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Blog moved

Published

2 years ago

in Blogging, Search engine optimization (SEO), Unix / Linux / *BSD software and World Wide Web

. 1 Comment

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.

WordPress 2.0.5 is out

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 1 month ago

in Blogging, Blogging software and Unix / Linux / *BSD software

. 0 Comments

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.

Coming soon: big list of "blogs about blogging" feeds

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 1 month ago

in Blogging

. 0 Comments

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.

Reading blogs away from the computer

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 1 month ago

in Blogging, Email, Mobile phones, Mobile phones software and PDAs

. 8 Comments

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?

AdSense tip: how to randomize ads between 2 positions

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 3 months ago

in AdSense and Blogging

. 1 Comment

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.

How to stop people from stealing your blog’s content

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 3 months ago

in Blogging

. 8 Comments

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:

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? :)).
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).
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.

How to track the number of comments in your blogs

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 3 months ago

in Blogging

. 0 Comments

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:

Continue reading ‘How to track the number of comments in your blogs’

How to track the number of your blog posts in graphical form

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 3 months ago

in Blogging

. 3 Comments

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…

Continue reading ‘How to track the number of your blog posts in graphical form’

The Portuguese and the Web

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 4 months ago

in Blogging, Search engine optimization (SEO), Search engines and World Wide Web

. 0 Comments

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.

Blog widths

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 4 months ago

in Blogging

. 15 Comments

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?

WordPress 2.0.3 and bugs

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 5 months ago

in Blogging and Unix / Linux / *BSD software

. 2 Comments

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.