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!
Tagged as: Blog, Geek, Internet, Wordpress
May
07
When one is surfing the Internet, one does enjoy a way by which to navigate the wild wild Internet. One might see content that is intriguing. One would then want to peruse more of said content. Well one is in luck!
Sphere.com is a site whose goal is connecting people to related content. From their site:
Sphere is a startup from a handful of people passionate about connecting mainstream and conversational media content
Anyways, a little while ago I added a cool Sphere widget to the bottom of each post. Click on it (it won’t redirect you away from the page unless you click again) and you’ll see some (hopefully) related content. And then this site will be just another stone in your stepping. Anyways, hope that this is useful to you!
Tagged as: Blog, Wordpress
May
04
So just to let you know, I made a statistics page available for readers to peruse. It lists general information such as how many posts and how many comments. The most interesting statistic (in my opinion) is the list of the commentors and how many comments they have left. However, I must admit that the commenting seems to be fairly unevenly weighted. Does that make you want to do anything on my posts? 
In any case, check out the “Statistics” page in the navbar.
Tagged as: Blog, Geek, Learn, Programming, Software, Useful, Wordpress
Apr
26
Here is a list of Wordpress plugins that I both use and recommend to anyone who is interested. It’s not exactly a typical setup (but then again what fun what a “normal” setup be?). Even if you don’t have a Wordpress blog, feel free to read the list and find out about some of the software that is powering this blog. Maybe you’ll discover some features that you didn’t know about!
And onward (not in order of preference or importance but rather just so that you can make sure that I have 13). Read the rest of this entry »
Tagged as: Blog, Geek, Learn, Wordpress
Apr
10
Although not exactly new, something that I’ve recently added to my blog is tags. Hopefully you (the reader) will find them useful when looking through my site. These are specified by me each time I write a post, and I am trying to make them as high-level descriptive as possible. I also noticed that while updating the posts written previous to installing Croissanga (which cross-posts snippets of my entries to xanga), they were getting added to xanga as new entries because they were not previously known to Croissanga. Oh well, maybe it’ll give people a chance to re-visit my old entries. I, for one, thought they were interesting.
Read the rest of this entry »