprocity will be the name of game when that hand returns the favor and stops linking back. They may even drop you from their "favorite reading" list as well if they see a trend of link hoarding out of you.

The premise behind blogs is simple. Link, and you will be linked in kind or more aptly --- United we stand, divided we fall.





Technorati Tags: wordpress, plugin, blogroll, page, linking, leakage, PR, PageRank, interlinking,

305 Free Themed TrueType Fonts

From TypeNow, 305 Free Themed fonts. Font categories include popular movies (Lord of the Rings), television shows (Battlestar Gallactica), websites (Yahoo ... no Google here though), music bands (Pink Floyd) or singers (Lenny Kravitz). Only 20 or so are available for Macintosh.

Sweet resource.





Technorati Tags: free, truetype, fonts, themed

Blogspot Blackout in Greater L.A. Area

In a seperate issue that is not related to the China firewall problem, the Greater Los Angeles area is experiencing a breakdown in communications with the Blogspot.com domain. Of course, blog maintenance via Blogger.com is not affected.

This problem, ongoing for a week now, seems to affect multiple ISP's (Earthlink, AT&T, Covad) regardless of what browser you are using. Blogger has not identified the problem and are asking you to contact your ISP's enmasse to have them work on it. Why Blogspot is not contacting them on their behalf is curious. Seems to me this would be easier to do, rather than explain how to do it via Google Groups to non-technical blogspotters.

Due to massive outcries on this subject, a single Google Help Group thread has been stickied, in which I posted a troubleshooting method to help Blogger (or Earthlink, Covad, AT&T) find where the break down is occurring in communications via a Trace Route ping.

See the third entry from the top in Can't get to my Blogger page thread for instructions. I would like to know what your results were if you try this.

---

UPDATE 6/14/2007: A response from Covad via email was posted by Double J in the Google Groups thread:

Please include the following line in all replies.
Tracking number: CTxxxxxxxx_xxxxxxxxxx

Dear James,

Thank you for your email.

We were experiencing a slight routing issue that was causing many
of our customers to be unable to access certain sites. This seems
to have been rectified. If you are still experiencing difficulties,
please contact our Inbound Tech Support Team at 1-888-642-6823,
option 6.

Thank you for choosing Covad,
Noelle
Covad.net Technical Support
1-888-642-6823, opt 6 24hours/7days a week

Since Covad is the upstream provider for Earthlink, AOL and AT&T, this stands to reason. This falls into my line of thinking when I suggested using a Trace to isolate where the breakdown in communication was.

So far, I have not seen if their efforts have been fruitful. I do not see anymore activity in the thread yet, so that is a good sign.

Technorati Tags: blogspot, unreachable, los angeles, at&t, covad, earthlink, ISP

Blogspot and the "Great Firewall of China"

Normally this type of information would be published on my Tips 4 Blogspot blog, but given the circumstances of a much larger problem, it needs to be posted here. There is a problem in China when attempting to view blogs that are hosted on the blogspot.com domain.



The Great Firewall of China problem is ongoing. It only applies to the viewing of blogs at Blogspot, but apparantly does not affect the maintenance of those blogs. Blog maintenance is handled via the blogger.com domain.



Blogspot.com is not the only domain affected in China, Wikipedia and Google (intermittently) is blocked as well. You can check if your domain is blocked with a real-time tool at greatfirewallofchina.org, which has a test server stationed inside of China. However, the tool may report sites as being blocked when there may be a technical reason, such as unavailability.

The censorship methods used by the Chinese government are becoming more sophisticated, more refined and more extensive every year, involving an increasing number of local as well as foreign parties in their system.



According to state media, by the end of 2006 there were 20.8 million bloggers in China. Blogging, which implies venting your own opinions, has become immensely popular in China. In order to control the phenomenon the government wants blog users to register under their real name.

It is puzzling why the Chinese will let their people create and maintain a blog anonymously, but block them from viewing that blog. Be that as it may, a resourceful Chinese individual created a loophole, www.adoptablog.org, in which you can adopt a Chinese blog to help keep these bloggers online - anonymously.



Bypassing the Chinese firewall is being approached from within and outside China by academics, security experts and hackers. Western academics came up with some promising ways to circumvent the firewall, but it may be a matter of time before the Chinese Government will counter those measures. Plus there is the question of whether or not the average Chinese citizen has the technical expertise to find a method (tunneling, anonymous networks, ignoring reset protocols) and apply it.



For now anyway, it appears that China's children should be seen and not heard.



Technorati Tags: china, chinese, firewall, great firewall, censorship, blogspot, blogger, google, proxy, anonymous, tunneling, reset protocol, networks, adopt-a-blog

How To Video: Registering a Domain

Instructional videos on the Internet have never been stimulating enough to hold my interest. Until now.

For your perusal, a very thorough How-To video on registering a domain thru GoDaddy. Watch for the promotion code to receive 10% off of your purchase. You are guaranteed not to learn anything here -- unless you are comatose of course.



Technorati Tags: how-to, register, domain, name, video, godaddy, purchase

Ngeblog 0.2 - PHP Class to Manage Blogger's Gdata API

Ngeblog 0.2 is an interesting PHP class that can be used to manage Blogger posts via the Google Data API (gdata). It can authenticate a user (or users) with seperate classes using the Zend_Gdata process, submit new posts, update or delete a given post, retrieve posts, and has multiple blog support.



Eris Ristemena, from Indonesia, was nominated for a PHP Classes Innovation Award in October 2006. Voting caught him the third place prize, being beat out by a Another CAPTCHA Project (why?) and Subversion::Dynamix. He received any book of choice by O'Reilly. Incidently, Eris' blog uses WordPress.



One usage possibility is an online post entry form, similuar to Blogger. Except you could add in the extra bells and whistles such as Trackback Pinging and Technorati Tags. It would also be nice to plug in the original article's Url into the field for Blogger Link and auto-discover the actual Trackback Url.



I will be playing around with this a little bit. Emphasis on the word "play".







Technorati Tags: php, class, ngeblog, blogger, google, data, api, authenticate, zend_gdata, zend, gdata

John Chow's Recluctance to Reveal How He Took Back No. 1

John Chow's brag of how he retook the number one spot back has a lot of people congratulating him for the achievement. He offers no detailed information except for a cryptic hint that Google webmaster tools is your friend and that you should get to know it very well. Hovering over the link he provided, suggested that it may be a problem in that Sitemap area.

It soon became clear that John's Sitemap was part of the problem. It was in conflict with his robots.txt file. Skitzzo of SEO Refugee discovered the differences between a cached version (saved here also) of the file and the now drastically altered version.

Examination of the old robot file disallowed Googlebot for his archived monthlies, feeds, trackbacks, files ending with extensions of .php and .xhtml and any pages with a question mark (?).

What prompted the change in the first place? Jez found another article of John's on how to get your pages out of Google's supplemental index. At the time of the post, he had 1,790 supplemental results. After a robot file tweak, he has managed to remove 10 of those pages from the index. Good job John!

More importanty, his robots.txt tweak had another nasty side effect. Not only were pages being removed from the supplemental index, he was losing regular indexed pages as well. John had 3,190 pages in the index total. His robots.txt file effectively wiped out 340 (non-supplemental)  pages and is now down to 2,840. Excellent job John!

But, John does not mention the robots.txt change in his post. Nor is there an update to the supplemental index post. Instead, he is trying to milk his secret for everything it is worth. And in John's case, he is looking for more money.

I was going to use this post to explain exactly what I did to restore my number one ranking. However, after reading Kumiko’s comments in my Taipei 101 to number 1 post, I’ve decided against it. I think everyone will agree that this kind of information is extremely valuable - some “SEO Guru” tried to take me for $4,000 by saying he knew the answer (which I highly doubt since he made no guarantee).

Whether this change in the robot file was the reason for John's return to number one or if it was just the Google update process taking few days to settle down is not an issue. People will probably be debating this for weeks to come.

What is an issue is that John seems to think that he is onto something, I genuinely believe that. But I also know that John knows of how dangerous his supplemental index post is and is afraid to admit it. Meanwhile that supplemental post is wrecking Google results for everyone who hangs on John's every word -- John is not only evil, he is an egotistical bastard who obviously does not care about his readership. Grade-A job John!

The Ultimate CSS Resource Guide

This may be the list to end most lists, Software Developer's 100 Freebie CSS Resources will aid the novice and professional CSS designers. If you are looking to design your site, but lack certain bits of knowledge to attain a goal -- then turn to this guide and find the site that will.

The guide is broken down into specific areas of CSS development. Starting with the basics of CSS, tutorials and tools to construct your site, then moving on to code libraries, browser bugs, galleries, articles and templates for devine inspiration. It is pretty much all here folks. A one page reference guide that will definitely clean out your bookmarked favorites.

Technorati Tags: css, resource, guide, tutorials, articles, code, develop, design, tools

CSS Templating Basics and Demos

Starting with the primitives in CSS Tinderbox to the full blown OpenWeb Designs, there are many CSS design concepts to view and demo; multi-column, fixed width, fluid. As well as a little CSS magic with rounded corners, gradient backgrounds and Web 2.0 look and feel.



I liked the look of pogy366's fixed width template Slight Amnesia. Very clean and simple. He came up with this by "flinging code around with no real objective or vision." His main goal was to focus on overall accessibility and browser text-resizing being as painless as possible.

Another style of of pogy's, Tree Hugger, features a single main column with three sub-columns underneath. I am seeing this type of layout pop-up more and more nowadays. It is based on one of CSS Tinderbox's fixed width box templates.

The Bright Side of Life looks familiar to me. It is a three column fixed width design which is blog template ready. Most of the CSS styling is here, comments boxes, comment form, more, yada yada. Nice tweak on the top with a tabbed navigation bar and the contrasting background image makes the page seem to jump out at you.

With over 2300 designs to browse, you could spend hours here. Fortunately they have a half-way decent method of narrowing your viewing selection down by contrast, primary and secondary colors and document validity type. The category search is pretty useless with only 'business' and 'fun' as your only choices. Still it is a nice place to flip through.

Technorati Tags: css, template, design, fixed, width, fluid, demo, free, open, source

How to Rank in the Top 10 for John Chow

To my surprise, I noticed a John Chow article I posted sitting on page one of the results for a "John Chow" search at Google. This got me to thinking about how that one post out of 2,140,000 results made it up this high.



This will be more of an analysis than a proof. I have a PR0 blog and really not much going for it in terms of a large readership base. Heck, I do not even use a John Chow label/tag to promote his name with internal linking.



Examining the external links for the article sheds some light:

• A reference from a "John, I told you so" article I posted. His last name, Chow, does not appear anywhere in the post. I do reference two of John's posts though, this is a case of "you are what you link to". In this case, it is John Chow.
  
  
• Dawud's explanation of why John Chow's billing for DoFollow disappoints him. In this well articulated article, Dawud gave me the a strong anchor text link of simply John Chow. He references several other Chow related articles, but my link is the only one with his name in it. Very sweet Dawud!
• The nofollow proponent Blog Rumble post entitled Do Not Follow Me Please. was a loss of respect opinion. The link from here refrenced my blog name only, and was misspelled to boot ---Websubtractions. Gotta love that one! Still there were several "you are what you link" references.
• Proaffiliate's post was simple. They linked to me in both the Title and Body of the post, of which the only thing in the Body was just the link. Kewl! The title of the post was WebStractions: John Chow offers "paid" DoFollow links. That pretty much says it all.
• Last, but not least, Andy Beard's DoFollow | No Nofollow - Highs & Lows espoused John's Dofollow approach as one of the lowliest of the lows and likened him as a modern-day Internet version of Ghengis Kahn. Andy's link text did not include Chow's name, but there was plenty of Chow references before and after it. This is Chow by association, I guess, and is still giving many click-through action from his readers. Thanks again Andy.

You may have noticed a couple of references to "you are what you link" in there. I firmly believe that in absence of strong keywords in your link text, you will still get a benefit from what you are linking to. A mere link to any John Chow page will return you a relationship with, at the least, his name. Since most of the linking posts to my article did not have Chow's name in the link text. The articles themselves, however, were about Chow and that relation was passed onto me and Dawud's strong keytext and a power link from Andy added some punch.



None of this, however, explains the hows and whys of the high placement in the search results. It is safe to say that there should have been more authoritative blogs than mine to garner this position. Here is a list of various opponent reviews of John Chow from the Top 100.

• Scott Jangro's John Chow’s Dangerous Advice concerning Affiliate click fraud
• Arpit Jacob's John Chow Gets Kicked Out of Google which has a stance pretty much like mine in regards to artificially induced links (paid or otherwise)
• The IMDB on the actor John Chow which has nothing bad to say, but it doesn't have anything good. This has nothing to do with this John either. Just threw it in there to spread my John Chow relationship out.
• Josh Dorkin's beef on how John Chow Crashed my Browser again which oddly happens when he has 5-10 tabs open in Firefox. My suggestion is to install NoScript and AdBlock -- but reading his blog via a Reader is probably the safest .
• Somebody at Turk Hit Box saying that John Chow still needs to learn how to improve his Blog SEO. My question is WHY? With over 5500 readers reported by Feedburner, who needs Search Engines.
• Jim Kukral's John Chow is Killing his Blog by trying to hard to make money. And none of that seems to be sinking in with some of those 5500+ readers of his.

The rest of the Top 100 are all supportive raves and/or paid reviews. Lot of support for John,with very little negative feedback.



It was kind of odd that my article was the only one concerning the Pay-To-DoFollow links controversy. Would have thought there would be at least a couple of others in there.



While I do not think that ranking for John Chow in the results is one of my goals in life, it is comforting to know that at least one dissenting view of one of his particularly dangerous money making tips is showing up.







Technorati Tags: john chow, seo, serps, dofollow, nofollow, ranking, john, chow

Ain't Gonna Say It, But I told you so John!

Poor John is scratching his head over his latest revelation that his keyterm for "Make Money Online" went from the number one slot to being buried on page three. Tsk, tsk. I will buy you a beer for that one though!



I did warn people of Google's intent of cracking down on paid links and highlighted the fact of fucking with their NoFollow brainchild by offering them up as Pay To Dofollow (PTD) links may be a disaster in the making.



Google's latest in a series of algo updates, has cracked down even tighter on paid links from publishers. It appears that they are punishing them even further with ranking reductions. The easy to spot targets for rank reduction would be sections such as sidebars and footers. Ferreting out dofollow links buried inside a sea of nofollow's is without any stretch of the imagination very doable -- or at least raise a red flag.



Being so close to the main content of the page (the blog post), PTD's may require a little more tweaking on Google's part. Whether or not this was one of the factors in John's reduction is hard to say. However, there are obvious and numerous link candidates on his pages to warrant the flaccid nature of his evidently limper ranking impotency.



I would also like to mention to all of the people who where suckered into PayPal-ing for a PTD from John -- this is not a one way street. Google may be waiting for the light to change before proceding through the intersection to slap you with a penalty as well. Hopefully you will have noticed that the light has changed and not get T-boned by Google in the process.









Technorati Tags: google, nofollow, dofollow, paid, links, penalty, pagerank, serps

Webstraction's is First Blogger Classic blog to go DoFollow

If you are using Blogger and hosting your blog with your own Web Hosting solution (aka FTP Classic), then you will now be able to remove the NoFollow attribute from the comment author's links. Blogger Classic blogs hosted at Blogspot.com are still S.O.L. for the time being.

I do believe this blog is the first official FTP Blogger account to go DoFollow. Go ahead and give the comment area to this post a test run.

Past comments will still temporarily be NoFollow until (A.) somebody attaches another comment onto the post or (B.) I republish this entire blog. In the case of the latter, that will not be happening for another couple of days. I am in the process of adding on more functionality scripts which will be detailed at Tips 4 Blogspot in the near future. Fair warning, you may see some unpleasant side-effects while viewing this site during that time period.

UPDATE :: The Remove NoFollow Tutorial is available now. It will require that you enable PHP for your FTP Classic Blogger pages. Adding PHP to your blog will allow you to create server-side includable header, footer and sidebar files, amongst other little goodies.

The scripting package I am working on is called pfBlogger and will open up all sorts of possibilities for FTP Classic blogs that were never before possible -- think trackbacks, personally hosted commenting, spam filters, stat tracking etc. Major features and documentation will be hosted here at WebStractions (accessible via nav menu above) while the Tips 4 Blogspot site will be geared for instruction on it's usage.

I am actually getting pretty psyched over this, and I can officially add it to BUMPzee's DoFollow list as well as, Andy's ultimate list of of DoFollow & NoFollow plugins.


Technorati Tags: dofollow, nofollow, blogger, blogspot, removal, php, script, ftp, classic

Greasemonkey script to pre-fill comments form

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

Speed Painting Rocks!

When I first saw a video of speed painting, I couldn't believe my eyes. The people who put these videos together are talented indeed.

The speed painting of Jessica Alba took the artist, MediaMaster, 7 hours to complete using Adobe Photoshop CS and an Aiptek Tablet.

The video compresses this down to 7 minutes with background music from Ian Van Dahl's "Nights on Java". It fits beautifully.

MediaMaster is a 24 year old Flash Designer from Brazil who also specializes in Vector Art. More of his works are on display via Deviant Art.

YouTube Link for the Jessica Alba speed painting video.

If you are a regular viewer of ABC's Lost, then you may enjoy the Kate, Sawyer, Sayid, Hurley and John Locke speed paintings.

Those are pretty tame compared to MohaFoto's rendering of Evangaline Lilly set to Tom Jone's "She's a Lady. But this speed painting makes a twist half way through, when he undresses her and gives her a bikini ("Bad to the Bone").

This is my first computer drawing to which I tryed to add a little extra ... It took 18hours and 36minutes to draw this video, full resolution is 5750x4650pixel.

This Evangaline Lilly speed drawing is available on YouTube also. But the higher resolution version on his website is much nicer and check out his gallery while you are there.

Special thanx to Free CSS Templates for turning me on to this.



Technorati Tags: speed, painting, photoshop, graphic, artist

Online video conversion service - vixy.net

This service allows you to convert Flash Video / FLV file (YouTube's videos,etc) to MPEG4 (AVI/MOV/MP4/MP3/3GP) file online using compressed domain transcoder technology. It converts FLV to MPEG4 faster and less lossy than a typical transcoder.

When you submit an url, it will download and convert to the video format. Then you can download the converted file.

FLV to MPEG4 Conveter engine is also available as OpenSource. You can download the source code via subversion: http://sourceforge.net/svn/?group_id=183657




Technorati Tags: video, converter, online, FLV to MPEG4, sourceforge, OpenSource

Selective Page Indexing Directives

Following up on the new Yahoo "class" directive for isolating non-content on a web page, I have come to one conclusion -- the Big 3, and others, have their own methods of explaining to them what your page is about. Each method is often-times confusing and hard to implement. Factor in the possibility that the most novice of web page creators, who probably will not have a clue, then you have chaos at it's best.



I came across an obscure page which details directives handed out by various search engines. The page is not totally encompassing, but it sheds a lot of light on how the major and minor search engines are competing for your Html input. This input is always geared for their consumption, and if not used, then you will be at a disadvantage for their indexing abilities.



In-page directives are always geared toward the SE provider that suggests them. Depending on the notoriety of the SE, they will be inserted into pages or not. Web page builders always have to keep up with the additions, which usually does not include minor or startup search sites.



The playing field is not even when it comes to directives. They who are strongest usually prevails, but at the cost of numerous forum and blog posts which generally promote the bigger of the pack. You know who I am talking about.

The robots.txt Summit

Yahoo's indexing directive (ill conceived) was born from a Summit that was supposed to deal with the robots.txt method of directing SE's to the main content of web pages. During the summit, the idea of robots.txt evolving to meet the current Internet needs was discussed. The term "evolve" went off on a tangent that I found hard to believe.



The simplicity of robots.txt has been an easy concept for virtually every webmaster. Meta declarations in the Head of the document to NOINDEX or NOFOLLOW have been adopted and used by most.



The evolvement of robots.txt into the Body of the page must be equally simple. There has to be a way of relaying "indexing" information to ALL robots. Proprietary tagging should not be allowed by any entity.

One Solution

In the beginning there was robots.txt, then the Meta Robots directive. Following in the simplicity of both, we should have a solution that is par with both concepts.



A new tag should be introduced -- <robots attr="directive">



The attribute can be discussed amongst the SE providers. My options would follow the original concept of robots.txt and the Meta alternative -- Index and Follow.



Adding onto this concept and the prevalent need to identify "actual content", the attribute of "content" would be added. Possible directives could be: Content, NoContent



Surrounding your intent with a <robot> tag will not only make it simpler for us, but make it easier for the SE's to drill down into our pages.



Also, if the original thinking of the SE's was to identify "content". Then why not say so. Why identify non-content through nefarious means?

Top Two Dozen Blogs About Blogging

Daniel Scocco's Top Blog List actually contains 25 blogs, but I dismissed one, thus the "two dozen". It wouldn't take a rocket scientist to determine which of the blogs I dismissed.



The list is based on an Todd And's Power 150 algorithm with a little of Daniel's own flair. He included Alexa data into the mix and tweaked some of the original ranking factors.



Monthly updates will be reported on his site, but I am not sure what the Url will be.









Technorati Tags: top, bloggers, list, blogging, ratings

Yahoo's Robots-NoContent: Another shade of NoFollow

Have you looked closely at Yahoo's new "robots-nocontent" tag? The tag was born from discussions at a recent Robots.txt Summit in which one topic focus included the adding of support for web pages to identify main content non-relevancy.

So what is considered non-relevant to the main content? Priyank Garg of Yahoo!Search summarizes it as navigation, menus repeated across the entire site, boilerplate text, or even adverting. So, basicly everything outside of your main content area is non-relevant.

This tag is really about our crawler focusing on the main content of your page and targeting the right pages on your site for specific search queries.

Actually the term "tag" is a misnomer. Yahoo's proposal is that you implement this with a class attribute (ie: class="robots-nocontent") for any content that is extraneous to the main unique content of the page. The Slurp help page cites numerous examples of how to apply this class to your Html -- too numerous.

Maybe I am not getting this. Wouldn't it just be simpler to identify what is the main content? Since it is apparent that Slurp cannot distinguish repetitive tendencies across the pages of one domain, then let's spell it out for them with a class="robots-this-is-content-dummie".

It would be a lot simpler to implement also. Just wrap your content with DIV element and you are done. You might have a section on the sidebar for "related" reference purposes, then wrap one around that too.

Give them their own tag <robots>

The usage of the class attribute is all wrong anyway. This is more of a relation than a class, more aptly it is meta-information which can aid the robots in distinguishing relevant content passages from the fluff.

To date, we have two methods of conveying information to robots on what not to index -- the robots.txt file and the meta noindex in the head section of our pages. Why not their own tag element for meta information inside the body of the page?

My suggestion is to use a new tag -- <robot attr></robot>. Inserting an element in your page that the browser does not recognize, will not be displayed to the viewer. For all intents and purposes, it is invisible except to the spiders.

The new robot tag could have an attribute of their own choosing. For instance, the Yahoo attribute would simply be slurp="directive", Google would be googlebot="directive", etc. Directives could be "content", "content-related" and (ugggh) "no-content" -- but there would not be a need for the latter, now would there?

Another possibility is to keep in line with the other methods of communication -- attributes of Index and Follow could be used. The attribute of Rel (relation) could be used also in the form of "main", "related", or "plagiarized". I made that last one up to see if you were awake or not. But when you think about it -- quotations or full passages lifted from other sites should not qualify as content.

There is a need to have this form of control at our disposal. The method that is used needs to be thought out a little better. Yahoo's premature birth of their new baby was not even close, it was slipshod and messy.



Technorati Tags: yahoo, slurp, robots-nocontent, robots, nocontent, robots.txt

Delicious Bot is tagging MyBlogLog

I was reading Alpesh's Blogosphere and he noticed that his blogs at MyBlogLog are being tagged from the files over at Delicious. If you hover over the tags, you will see the unmistakable icon doing the handywork.







I haven't noticed any tags coming over yet. So really don't know how long this will all take to transpire. Anybody noticing anything on their end?



The bot, according to the statusbar is called mbl-deliciousbot and has its own member profile. Clicking on it will bring it up. The About Me reads:

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website -- the primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too.



http://delicious.com

Welcome to the neighborhood!



I never thought I would ever talk to a bot, but I left him a welcome message anyway.



Update: There is another report that MyBlogLog is also crawling Technorati tags. Bot name is, duh, mbl-technoratibot.

You can opt-out of tagging if you wish. The setting for this can be found on the Edit Profile page.


Technorati Tags: delicious, mybloglog, tags, bot

Mandarin Design - For people who make mistakes

How
to make your
Blog look like
a magazine
without hardly
trying.
Plug in examples,
directions
in blogineese!

HTML and CSS Examples
Popular Blog Code
TIPS and TRICKS

Magazine style is easy with simple copy and paste code for styled drop caps, small pullquotes, new orange pull quotes,

...this will look like some of the pullquotes and styles we see in magazinelayout...

opacity pullquotes, and
easy pull quotes. A magazine cover and highlights are served cut and paste style in Text Tricks. Add Polaroid borders, triple borders,
and float pictures left and right
the easy way with tips and tricks in the
Box Tips and FAQ sections.

Did that get your attention?

Quick CSS Tricks Roundup

Here are some unusual and ingenious CSS tricks, all meant to be quick reads and get your mind thinking in a different direction. They will also show you that sometimes simpler is better.



Remove dotted outline from links - This one was news to me. Works on text and image links. (Deziner Folio)



Center DIV - Horizontally & Vertically - Apply a little math for this neat trick, pure simplicity. (Deziner Folio)





Prevent content from shifting with AdBlockers - If you have ad content in the flow of your design, ad blocking could cause it to shift. Here is a fix for that. (5ThirtyOne)



Custom underlines - Okay, this is not too quick. But it is unusual. (A List Apart)



Fluid dot leaders - This is a freaky thing to watch when you adjust screen width. Great for pages that have a table of contents. (David Lenef)













Technorati Tags: css, tips, tricks, alignment, underline, links, div, lists

Search Qoogle for video content on YouTube

Qoogle Video offers an improved search for video clips on YouTube. Result pages display 20 clips in four columns of five rows. No ads, quick display, no distractive banners. Clean pages.



Each clip result includes 3 snapshots and a link to view the clip without having to visit YouTube. My only disatisfaction with the display is that the columns are too close together, outside of that, this is a pretty fast search utility.



Returned results were very satisfactory in my opinion. And with more results to a page, I don't think that I could use YouTube search ever again.



Extras at Qoogle

They also have a Firefox plugin for Quoogle, supposedly. I think it is only good for versions prior to Firefox 2.0 -- have not checked it out yet. If anyone does, drop me a line to confirm.



The neatest feature, as if the search wasn't enough, is that they have a download utility page where you can snag the videos with. But there is also a Firefox extension called the VideoDownloader that will handle YouTube, as well as 60 plus other sites including Google, Metacafe, iFilm, Google and many, many others. This extension actually works by extracting the information from the embedded Html code -- normally you could do this by viewing the source and hand-typing the source file into your browser.



Video presentation ideas

The YouTube format is .FLV (flash video), but if you change the extension to .AVI then you can edit, take snapshots, or whatever with most video editing software. I have not tried this, but that is what I have read in a few spots.



Ideally, if you prep your videos and grab screenshots, then run them through something like Slide -- you could present your video content a little more different than the same old boring YouTube fashion. Slide has many options for displaying image clips (blinds, fades, turning pages, and those irritating MySpace slideshows too).





Technorati Tags: quoogle, youtube, video, search, slide, presentation, firefox, plugin, download

New Google Translate Search

Breaking down language barriers in search is a goal for Google, and they just launched a new translation search page to take, hopefully, a giant step in that direction. The page allows you to enter your search phrase, the language you speak and the language that you want to find results in.



As you know, I am a big Serebro fan and they are 100% homegrown Russian girls. So let's put this baby to the test. Now I know that Google's Russian translation machine is in Beta, but hey, they have it listed in the drop down menu. Right.



My first crack at this was to see if it can find the MTV Russia page where I saw some kind of online chat session between MTV and the girl trio. So I enter in "serebro MTV chat", enter. Ah, results -- two columns of them. One for the original language and the other for the translated page.



Well MTV is at the top, but it lands on the home page at MTV Russia and it does not look any different from the original. Sigh. I can see the link for Serebro though. Don't need to understand Russian if it is written in images! And if there is one language I can read, that is Serebro.



Interestingly enough, some of the other results were about unclothed celebs and live internet, something or other. And here I thought the US was the pRoN capital of the world. Boy was I mistaken, Russia has some goods on us there. And some mighty fine goods indeed.



Something seems to be broken on the new search page. If you were to use the ol' tried and true Translate Text box on the original Google Translate page, the translation is not too bad. Even for Russian. I was able to piece together parts of the conversation between the participants. Albeit, it is a tedious one. I just don't understand why this is not wired into the new page correctly.



Anyways, I just broke the tip on the end of my scissors and almost out of school paste. Probably should get up to Walmart before the storm rolls in tonight.







Technorati Tags: google, translate, russian, english, web, pages, foreign, language

Serebro (Серебро) Song No. 1? Try almost page number one.

I was trying to run down an error on my server today and in the middle of that, my eye came across a hit from Google in my logs for one word -- Serebro. Curious one that. I check it out and find that I am placing 14th out of 698k for a one page post, 31st in Russia. Kewl.



Serebro in Russian, means silver.But they are more like gold right now. I am still going thru videos on YouTube, even the interviews that they have given after their EuroVision appearance. Of course they are all speaking Russian, but I don't care. I can't understand a single word they are saying and I am kewl with that. Sigh.




Serebro may look like runway fashion models -- they are all but. All have had prior dance training in their backgrounds and can really "kick the flow".

<---- Who is my favorite Serebro babe?

Tough question. Do I really have to pick?



Elena Temnikova, the lead singer, is spicy hot. I am a man and would not turn it away, that goes without saying. She has been on Russian TV with "Star Factory" and I am thinking that she may be a little more than I can handle. Just a little mind you, but a little of Elena could probably kill a man.



Marina Lizokina, is a seasoned veteran singer and has those, oh so, plump pouty lips - yikes. She also reminds me of one of the Olsen twins -- the pudgier one (as opposed to skinny as a rail). Forgot her name, but Marina is a sultry vamp. Yeppers, she is a honey bunny.



But if I did have to pick, I would have to go with Olga Seryabkina -- the shy one. She has been studying ballet since the age of 7. Olga has legs that just don't quit and hasn't been a singer all that long before joining Serebro . She is pretty much unknown, but that is kewl. There is a quality about her that is hard to put my finger on, she is just very pleasing on the eyes.



And now the burning question that is on everybody's minds. What is the meaning of the line "I'll be your funny bunny" in Song #1? Here is an interview sequence in which Marina answers that question. Of course they are all speaking Russian, again, but my interpretation (you will have to see it) is that Funny Bunny was one her imaginary childhood friends -- boy to be young again, or a bunny.





Technorati Tags: serebro, eurovision, song, #1, elena, temnikova, marina, lizokina, olga, seryabkina, Серебро, silver, russian

Firefox Bloat

Firefox is experiencing growing pains in more ways than one and two of the bloating problems they have encountered appear to be intertwined -- browser code and Google money. The browser war may be pushing the Firefox project too fast and down the wrong path.



Recent estimates place Firefox with a little over 15 percent of the market and Internet Explorer around 78 percent. Most of the market share that Firefox has gained on Internet Explorer came with the royalty deal that Google struck with the now for-profit Mozilla Foundation, who has 90 employees and revenue of more than $100 million in the last couple of years.

Mozilla plans to make enough money to keep growing ... Google, which, like the other search companies, is always competing for better placement on browsers. Under the agreement, the Google search page is the default home page when a user first installs Firefox, and is the default in the search bar. (Google has a similar placement with Apple’s Safari.)

The transparency of Mozilla is coming into question by many critics, mostly because of the level of secrecy that has to be maintained in its arrangements with Google. That issue caused tension around getting the deal done and disclosure.



Other critics claim that Mozilla is percieved as an extension of Google:

... they note that one of Google’s growth areas, Web-based software applications, would have a better chance of success with a browser not controlled by its biggest rival, Microsoft.

With money comes change. Firefox is evolving in directions that nobody would have imagined a couple of years ago.



The surge in popularity of Firefox has caused a backlash effect from Microsoft who is shelling more money into the advancement of Internet Explorer. The release of IE 7 shown remarkable improvements over previous versions and demonstrated to the Google/Mozilla camp exactly what they are capable of accomplishing.



When Firefox launched over five years ago, "it burst on the open-source browser scene like a young Elvis Presley -- slim, sexy and dangerous.", says Scot Gilbertson of Wired. But now he fears that with the "IE killing" release of Firefox 3.0 later this year will be in danger of becoming

the later version of Elvis -- fat.

Anecdotal reports of problems, from sluggishness to slow page loads and frequent crashes, have begun circulating in web forums, along with increasingly loud calls for Firefox to return to its roots. The alleged culprit: bloat, the same problem that once plagued Mozilla, the slow, overstuffed open-source browser spawned by Netscape that Firefox was originally meant to replace.

The "roots" was Firefox's small memory footprint, fast load time and extensibility thru plugins. It was a roll-your-own bare bones browser. It was this root that became one of Firefox's major selling points to non-geeky computer users. But now that is coming under more scrutiny as reports from reader polls cite that Firefox's mysterious habit of gobbling up huge chunks of memory as their number one complaint.

Actual data is hard to come by, but Mike Schroepfer (Mozilla's vice president of engineering) opines that memory problems can be blamed on the users environment which is influenced by other software, add-ons, and extensions. To keep the bulk down, Schroepfer's team sets a high threshold for the addition of features. New features aren't built in unless they are useful to at least 90 percent of Firefox's users.

Despite those safeguards, some now-standard features could be adversely affecting performance.

Firefox's page-cache mechanism, for example, introduced in version 1.5, stores the last eight visited pages in the computer's memory. Caching pages in memory allows faster back browsing, but it can also leave a lot less memory for other applications to use. Less available RAM equals a less-responsive computer.

It is a fine line that Firefox has to walk when trying to find a balance between what is perceived to be a "needed" feature and one that is not. What is too much? And does Firefox have a choice in that matter?

Slowly but surely, Internet Explorer is catching up to Firefox. In IE7, Microsoft added tabbed browsing and integrated RSS support to its browser. If Firefox is going to continue to compete, it will need to up the ante, but it must do so without making users add extensions .. and possibly introduce compatibility problems.

With the emerging technologies appearing on the web today, it will certainly push the limits of the new breed of browsers, Firefox and Internet Explorer. The change is inevitable and I do believe that neither will be going back to their roots and will continue to grow with the web.



Technorati Tags: firefox, internet, explorer, google, bloat, money, code, extensions

Test Blogger .. and get paid for it

You can make a little coin ($75 and hour) just by using Blogger!
From time to time, Blogger will run usability studies to make sure that they are on the right track with all the new features that are being worked on.

If playing with Blogger for an hour or so and making up to $100 sounds like something you’d like to do, sign up here.



You don’t even have to live near Mountain View, CA to participate. Some field surveys are handled over the phone and sometimes they will come to you.



After signing up, there is a five page questionnaire you will need to fill out. It doesn't take too much of your time.



Need more info,&nbsp; read the FAQ.

Technorati Tags: google, blogger, usability, survey, paid

Did you know these basic Firefox Tips?

From the desk of CyberCapital comes three sets of Firefox tips. Some you probably already know, others not. All worth a look at.

• Basic Firefox Tips
• Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts
• Top 10 Firefox chrom Url Tricks

There are a couple other quirky entries (warning, memory intensive) Firefox Inside Firefox and Dancing Firefox. Use at your own risk !!!





Technorati Tags: firefox, tips, chrom, shortcuts, hacks

John Chow offers "paid" DoFollow links

John Chow has developed a DoFollow plugin to selectively remove the rel="nofollow" extension from comment links, in which he is offering for your comments at $10 a month. He also has a plan to sell the plugin and/or set up an affiliate program to peddle the gimmick.



Yes, I said gimmick and you will also notice that I emphasized the term "paid" in this post title too.



There are quite a few reasons why you should not buy into this scheme. Anyone who does will just be throwing their money away. This is no more beneficial to the subscriber than tits on a boar.



Let's say you "rent" your comment link for a few months. And remember, it is rent. If you don't pay it, you get evicted and NoFollow is taking up residence on your sofa.



Links will not pick up any juice right out of the gate either. Once they "stick" for any duration, then they may give you some benefit. But looking at a page with close to 200 hardcoded links without any comments, how much value will that be? And once it does stick, it will be buried in the archives and off of page one.



Comment links are not the same as site-wide links. Site-wide links will overpower your comment link without even lifting a finger. Chow's site has approximately 3,140 pages indexed by Google. By his admission, a site-wide link costs $240 a month -- do the math, that is only 7.6 cents per link. How many comments will you have to make to bring your margin down.



If you look at this gimmick in the right light, John Chow is not really selling you the NoFollow removal. You are paying him to comment. John is fully aware that you will be commenting (or not) on a daily basis just to get your link in there. This is reverse pay-to-comment mentality.



Lets talk about that plugin a little bit. This would be a first wouldn't it -- a WP plugin you would have to actually buy? This goes against the grain of WP itself doesn't it?



The selling of the plugin is far more evil than duping some of John's more ignorant readers into the link renting. And I wouldn't doubt if some pissed off blogger hacks the plugin and offers it up on one of the more popular download sites.



But John better revise that plugin to include the microformat rel="paid". After all, they are paid links and Google's Matt Cutts is looking very closely at them. That goes for the site-wide links too.



There is a mechanism in place via the Google webmaster console to report paid links. Albeit, it is not an official one and is being run through their spam reporting system. Currently the main purpose of reporting is so that Google can augment their existing algorithms.



And what does Matt think about paid links?

&nbsp;

... link sellers can lose trust, such as their ability to flow PageRank/anchortext. Also, we’re open to semi-automatic approaches to ignorepaid links, which could include the best of algorithmic and manual approaches.



I even mentioned earlier this year that paid articles/reviews/posts should be done in a way that doesn’t affect search engines.



As someone working on quality and relevance at Google, my bottom-line concern is clean and relevant search results on Google. As such, I care about paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings.

I think I will just end this with by agreeing with Matt. 'nuf said.

PhpBB3 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) Released

For the last 5 years, phpBB 2.0 has gained a huge following worldwide and has played an important role in defining the success of Open Source software.

Acyd Burn, phpBB Development Team Leader, announced the first release candidate for the overly anticipated phpBB3 has just been released. PhpBB3, code named “Olympus”, has been in the making since 2002.

Support will only be offered on clean installations of RC1 and conversions from phpBB 2.0.x to phpBB3 RC1. Any other conversions/updates involving phpBB3 Beta will not be supported.

Conversions from 2.0.x to phpBB3 RC1 may be problematic at this time, depending on your setup and the amount of mods you installed. To be on the safe side, it is suggested to wait for later releases before you fully convert your phpBB 2.0.x installation.

What is new in phpBB3?

Features already available in 2.0.x but improved and/or enhanced for Olympus include Private Messaging, Registration and Search.

New features include the rolling in, and improvement of the Attachment Mod, unlimited subforums, custom BBCodes, custom Profile fields, enhanced User Control Panel, new moderating tools, caching and performance enhancements, warning reports, bookmarking, Jabber/XMPP support notifications ... and much more. In some ways this goes to, and beyond, VB3.

The Admin Control Panel has been made more flexible with a tabbed layout format. The ACP has been completely restructured and allows for easier extensibility. More improvements for Admins include global announcements, pruning of inactive users, error logs, language pack editing, user notes and search spider detection.

phpBB's creator resigns, group will go on

With the recent resignation of phpBB's creator James Atkinson (aka "theFinn"), a transfer of majority share in phpBB.com has gone to the now newly independent phpBB Development Team. This transfer will not affect the development of phpBB 3.0.x and support will still continue for the stable phpBB 2.0.x

The group of contributors behind phpBB all share a passion for Open Source software. The phpBB Group has maintained its ambitions since its formation in 2000; to continue developing and supporting a stable bulletin board system.

Technorati Tags: Olympus, phpbb, phpbb3, phpbb2, RC1, release, candidate, forum, php, software

Google Adsense Preview Tool

Digital Inspiration has just launched a new online tool for Adsense publishers. The Adsense Sandbox 1.0 will show the latest ads available in the Google inventory for particular keyword(s) or webpage URLs.



This tool supports all Google ad formats including Adlinks and Rich Media Google Ads (Images, Video or Flash) and can be used to help you determine what kind of Google Ads are being served on your web pages for visitors who are coming from other countries like China, Brazil or Japan.



You can watch a short video (via YouTube) for a quick tour of Adsense Sandbox.





Technorati Tags: google, adsense, online, tool, sandbox, keywords, preview, adlinks, ads

Online Tool: Stripe Generator 2.0

A pretty cool online tool that will generate striped tiles that can be used as a background. I am not into stripes, but somebody else may.



Click on some of the latest stripes that were generated to see how to take full advantage of the tool. There are also some shared stripes to view also. Some are actually pretty impressive.



But, I was more impressed with the design of the site. Pretty slick looking.



Technorati Tags: online, tool, striped, background, tiles

ScribeFire: Blogging Client for Firefox

Let's face it. I am not ready for the online world of data entry -- including blogging. Tiny little boxes, delayed keystrokes and the editor inputting garbage code such as &lt;span style="font-weight: bold;"&gt; when all I wanted was a damn &lt;b&gt; had really started to get on my bad side. But I have put up with it ... until now.



After searching for a desktop client to publish my blogs with, I discovered ScribeFire for Firefox. I am posting from it right now. And my first feelings about it are --- awesome.



Setup was a breeze. ScribeFire will interface with several popular blogging platforms and according to the website, more will be added. The Blogger API is also supported and it has a built-in FTP for uploading images to your own server.



Right out of the gate you notice something different about it, the split-screen. You enter your post into the ScribeFire interface on the bottom of your Firefox window and up above you can browse multiple tabs -- think compilation of multiple blog posts on one subject. The split is adjustable to your taste.



ScribeFire is feature packed. You can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing into your post. You can even drag images (I discovered this by accident). The image for this post was dragged off of the main ScribeFire page.



You can start a post by clicking on the ScribeFire icon which sits in your status bar. The editor will open up and have the Title of the page and the Url link already to go for you. If you had selected text on the page, that is transferred as well. This is just like a "blog this" button in many ways.



There are three views for the interface: posting view, html view and the pre-view. Even in the posting view, if you have inserted an image, it will display on the screen where you have placed it. If it is in a bad place, just drag it somewhere else.



Have a long post? You can either publish it as a draft or save your work locally. I like the save locally option. This is known as Saving a Note -- but I use it to save drafts.



You can add Technorati tags to the end of your post and send those tags on to del.icio.us as well.



Does your blogging software NOT support trackback Urls? BlogSpot comes to mind. No problem with Scribefire you can enter in the trackback Url and it will send it on.



Do you want more? Okay, the Page Tools panel will show you how popular a post is via Technorati and how many backlinks the post has. Chances are if this screen shows oodles of links, then you are not the first one to know about it. Just put in your quick two cents and move on.



There is a bookmark feature. Not quite sure what that is for yet. And I am sure there are some other features or quirks that I have missed.



All in all, I am a very happy camper. I highly recommend that you try it out.











Technorati Tags: scribefire, firefox, blog, editor, addon, plugin, performancing

BUMPzee! Search Plugins for Firefox

After seeing Carsten Cumbrowski's search goodies for BUMPzee and they only supported Internet Explorer, I took it upon myself to write a search plugin for Firefox.

Go to my BUMPzee search plugin page which has a one-click installation regardless of what version of Firefox you are using.

Firefox 2.0 and beyond supports the new OpenSearch format, while previous versions used Sherlock. The script will detect which version you are using and install the corresponding plugin for you.

BUMPzee! Blogging Goodies

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.