Webstractions Server & Blogging Platform Move

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.

[UPDATE jan 6, 2009: A little hiccup with the server. Seems I have been down for a few days! Need to republish a couple of posts.]

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.

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

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

Blogger Tips and Tutorials

I just opened a new blog for anyone who uses Blogger. It is called Tips 4 Blogspot and will feature posts about wading thru widgets, layouts and other features of both the New Blogger and Classic style.

My first tutorial is up -- How to add pseudo-Categories to the sidebar. It has the basic building blocks of how the category list was set up on blog itself.

I wrote the article because of my loathing of labels on the sidebar in general. Found them to be ridiculously long. Tag clouds were out of the question. I wanted a neat uncluttered look.

Google Blogger SPAM Flagged Me

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.

Are you PING-less in 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.