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.

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.

Related posts:

1. Portuguese Blogging tips: writing well
2. New blog: “A Arte de Blogar”
3. WordPress 2.1

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.

Related posts:

1. For the Portuguese-speaking paranoids out there…
2. Tip: give your blog’s readers a way to contact you
3. Portuguese Blogging tips: writing well

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? ]

Related posts:

1. More additions to the PA top Technorati ranks table
2. Adventures with my Technorati ranks "toy"
3. Testing Technorati tags

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?

Related posts:

1. Adventures with moonmoon and tidy
2. Quick HTML page creation
3. Blogging tips #3: Valid HTML

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.

Related posts:

1. More about tidying up HTML
2. Adventures with my Technorati ranks "toy"
3. My Technorati ranks "toy"

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.

Related posts:

1. WordPress 2.0.6 FeedBurner fix
2. WordPress 2.0.5 is out
3. RSS aggregators: alternatives to Bloglines?

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?

Related posts:

1. Blogging tips #20: Using social bookmarking to increase traffic
2. Blogging: more “experiments” with traffic
3. Coming soon: big list of "blogs about blogging" feeds

(also a great name! )

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.

Related posts:

1. For any Portuguese readers…
2. Does belonging to a ‘Planet’ site increase or decrease traffic?
3. Blog moved

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.

Related posts:

1. AWStats fix for Portuguese search engines
2. More updates: Ubuntu, WordPress
3. WordPress quick tip for multi-author blogs

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.

Related posts:

1. The order of titles
2. Blogging tips 4.5: The importance of titles
3. Blogging tips #19: have a “top posts” page

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.

Related posts:

1. The Tlog has moved!
2. Goodbye, Apache; hello, lighttpd!
3. Blogging tips #8.1: Use FeedBurner

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.

Related posts:

1. Blogging tips #7: About RSS / Atom feeds
2. Blogging tips #2.5: Finding stuff to write about using Search Feeds
3. New feeds / Bloglines tutorial

(and yes, I’ve been incredibly lazy… where are the new posts? ahem… any day now )

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?

Related posts:

1. Newspipe
2. A day off from reading blogs?
3. Coming soon: big list of "blogs about blogging" feeds

I thought about calling this part “prevent premature promotion”, but I’m not Stan Lee. Anyway…

“Promotion”, in this case, is adding your blog to search engines and directories, asking friends and other people to link to it, linking to it yourself in your other blogs or sites (if you have any), adding it to sites like Technorati, Blogshares, etc….

And “premature”, of course, means “before the right time”. “What do you mean, right time? Shouldn’t I do everything in my power to promote my new blog, as soon as the blogging equivalent of a “Hello World” program is in there?”, you may ask.

Nope. It’s a bad idea. It’s not the end of the world, but it will harm you in the long run, and may take some time to recover from.

Premature promotion of a blog is the equivalent of newspaper ads for a new store, saying “open now!”, which, when people go there, is still under construction, with a sign saying “opening soon”. Nobody with half a brain would do that, right? (which means that only people who wear ties would do it.)

Think about it this way: anyone who goes to your blog or site and sees nothing of interest there… will probably never come back. That’s a lost visitor. Forever. Someone who could have become a regular visitor if only he or she had come there after there was something interesting to see.

So, when should you promote your site? At least, consider the following:

• The site should have a couple of articles – 5 or more, if possible, but at least a couple of them. And most of them should be actual content, not a “welcome to my blog” message.
• The site should be search-engine friendly. That means, among other things, no broken links, proper HTML, all the site’s sections in working order…
• You should be using the definitive theme, not the original one which “came with the software” (unless that’s the one you’ll be using). “Definitive” doesn’t have to mean that you’ll never change it – just that you won’t change it tomorrow.
• In general, your blog should no longer be “in testing”. If you’re still trying out plugins, enable and disabling features, testing stuff… it’s too early. Finish those tests first.

After all of that, unleash hell! Unless you’re a small child, or a Christian fundamentalist, in which case, unleash heck!

EDIT: An important exception: suppose you have just registered your domain, but the site won’t be “live” for some time; in that case, add it to Google (at least) as soon as the domain is up and you have something there – even a simple “Under construction” page. The reason for this is the Google Sandbox – it usually affects “new” sites, and if Google has known about yours for months, it won’t be seen as “new”. But do all the submitting again when your site goes “live”.

Related posts:

1. Blogging tips #5: Adding your blog to search engines and directories
2. Blogging tips #3: Valid HTML
3. Blogging tips #15: Making money from your blog – AdSense: the competitive filter

AdSense’s competitive ad filter is, as the name suggests, a way to prevent some ads from appearing in your blog/site. While it’s targeted towards companies, especially commercial sites, in order to prevent absurdities such as a Coca Cola ad in Pepsi’s web site , it can also be useful for blogs – even personal ones. There are two reasons for it: one which will apply to some people, and one which should matter to everyone.

• It’s possible that you find some ads offensive, insulting to your site or to your readers, or simply totally in opposition to what you’re trying to say in your site. For instance: an atheism site will probably include words like “religion” and “god”, and those words will attract many religious ads – for churches, faiths, and religious web sites in general. That brilliant piece you wrote denouncing astrology will probably have many ads for horoscope sites around it. A technical article about Firefox and its advantages over Internet Explorer will probably get ads for IE toolbars, IE “optimizers”, IE spyware removers, and so on. It’s likely that you simply don’t want those ads – just like you don’t tend to see “free viagra” ads in the New York Times web site. (at least, I don’t think you do – I don’t visit that site )
• Independently of the above, there’s a more pragmatic reason for preventing some ads from appearing in your site: you want ads to be clicked on! Think about it: what earns you money? It’s not showing the ads, it’s having people click on them! So, naturally, you want them to be relevant, sure, but you also want them to be of interest to your readers. Since they are your readers, it must be because they like the way you write, or because they agree with you, or because they are interested in the subject, or because they find useful information or tips in your blog. Therefore, the banners shouldn’t be in total opposition to what you write. Using an example from above: if you have a blog about atheism, your visitors aren’t likely to click on a banner for “The Holy Church of XXXX”, right? Or maybe you get ads, from time to time, that are obviously hoaxes, and that nobody with half a brain would click on. So, if you can prevent that one banner from appearing, you improve your chances of getting a “clickable” one in that place.

Now, how to use the filter? The AdSense competitive ads page has the following tips, which should be self-explanatory:

Examples:
example.com 			block all ads across all subdomains
sports.example.com 		block only ads across the 'sports' subdomain
sports.example.com/widgets 	block all ads below a specific directory
sports.example.com/index.html 	block all ads for a specific page

But one important thing about this: it’s the URLs that you should type, right? But which ones? AdSense banners tend to have URLs on them, but they may not be (and usually aren’t) the real ones, they’re just there to attract attention. For instance, an ad may say “www.free-spyware-remover.com”, but it may link to a completely different address from that. And it’s that real one that you should add to the competitive ad filter.

How to find it? One way is, indeed, by clicking on the ad yourself. But Google may not like you if you do it too much – especially if always from the same IP address. So, don’t abuse it.

Related posts:

1. Blogging tips #13: Making money from your blog – Adsense: the basics
2. Blogging tips #23: Making money from your blog: Change your ads
3. Blogging tips #12: Making money from your blog – About AdSense

(WARNING: you really should read, at least, #3 – valid HTML and #4 – making your blog search engine-friendly before you do this one)

Now, the fun begins. Your blog is already interesting, you love doing it, its HTML is valid, and its ready for search engines. So, let them come!

To begin with, go to your favorite search engines, look for the “Submit URL” or “Add URL” or “Add Link” or… link, and submit your blog. Sometimes, the links are slightly hidden; for instance, Google’s is here.

This way will eventually work. But it works much better and more quickly if your site is linked from other (already indexed) pages, especially popular ones. (That will also help your PageRank value, but that’s for a future article.). Maybe you already have/control some. Maybe some of your friends have blogs or other web sites of their own. There are other lists where you can add your URL, if its subject is appropriate. Commenting in other related blogs, and including a link to your blog when appropriate (otherwise, it’s spam) can also help.

To put it short: if at all possible, make sure your site is linked from many others. But don’t spam! Not only is that unethical, it can end up being harmful to your site, its popularity and its reputation. Search engines can even unlist your blog because of it. So, don’t just go adding your link to every site or blog you see even though it’s totally unrelated to your blog.

Now, other than search engines, there are also directories. From my experience, you can’t expect a huge amount of traffic from them, but some is better than nothing, right? I’ve included a bunch of them, to which I’ve added my blog, on the right sidebar (visible only on the main page). They are the banners below the Blogshares one. Just go to each one, find the appropriate section, and add your blog. They’re directories, so that’s exactly what they want you to do – a directory is nothing without entries, right? Just make sure, again, that you’re adding your blog to the correct section, and note also that some directories are restricted to a theme (such as technology), so, if your blog doesn’t fit that theme, don’t add it there.

One final note: all of these things can take time. Don’t expect to submit your blog to Google today and start getting visitors from there tomorrow. Even after search engines have indexed your site, they still take time to follow your updates – don’t be surprised if only your older articles seem to receive people coming from search engines. Be patient, they’ll soon catch up.

Related posts:

1. Blogging tips #4: Making your blog search engine-friendly
2. Blogging tips #4.8 – Avoid premature promotion
3. Blogging tips #10: “No blogger is an island”

I’m sure a lot of people won’t think this one is relevant, but my experience says it is.

You know what HTML is, right? Most of you probably do. You don’t have to know it to have a blog, though, especially if you use a service like Blogger or LiveJournal – they mostly take care of the hard work. That’s why blogging is for everyone, not just “computer people”.

Still, it won’t take a lot of time or work to ensure your blog – every part of it – is made of valid HTML. I’ll talk about the advantages of it in a moment.

How to validate it? Well, it just so happens that the World Wide Web Consortium, which develops and maintains all those nice standards like HTML, XHTML and such, has a nice HTML validator. Come on, try it. Just open that link, type the address of your blog in the first box, click on “Check”, and wait a couple of seconds.

If it validated, great! But it probably didn’t, right? Well, check the errors, it usually explains what the problem was. If you use one of those blogging services, they usually have their own parts well coded, so maybe it’s something you wrote, like a malformed link, a tag (like <a> or <p>) you forgot to close, an image link (<img>) without an “alt="something"” description, or possibly some code you copied from a badly designed page (maybe created with FrontPage or some other horror). Correct those if you can – like I said, it’s not a lot of time or work, and, when fixed, it stays fixed. If you really can’t correct some error, ask a more technical friend – if he’s good and cares about doing things right, he’ll beam with pleasure and say something like “I wish more people cared about this, you don’t believe what I have to put up with”.

A tip: a lot of blogging-related sites give you code to put links or banners to them. Some of them are fine, but others give non-validating code. With experience, you can spot them easily. For instance, maybe they don’t put values between quotes (width=50% (wrong) instead of width="50%" (right)). The validator will warn you of those, but you will be able to easily see them by yourself, and fix them, after a while.

Why is this important?

You may say something like my blog shows up fine in my Internet Explorer, so why all this work to fix errors I can’t even see?. Maybe you can’t, but it’s very likely that other people can. People with other browsers like Firefox or Opera, people with other systems like MacOS or Linux. Even the next version of Internet Explorer may be (we can only hope) more demanding about valid code, and then your blog won’t be seen as you intend it to.

Besides, people are increasingly browsing the web with devices other than a PC or a Mac. Cell phones, Blackberries, PDAs, Sony PSPs… and you almost surely can’t test your site on all of those. But respecting standards ensures all of them can display, and navigate around, your site, properly.

If a couple of minutes of work mean that your blog can be seen correctly by 100% of users instead of 85%, why not take the time to do it right?

Also, it’s not just a question of browsers. Your blog will probably have an RSS feed (I’ll talk about those later in this series), and guess what, it’s generated from the HTML code. And those, being in XML, are much stricter – a simple error usually means that feed readers refuse your feed, marking it as invalid.

And search engine bots? Well, they interpret HTML too. Maybe they won’t “eat up” some invalid code that Internet Explorer did.

Lastly (and this one is mostly a personal opinion), you should take pride in whatever you do. Even something you do just for fun. If there’s a right way and a lazy way, choose the right way. Bad HTML is like bad spelling – sure, most people will understand what you meant, but…

Related posts:

1. More about tidying up HTML
2. Blogging tips #8: Configuring the RSS feed
3. Blogging tips #8.1: Use FeedBurner