- 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.
Archive for the 'Blogging' Category
… 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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
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.
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