Yes, I realize I haven’t posted here in a while, though I intend for that to change. Currently, I’m relatively busy with my new blog, Winterdrake, which is about several “geeky” subjects: video games, retro gaming, comic books, fantasy, science fiction, RPGs and so on.

I have been thinking about consolidating my blogs a bit more, and focusing my efforts on a maximum of three or four. Therefore, Winterdrake has “absorbed” my old video games blog, The Games of My Life (not linked here since it’ll eventually vanish), although I have been moving some of the better posts there (while expanding them — some of them are now more than 50% new content). That won’t happen to this blog, though; I think “geeky” and “hard tech” don’t necessarily mix, and I don’t want to annoy readers interested in one subject with the other. People who, like me, are interested in both, should read (or subscribe to) both blogs, of course. There have been a couple of more technical posts on Winterdrake, too, but I don’t intend for it to become my “real” tech blog; that’s for this blog here. I may cross-link both blogs when a post makes sense in both, though.

So… enjoy Winterdrake. Meanwhile, I have been spending some time optimizing my anti-spam gateway, and may post some tutorials about that here, in the near future. Stay tuned…

• Planeta Asterisco is now PrintScreen (or Prt.Sc). I like the new look a lot, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to convince them to make the post titles clickable. The Tlog is proud (well, I am; the blog isn’t sentient, at least not yet…) to be aggregated there.
• Bill Gates denies the Wii’s existence. Loved this one: “No, that’s not it. You can’t pick up your tennis racket. And swing it.”. Uh, Bill…
• Top 10 underrated WordPress plugins. No need to say more, really.
• Could you pass 8th grade Science? I haven’t done the test yet, but it’s on my to-do list for today. Looks quite nice.
• Fórum Arte de Blogar, a companion forum to my Arte de Blogar blog, in Portuguese. It’s about blogging, SEO, website marketing, and so on. Still relatively empty, but it’s up to you to change that.

… interested in professional blogging, optimization, promotion, SEO, and stuff like that, I have just resurrected my old “blog on blogging”. It’s now called Arte de Blogar (it lost the initial “A”) and it has moved to a new location, www.artedeblogar.net.

If you’re interested, and what to know what’s coming next for that blog, or why it had been “zombified” for months, start here.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Inspired by Carlos Andrade‘s own tool, I’ve just coded a couple of scripts to take an OPML file and show an ordered table of Technorati ranks. Naturally, I used it for my own Planet site, Planet Atheism.

Here it is: Technorati Ranks for Planet Atheism members

The implementation was ridiculously simple (and there’s a lot of room for improvement), but, other than Carlos’ tool, I didn’t find any scripts or utilities to do this. And, yes, I searched. Therefore I may release the code soon, as the 2nd project on software.dehumanizer.com, since this can be a fun “toy”.

[EDIT: added each blog's Google PageRank to the table. Why not? ]

If you’re curious about the last post…

I accept that making some HTML code validate in validator.w3.org shouldn’t be the be all, end all of the problem. A piece of code can validate and yet be… horrible. On the other hand, a piece of code may not validate because of a minor problem, and yet be better than 99% of what you see out there.

Still, that applies mainly to your code. What if you’re aggregating other people’s code? What if they’re using bad HTML, which their blogging systems (mostly Blogger or WordPress) automatically converts to a feed, which is then converted back to (simplified) HTML by a Planet? And what if you want all of that to validate?

Well, tidy works very well; it fixes the worst problems, mainly, badly nested code, and unclosed tags. But… well, if you’re being pedantic (like the W3 validator is), then there are still problems.

They’re mostly one of the following: 1) img tags without an “alt” attribute, and 2) proprietary attributes.

tidy, by default, doesn’t deal with those (since its point is for you to correct your code, and those problems should really be fixed in the code itself). But you can make it do so.

How? Well, here’s the command line I’m using for Planet Atheism:

/usr/local/bin/tidy -wrap 79 -m -i -utf8 --alt-text "" --drop-proprietary-attributes 1 -asxhtml filename

It should be obvious what each parameter does. The “ alt-text "" ” part adds some empty alt text to any img tag that hasn’t got one. The “--drop-proprietary-attributes 1” part removes those weird attributes inside other tags, which make the W3 validator choke. I don’t want them anyway, since a Planet site is supposed to display a basic version of a post — not a Flash-y, YouTube-d, animated one.

The result is: complete W3 validation, and readable code. From many other blogs, by many different authors. Automatically. What more could anyone want?

As I’ve mentioned here before, for Planet Atheism I’m using moonmoon, mostly because 1) everyone else uses planetplanet, and 2) it’s in PHP instead of Python, and I know a little PHP.

moonmoon is still on version 0.2, however, and, while it removes “dangerous” tags from feeds automatically, it doesn’t (yet?) deal with unclosed tags. As most of PA’s members are as far from being geeks as possible, they tend to use WYSIWYG editors, and aren’t really worried about “validating HTML”. So, from time to time, a post would make every other post after it show in bold or italic. Annoying, to say the least.

Yesterday, it was even worse: some posts “spilled over” to the sidebar. And it wasn’t just one post causing it, but two, from different blogs, at the same time!

Well, enough was enough.

“Fixing” moonmoon (or, more precisely, SimplePie) was out of the question; I simply don’t know enough PHP / XML parsing to do it. But I tried something else: I saved the generated HTML to a file on the site’s directory, and used tidy on it. Surprise: this new version was perfect! So, I got the idea of using tidy on the generated HTML every time.

Now, PHP has a tidy module, but in PHP5 I would have to compile PHP by hand. Ubuntu doesn’t have a package for that module, unfortunately, and I really didn’t want to make an exception from using apt packages on that server. So, I had to find another way.

My solution was to dump all the page into a buffer (using the ob_ functions in PHP), save it to a temporary file, use the system command to apply tidy on it, load the altered file, and show it to the browser. It’s probably not very efficient, but it works… better than I expected, too. It may be a crude solution, but I’m proud of it anyway.

It’s out. It’s got some very interesting new features.

Upgrading my blogs was, again, a piece of cake. I just checked whether the plugins I use have been tested as working; luckily, all of them were. I also used this excuse to update a couple of them to the most recent version (which is almost always a good idea).

WordPress is really a great piece of software. I know it’s “unfashionable” to say that some software is good or bad, as it looks like you’re somehow biased, but I’ve used other alternatives before, and WP is nowadays really, really good. I’d choose Drupal for a more “serious” site, but, for a blog, WP simply can’t be beaten, nowadays.

A question that arose among members and possible members of my new Planet Atheism is this: won’t people start reading my writings through the Planet, and never visit my blog again? In other words, won’t it reduce traffic?

Traffic is important to many kinds of blogs (and sites in general). Maybe you are supported by ads, either as a main source of income, or just as a little extra cash every month. Maybe your blog is more about the comments than the posts themselves. Maybe it has other interactive features, which won’t be seen by anyone reading it through the “Planet”.

So, the question makes sense.

My own experience of being a part of a Planet — in this case, Planeta Asterisco, which aggregates this very blog — has always been positive. It hasn’t made me “famous” , but I notice that I get readers from the aggregator, that other members themselves sometimes comment on my posts, and so on.

But you can consider the following factors:

1. losing any traffic should be incredibly rare, if it happens at all. Any regular readers you already have will probably keep reading your blog the way they’re used to.
2. belonging to a Planet will increase your readership; depending on the Planet’s success, it may increase it a lot. An increased readership, even if many of them don’t actually visit your blog frequently, has many advantages; among others, they are likely to link to any posts of yours they find interesting. And comment on them (which, incidentally, means they visit your blog after all). You also begin to slowly build a “name” for yourself.
3. you can gain a lot in terms of search engine optimization (SEO). The aggregator includes permanent links to your blog, and to each individual post. Since many of the Planet’s members will also link to the Planet itself, it will probably soon be very well positioned in terms of SEO, making links from it valuable. As a result, you get more visitors from search engines.
4. you get other members of the Planet as regular readers (since most tend to read the Planet themselves). They all have blogs about (mostly) the same subject as yours, which increases the likeliness of they expanding on your posts in their own blogs, linking to yours. Again, more readers (coming from their blogs), and SEO gains (because of the links).
5. if you’re afraid of being part of an aggregator, then you should be afraid of having an RSS feed at all, shouldn’t you?

A few days ago, I created a “planet” site, Planet Atheism, aggregating (guess what) atheism-related blogs. Since everyone uses Planet (or “planetplanet”, a much cooler name IMO), I decided to be different just for the heck of it, and use moonmoon (also a great name! ). It’s still early in development, but it does exactly what I want, and couldn’t be simpler to configure.

From the start, I made it my policy not to add any blog’s feed to PA without express permission from the blogger, even though I could — both technically, and legally — do so. Therefore, I posted about it in Way of the Mind, and I’ve also been contacting the owners of other atheist blogs, asking their permission.

Or… trying to. Because it’s amazing how many blogs — especially Blogger ones — don’t have any sort of contact information available. Not an email address, not a contact form. Nothing. The only way to contact them is to post an off-topic comment on the newest post — something that is annoying and can even been seen as rude. Therefore, except in some particular cases, I have been avoiding it. Yet, it’s either that, or nothing.

People, having some form of contact info is important. It avoids having unrelated garbage in your comments. It makes your blog look more “professional” (which is important if you’re trying to establish yourself as an authority in some subject, though I’m sure some Portuguese bloggers will now cry that they don’t want their blogs more “professional”, that they just blog for fun, and that anyone who blogs for any other reason is a dirty money-grubbing bastard. Sigh.) Along with an “about me” page (also important), it “humanizes” you; suddenly, you’re not just some generic blogger, but a real person, in the mind of your readers.

If you’re worried about email spam (a legitimate concern), there are many ways to disguise your address so that spam bots can’t get it. Or use some contact form which doesn’t reveal your address at all. But don’t just “hide” from your readers just because you’re afraid of spam.

WordPress 2.0.6, released a couple of days ago, has a bug that causes FeedBurner, from time to time, to be unable to download the feed correctly.

Mark Jaquith, one of the WP developers, has a fix. It’s a simple patch, though he also provides a fully updated functions.php file.

Usually, I try to avoid short posts of the “look at this cool page!” kind, because a blog full of those, usually, has little original content. But, from time to time, there’s something so good out there that not linking to it would be a crime.

Here’s one: 21 Surefire Tips for a Successful Blog Launch, at Aviva Directory.

Despite the title, the tips aren’t restricted to a blog’s launch; some of them are surely of use to many an experienced blogger.

If you read this blog through the feed, you may not even notice it, but it has just moved to another server, and it got a new domain to boot.

Instead of tlog.dehumanizer.com, this blog is now at www.thetlog.net. Like in my previous move, old URLs are redirected to the correct new ones, except for the front page, which shows a message telling people about the move for 5 seconds, and then redirects.

If it’s not too much work, I’d ask you dear readers to please change your bookmarks, and any links you may have on your own blogs or sites.

By the way, this blog is now also using page titles without the blog name. The more I think about it, the more I believe it’s a good idea.

And now for the OpenBSD 4.0 upgrade, in a few days. Sigh. A blogger/sysadmin’s job is never done…

If you’ve read the Blogging Tips series, you’re surely aware of a part of it called The Importance of Titles. Titles (meaning what ends up between the <title> </title> tags) are one of the most important, and most ignored, parts of SEO, these days. Not only do search engines use them to rank pages, but they’re also what actually appears in search results, and a bad title is much less likely to be clicked on… even if the content is exactly what the user wants.

In case of blogs, the blogging software, typically, inserts the blog’s name and post title automatically, which is a start. But can it be improved? That’s what I wanted (and still want) to investigate.

By default, WordPress uses the common Blog title – Post title format. Which, as any “serious” blogger should know, is a pretty bad idea. People are interested in the post, not in the blog, at least at first. The blog’s name will be the same for every single one of your posts, and if it appears first, people will probably ignore that entry in the search results.

Again, nobody searches for blogs. They search for posts.

Which, of course, suggests that reversing the order is a good idea… and it certainly is. Themes like K2 do it automatically (though that one inserts an “at” between post title and blog name, which I don’t like — though it’s easy to change, of course), and there are also plugins like Optimal Title to do it.

But is this the best we can do? It’s what I’ve been doing until now, but… can we go a little further? What about removing the blog’s name from individual posts (not from the front page, of course)?

Not only should this be better in terms of SEO, but it should make search results more appealing. After all, hopefully, the post’s title should be — and be just — what the user is looking for.

I’m trying it now on Way of the Mind, where I seem to be doing most of my experiments these days. Of course, it will take a few weeks for Google and others to re-index every page and show them with the reduced title, but hopefully the results will be good.

I’m pretty optimistic about this one, so it will probably happen to my other blogs soon.

I finally had some time today to move Way of the Mind (note the new URL) to my Slicehost virtual server. The new WotM Forum is also up, using MyBB, instead of phpBB like my other two. So far, I’m liking it (MyBB) a lot, though it’s a bit weird to have the entire theme inside the MySQL database instead of normal .php or .css files.

Moving the WordPress blog was simply a question of following these instructions. Basically, you go to the WP options in the old blog, change the 2 URL fields to the new address, dump the database, do a search & replace to change any images and other URLs in the database to the new address, import the database to the new server, copy the files, and that’s the proverbial “it”.

As for redirection, there came the eternal dilemma: if you redirect everything, then people will be lazy and keep using the old address (thus wasting your bandwidth); if you don’t, it’s inconvenient, and you lose everything you had in terms of incoming links and SEO.

What I did was to redirect (301, to signify a permanent move) every URL except the front page, which shows a message telling people about the change, and redirects after 5 seconds. I believe that this is the best of both worlds. Any link to an individual post will be redirected transparently, but whoever arrives at the front page will told about the change of address, encouraging them to update their bookmarks.

As usual, get it from the usual place, and follow the instructions if you’re upgrading from a previous version. I’ve just upgraded 11 blogs in about a minute (most of which was spent backing up the databases and the files, in case Something Bad ™ happened).

List of changes here.

Apparently, there’s a new problem when running on a server with FastCGI installed: it may give a 500 error in some cases. If that’s your situation, there’s a workaround.

In a way, this is related to my previous post, Reading blogs away from my computer… because the blogs I most enjoy reading on my cell phone are the “work” blogs, those related to my work (blogging). For some reason, I always find the time and the will to read them when I just have my cell phone and no other means of connecting to the world.

So, I’ve been building a list of such blogs, which includes the usual suspects like ProBlogger, but also some other interesting ones, some of which I discovered just days ago.

The main condition is that they must have full feeds (they’re meant to be read in my phone!). I currently have more than 30 in my list, and I think others will find it as useful as I do – even to add to a “normal”, non-mobile aggregator.

I’ll be posting the list here, soon, in both OPML format (which you can import in any aggregator), and as a list of “./r2e add” commands for rss2email, which I currently use to convert feeds to email, to read on my phone. It still needs a few touches, and I know of some more blogs I want to investigate, first.

By the way, if you (yes, you!) have a related blog (about blogging, writing, monetizing, site promotion, seo, etc.), updated regularly, and with full feeds (this is really essential), feel free to let me know – I may add it to the list, if it’s not already there.

Now that I work at home (and yes, I’ve been incredibly lazy… where are the new posts? ahem… any day now ), I’ve discovered something about myself: I don’t like to read stuff on my computer.

Sure, I do a lot of that, anyway, but, for instance, there are a lot of blogs that I have subscribed in Bloglines… only I usually skip them. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the content of those blogs – I do. I simply tend, repeatedly, to find excuses, other things I’d rather do at the time, and so on. However, I love to read them in other places – in bed, in a café, and so on. Whenever I’m alone, with nothing to do, and away from a computer.

Reading them in a mobile phone or PDA, then, is the logical answer (a laptop is still much too “PC-like”, with all its myriad distractions; when you can do everything, sometimes it’s hard to focus on just what you need to actually do). I currently use a Nokia 6630, which I’ve had for more than a year. I’ve tried several aggregators, and also the mobile Bloglines, which is accessed through a web browser such as Opera, and, while they work well, they’re too slow and cumbersome for my tastes. Therefore, I used a combination of newspipe (to convert posts from feeds to email messages) and Profimail (to access a mailbox through IMAP). Recently, I’ve dumped newspipe for rss2email, for reasons I’ll mention in a future post, and that’s what I have right now.

I’ve been considering other possibilities, though. As I said, a laptop isn’t a good idea here. I’d mostly like something a little bigger than the 6630, with a larger and better screen, and possibly a QWERTY keyboard (to do annotations and so on). The Nokia E61 seems to fit the bill (and it supports Wi-Fi, which would save me a lot of money in phone bills), though I wouldn’t like to spend too much money (after all, it’s mostly a luxury – I can keep using the 6630, or even battle my distaste for reading on the PC). A PocketPC (are they still called that, these days?) PDA might also do the trick, though the ones I saw recently would cost an arm and a leg (really, 800 euros!? what are they thinking?).

So, any suggestions / tips?

Some time ago, I wrote about a way to randomize ads; that is, in a particular position, show one of a number of different ads. With AdSense channels, you can use it to find out which ads (formats, colors, etc.) work better in a particular position.

But now I’m going to take you one step further.

What about randomizing between two positions? Say you want to see if an ad works better on the top or on the bottom of a page. How to show one, and only one of them?

Making the first ad show 50% of the time is easy. The problem, here, is that the second ad must have a way to tell whether the first ad was shown or not.

There are, of course, several ways, most of which using some kind of variable to store if the first ad appeared or not. But I think that there’s a better method, which has the advantage of being incredibly simple, and doesn’t require you to store anything.

It’s simple: use the clock.

If the current hour is even, you show one of the ads. If it’s odd, you show the other. Each of them “knows” whether it should appear or not, according to the current time.

Sounds complicated? It isn’t. For instance, using PHP, in the first position you put:

function isodd($number) { return($number & 1); }
$x = date('G');
if (isodd($x)) include "adsense-top.php";

And in the second position:

function isodd($number) { return($number & 1); }
$x = date('G');
if (!isodd($x)) include "adsense-bottom.php";

The “adsense-top.php” and “adsense-bottom.php” files can be mere AdSense code, or can branch itself further, using something like my original tip.

By the way, I use hours instead of minutes (which would provide better granularity) because I want to avoid, as much as possible, the small possibility of the hour changing in the miliseconds between the two scripts. Using the hour value, it should virtually never happen (never happened to me, so far), though it wouldn’t be the end of the world anyway.

Because it’s so easy to start making money with AdSense and similar services, many less scrupulous people figure that, if they can create thousands – or hundreds of thousands – of pages, and put ads in them, they will probably get some traffic from search engines, which, multiplied by the thousands of pages they have, should make them a lot of money.

Now, how do they get so many pages quickly and without actual work? By stealing content – mostly from feeds. By using some simple scripts to read from hundreds and hundreds of feeds, and generate web pages from them, they can get those hundreds of thousands of pages, almost instantly, and with no real effort at all.

Fortunately, search engines like Google don’t like repeated content, and their algorithms include figuring out which is the “original source” for any particular piece of content. That helps reduce the effectiveness of the “automated content” pages, since Google should always – or almost always – make the original pages appear first, in search results.

Still, there are some things you, as a blogger, can do in order to punish content stealers even more, by making it obvious that 1) their content is stolen, and 2) it’s stolen from you. Here are some possibilities:

1. Link internally – when posting about a particular subject, mention (and link to) a previous, related post of yours. The stealers’ scripts will almost surely keep those links intact. This has other advantages, too, both in terms of SEO, and in terms of making readers stay longer on your blog (see? ).
2. Add a copyright notice – either just in the feed, or in the actual posts as well. For instance, by using Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter Plugin for WordPress, you get such a notice (which includes a link to your blog) added automatically to every post in your feed (though I had to make some changes to the plugin for it to work perfectly with FeedBurner).
3. Provide excerpts only – it helps, surely, by making your feeds useless to content stealers, and can also increase traffic to your blog, as people can no longer read everything you write in their aggregators. However, I think this is “evil”; I don’t read excerpt feeds myself (not practical, IMO), and don’t want to force them on others either; therefore I use full feeds. I won’t be forced by content-stealing scum into crippling my own blogs.

Note that I don’t suggest actually complaining to the content stealers. It probably won’t work (unless you have some lawyers behind you), and it’s probably more trouble than it’s worth.

Using some kind of Apache rules or firewall rules can also work case-by-case, but, again, it’s too much work, and forces you to “chase” the stealers. Besides, you can’t do it if you use FeedBurner.

Myself, I use the first method, and will be adopting the second one as well in the near future (one blog already uses it). With this, it becomes obvious both to readers and to search engines where the articles really come from… and, incidentally, it also makes every stolen post link to me.

Sure, the content stealer could perhaps program their scripts to try to remove copyright messages… but that’s probably more work than they are prepared to do, considering the fact that they probably steal from hundreds of feeds at the same time. It’s only worthwhile for them if then can do all the work automatically… and this makes it harder. Either they will just stop stealing your feeds, or they will ignore it and display your copyright messages and links to your blog in every single post.

Yes, it’s a sequel to How to track the number of your blog posts in graphical form.

I had been using that method to track the number of my blog posts, in this blog and others, for months. But, believe it or not, I only wondered yesterday if it was possible to track comments as well. Talk about being attentive.

The answer was yes, and it was quite trivial: just do a search-and-replace for “posts” to “comments” in all script contents and file names. But… whoa, 4700 comments? That’s almost 5 times as many as the posts I have, and I surely don’t have that many comments.

The explanation is that comments flagged as spam were included. So I had to specify that I only wanted approved comments.

Since we all love to see things for ourselves, here’s my own example.

And now for the scripts themselves:

1- file /etc/mrtg-blogcomments.cfg

WorkDir: /var/www/htdocs/blogcomments
Options[blogcomments]: nopercent,noi,growright,nobanner,nolegend,noinfo,gauge,integer
Refresh: 6000
Target[blogcomments]: `/root/bin/blogcomments.php`
MaxBytes[blogcomments]: 5000
Title[blogcomments]: Blog Comments
PageTop[blogcomments]: <h1>Blog Comments</h1>
XSize[blogcomments]: 500
YSize[blogcomments]: 250
XScale[blogcomments]: 1.4
YScale[blogcomments]: 1.4
YLegend[blogcomments]: comments
ShortLegend[blogcomments]: comments
Legend1[blogcomments]: Blog Comments
Legend3[blogcomments]: Max Comments
LegendI[blogcomments]:  Blog Comments:
LegendO[blogcomments]:  Blog Comments:

2- file /root/bin/blogcomments.php

#!/usr/local/bin/php
<?php
$comments[1] = rtrim (`mysql -s -u blog1user -pblog1pw blog1 -e "select count(*) from wp_comments where comment_approved='1';" `);
$comments[2] = rtrim (`mysql -s -u blog2user -pblog2pw blog2 -e "select count(*) from wp_comments where comment_approved='1';" `);
$comments[3] = rtrim (`mysql -s -u blog3user -pblog3pw blog3 -e "select count(*) from wp_comments where comment_approved='1';" `);
# ...
$total = array_sum ($comments);
print "$total\n";
print "$total\n";
print `uptime`;
print `uname -n`;
?>

NOTE 1: the script is in /root/bin , because it contains the databases’ passwords.
NOTE 2: obviously, you should change blog#user, blog#pw and blog#.
NOTE 3: if there are more blogs, just add the queries at “# …”, in the script

3- in root’s crontab:

*/5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/mrtg /etc/mrtg-blogcomments.cfg

Enjoy.

The goal, here, is to have a graph of your number of total blogs, by time.

To start with, a disclaimer that will surely be ignored: the objective is not to use the number of posts as a measure of a blog’s worth, or as a goal; in other words, quantity before quality! That’s not the point at all – but I’m sure that I’ll be accused of promoting that, anyway. But I just do this for fun.

It can, however, be inspiring – assuming you write interesting, useful, quality posts – to look back and see how many posts you had written, say, 6 months ago, and how many there are now. It can also be helpful to see your blogging tendencies, like “I was too busy that month, so the line stayed flat”.

If, on the other hand, you think that looking at the amount of blog posts will make you write just to see the line go up… forget all this. Easy. I really don’t want to be accused of promoting having the number of posts as a blog’s main goal.

Having said that, here goes nothing…

All of this is for WordPress blogs, and requires you to have shell access to the server, and to be able to query the MySQL database. If you have your blog hosted somewhere, such as WordPress.com, you won’t be able to do this. If you use some other blogging software, this is possible, but the queries will be different, and you’ll have to write them yourself.

I’m assuming that each of your blogs is in a different database. WordPress allows you to use a single database for several blogs, by having different table prefixes, but I prefer having them apart. Once again, if you have a single database, it’s just a matter of adapting the queries.

Obviously, you need to have MRTG installed.

So, finally:

1- file /etc/mrtg-blogposts.cfg

WorkDir: /var/www/htdocs/blogposts
Options[blogposts]: nopercent,noi,growright,nobanner,nolegend,noinfo,gauge,integer
Refresh: 6000
Target[blogposts]: `/root/bin/blogposts.php`
MaxBytes[blogposts]: 5000
Title[blogposts]: Blog Posts
PageTop[blogposts]: <h1>Blog Posts</h1>
XSize[blogposts]: 500
YSize[blogposts]: 250
XScale[blogposts]: 1.4
YScale[blogposts]: 1.4
YLegend[blogposts]: posts
ShortLegend[blogposts]: posts
Legend1[blogposts]: Blog Posts
Legend3[blogposts]: Max Posts
LegendI[blogposts]:  Blog Posts:
LegendO[blogposts]:  Blog Posts:

2- file /root/bin/blogposts.php

#!/usr/local/bin/php
<?php
$posts[1] = rtrim (`mysql -s -u blog1user -pblog1pw blog1 -e 'select count(*) from wp_posts;' `);
$posts[2] = rtrim (`mysql -s -u blog2user -pblog2pw blog2 -e 'select count(*) from wp_posts;' `);
$posts[3] = rtrim (`mysql -s -u blog3user -pblog3pw blog3 -e 'select count(*) from wp_posts;' `);
# ...
$total = array_sum ($posts);
print "$total\n";
print "$total\n";
print `uptime`;
print `uname -n`;
?>

NOTE 1: the script is in /root/bin , because it contains the databases’ passwords.
NOTE 2: obviously, you should change blog#user, blog#pw and blog#.
NOTE 3: if there are more blogs, just add the queries at “# …”, in the script

3- in root’s crontab:

*/5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/mrtg /etc/mrtg-blogposts.cfg

And that’s it. I’m assuming that /var/www/htdocs/blogposts exists, that the web server is making that directory available, and so on.

Most of this blog’s subscribers speak English, and I know how annoying it can be to have a post in your feed reader that you can’t understand. And this post of mine, from “A Arte de Blogar”, doesn’t really make sense for people outside Portugal… at least, I think so. But it should be relevant to the Portuguese readers (and they exist, indeed ); therefore, here’s a link to it: Os Portugueses e a Web.

An excerpt, to whet your appetite (if you do speak Portuguese):

Por outras palavras, Portugal é como uma “selva inexplorada” em termos de SEO, e é facílimo ultrapassar os sites “a sério” em termos de posicionamento nos motores de busca (como disse, acontece frequentemente mesmo sem se tentar). Porque, por cá, ninguém sabe o que é SEO, ou como é que a Web funciona… e nem se quer saber.

So, what was the trouble I mentioned yesterday, which made Google warn me by email?

Apparently, there are some programs for generating traffic and/or clicks artificially, which Google doesn’t like, of course.

This appears to be related to referer spam, which sends a lot of hits with fake referers (such as casino sites), because many people and sites have public statistics, which may mean improved PageRank for the spammer’s site. If they spam thousands of sites this way… it can really make a huge difference.

This new case, however, doesn’t appear to be “true” referer spam, but traffic exchangers or autosurf programs.

For instance, last month the top referers for this blog were:

That’s an image, of course. I would never link to such sites.
Note, by the way, how close the numbers are… can you say “automated”?

I have just blocked those, and others (go here for some tips on doing so with Apache).

It’s quite likely that blog exchangers are considered “bad”, too. And if Google is cracking down on such services, it may be a good time to stop using them (and to edit that part of the series). Most poeople really use them just to surf for credits, though I have been lucky to discover a couple of very interesting blogs, which I read to this day, there.

Have you noticed that most blogs and sites are designed with fixed widths? They’re made as if 640×480 was still the “standard” resolution, and, if the browser window is larger, they don’t adapt.

Most of them look really bad at 1600×1200, with a smallish column in the middle, and most of the screen (assuming you have the browser maximized) being wasted.

What’s odd is that virtually all the successful blogs are this way! Consider ProBlogger, or Steve Pavlina’s blog, or GamePolitics, or most of the blogs at Planeta Asterisco.

It’s incredibly rare to see a blog like Performancing, which looks good at 1600×1200.

But why do most people configure their blogs this way? Is it apathy? Laziness? Because the WordPress and Blogger default themes are like that? Lack of theme editing skills? Is it because everyone else does it that way?

Or do all those people know something I don’t? For instance, has it been proven that people prefer to read blogs that way? Does it make them easier to read? Do they work better in terms of AdSense conversions?

I really don’t know the answer. It can’t be purely technical, as in “most people still surf at low resolutions”, because it’s really easy to write (or edit) a little CSS to make blogs use the entire browser width, and look good both at 800×600 and at 1600×1200.

So… what do you think? Do people do this simply because everyone else does , or is there an actual reason behind it?

Yesterday, I updated my blogs to WordPress 2.0.3, the latest version. Today, when editing one of my comments, I discovered an annoying bug: it added escape characters (backslashes) to all quotes or apostrophes. The only way to get the comment “right” was to copy it to the clipboard, delete it and add it again… which would be even more annoying if it wasn’t the most recent comment. It also added some weird “are you sure?” dialogs when editing comments.

So, I searched around, and there’s a plugin to solve these 2.0.3 annoyances (and which will deactivate itself automatically if the version isn’t 2.0.3). It’s called WordPress 2.0.3 Tuneup, and it fixes:

* #2760 “Are you sure?” dialog for comment editing no longer appears
* #2761 “Are you sure?” dialog no longer adds slashes to info passed through it
* #2764 After editing a comment, you are properly redirected back to your original location
* #2776 New in version 0.2: “Are you sure?” dialog for user editing no longer appears
* #2782 New in version 0.3: “Are you sure?” dialog for link editing no longer appears
* #2806 New in version 0.4: Deletion of links works when JavaScript is turned off

I’m using it now, and it’s working great.