Tagged as: Blog, Geek, Wordpress
Jun
12
I’ve made a sitemap (which is, if the name doesn’t already indicate, a map of this entire website). It includes links to every page available on my site! The purpose of this is to allow search engine ‘bots (computers that “crawl” through the Internet so that pages can be found through their search engine) to be aware of all of my pages. I’m using the Google Sitemaps plugin which will automatically update the sitemap every time I update or create a post. I’m also using the Google Sitemap - append Tags plugin in order to add the tag pages (where you can see all of the posts with that a tag) to the sitemap.
I think that it’s cool, although I’m looking for a better way to order it. It seems like it should be ordered based on the number of comments because that’s what I set the option for.
Hmm I just installed the Popularity Contest plugin to see if I could use that in order to calculate how to order the sitemap.
And now I just easily set it to calculate the priority based on the Popularity Contest plugin! It uses a priority that is calculated using view count, comments, pingbacks (links to), etc. I also just realized that the sitemap is just ordered by having the most recently changed posts at the top. I suppose that this makes some sense since it is for updating the index of the ‘bot that is crawling it. There is no sense in updating the index of a page that is unchanged.
Okay so basically, now you can browse through and check out posts based on their priority. I just recently made a Favorite Posts page, but I’m not sure if I should still keep it. Feedback, as usual, is welcome!
Tagged as: Blog
Jun
07
Well not that I don’t like all of my posts. Because I do. Otherwise I wouldn’t post it! But I think that an especially good idea was for me to make a static page of some of my even more favorite posts. Find the page at Favorite Posts where there is a link and a short description of the post. So go on. Visit it. Tell your friends. Tell the world. I’m sure they’re all dying to know how to go the wong way. 
Tagged as: Amusing, Blog, Internet
May
22
So another advantage to hosting my own blog (okay it’s not just limited to hosting yourself) in addition to other costs and benefits of running your own server is that you get to see statistics. You can install any type of tracking system. I personally am using Statcounter and Google Analytics, but there are a plethora of options out there.
In any case I’d like to share what some amusing searches on my site have been:
- pastor “Derek Wong” - Say whaaatt? Haha
- siafu ant - One would think that I would get no hits on the Siafu Ants since there are other much more reputable sources than my blog on a species of ant. Oh well.
- tweedle dee tweedle dumb - Apparently nobody writes about Alice in Wonderland anymore.
- how to use gimp to make a passport photo - I would guess that someone could arrive at my site on this because it’s a pretty specific topic that I wrote a post about.
- Jennifer Shih facebook - Now that’s just strange. Quit it stalker kids. Or rather, quit it stalker boys.
- amazing gross photos - I think that’s awesome that they could arrive at my site on these keywords! Of course I probably disappoint because I don’t exactly have amazingly gross photos.
- wong way poet - That seems pretty specific to me. You’d think that they could just remember “goingthewongway” if they can already remember “wong way.” Or maybe there is just some poet out there named wong who is writing about the way. I bet he wants my domain name.
- california dmv temporary-operating-permit - I’m very happy that I can provide the answer to this. I know that I would have wanted to happen upon the answer in a quick search!
Okay that is just a taste. And considering that some of these searches are old, I make no guarantees that you will still find me indexed for these keywords. I just wanted to share how amusing it is for me to see these things.
Tagged as: Blog, Internet, Learn
May
15
There is a cost to running your own web server. I’m not talking about the actual monetary cost, although there definitely is some of that.
I’m talking about the down time and lack of production-level reliability. I just got my Internet connection back up after being down nearly the entire day! I had checked the status in the morning, and it was working. However, when I got to work I couldn’t access it. “Oh great,” I thought.
So basically I just lost a day of traffic, readership, etc. Great, that just stinks. You know I wonder what my uptime percentage is. I was thinking about it today as a result of not having it available, and I am positive that I am up more than 9 days out of 10. However, I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t claim more than 95%. Oh well.
Anyways, I think that the benefits to running my own web server outweigh the cost. Let me share what I think some of them are.
- Learn more about how the Internet works by becoming more than a user, become a cog.
- Know exactly where all of your data is stored
- Don’t have to pay for hosting costs (okay, okay there is the electricity to run the computer which is definitely something. But you’re not getting charged 15 bucks a month like you normally would be.
- Learn interesting server-related things such as configuring Apache. This is especially interesting for those who have a professional interest in computers I think.
Is it worth it to you? I don’t even know what the percentages are of people who run their own server. I actually don’t know too many people that do. Of course I guess that speaks more about the people that I know than what is actually going on. In any case, sorry for the downtime, and I’m back (for now).
Tagged as: Blog, Geek, Learn, Read-It, Useful, Wordpress
May
10
While reading Rory’s post on hamelife.com (which I enjoyed because it was very interesting plus my blog got a mention!) I continued surfing and happened upon this post about nofollow links.
I doubt that many of you would want to read the wikipedia article explaining what I’m talking about so I will briefly explain. Search engines (Google among them) have an algorithm that uses the amount of links to your website as a part of how to determine the important of your website (this is called your PageRank in the end). This is, in part, what is used to determine how high you are when searches are done.
However to combat people abusing the system, they started to allow you to add an attribute relationship in the links like
<a
href=”http://www.goingthewongway.com/” rel=”nofollow”>goingthewongway<a>
This would then be disregarded in the algorithm to calculate your PageRank. The bottom line is that any links that have that attribute are worth nothing for search engines.
Why is this important?
As a blogger, being read is what’s important! Search engines allow your site to be listed as “more relevant” which could allow more people to find your site and read your content. I don’t write on this blog to understand myself. I write because I like to share my thoughts and get feedback from others. So after reading the article and thinking about it myself, I realized that it definitely encourages more feedback if commenters can get something back. The big popular sites like to do fancy giveaways, but I’m not a big popular site. However, I realized that the least that I could do would be to give anyone who commented a backlink! This helps them because it ever so minutely increases their importance in the eyes of the search engine. And it would hopefully help commenters to have another incentive to leave their thoughts.
Anyways suffice to say I installed the ever so easy to use DoFollow plugin for Wordpress which removes the nofollow attribute for all user-input links (like the website that you list when you leave a comment). Happy nofollow commenting!