I’m suffering from a little bout of writer’s block these days. When you combine that with the fact that I haven’t been cruising the ‘net finding new and funny things, it makes for a dearth of new content on this site. I was thinking that it would be cool to display a single post from the archives at the top of the home page when there’s nothing new to see. Something like, “Hey! Sorry I haven’t posted anything new in x days, but check out this from y years ago …” I got as far as writing the SQL for it, but then I stopped working on it. I think it’s a good idea, though. Maybe someone will decide to write a plugin to do this. (Or, more likely, someone already has and I am just too lazy to find it.)

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I installed Akismet here at the beginning of the Fall of 2006. I really don’t know how I lived without it. I emptied the queue about seven hours ago, and when I got to the office this morning there were already almost 1500 comments, pingbacks, and trackbacks flagged as spam.

Akismet has protected your site from 380,243 spam comments already, and there are 1,471 comments in your spam queue right now.

I was very happy to see that the WordPress developers included the ability to “tag” posts. For a long time I’ve been using my own bastardized version of Bunny’s Technorati Tags to add tags to this site. A few days ago I decided to bite the bullet and convert to using the tag system that is now baked into this CMS.

Here’s my only problem: The standard WordPress tagging engine is designed so that clicking a tag on a post displays an archives page with all of the other posts tagged with that tag. (Confused yet?) I don’t like that. One reason I don’t like that is because I have not yet managed to transfer all of my tags from the old system to the new, so lots and lots of my posts have no tags. That means if you click a tag for “ovulating kleptomaniac”, for example, you’re not going to get any results. So I have hornswaggled the code a bit to make it so that on this site the tags link to search results for that tag instead. I think it’s a much more “visitor friendly” implementation of tagging.
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The original Plaxo is a little address-book organizing tool that I had always liked quite a bit. It’s got an Outlook plug-in which lets it sit in there and pay attention to the email addresses of people who email me and the people I email. There’s some global information superhighway sort of thing out there that it uses to synchronize these email addresses with everyone’s profiles, so my address book has — for many years now — been more or less up to date. It’s cool.

But now, however, I am having second thoughts about this seemingly-innocent little company.

They’ve started a new Web 2.0-type program called Plaxo Pulse. (It’s in beta.) Plaxo Pulse is sorta-kinda a good idea. It traipses through your address book and emails people to tell them whenever you do something on the tubes. I am now being barraged with emails telling me every time any of my friends post a blog entry, change their cell number, move, post a photo somewhere, etc. I can only assume that the people who consider me a friend (and who use Plaxo) are receiving the same barrage.

That in itself is not so evil. The creators of Plaxo Pulse were wise enough to allow me to disable these email alerts.

Here is why this is evil, and why people should be getting angry: (1) Plaxo Pulse uses blog RSS feeds to import a user’s blog posts into itself and (2) Plaxo Pulse steals blog comments.

1. Plaxo Pulse uses blog RSS feeds to import a user’s blog posts into itself.

   That means every time I post a blog entry, the entry appear here on my blog (as it should!) and it appears again on the Plaxo Pulse site. This is bad. For years and years there has been a great debate over how Google feels about “duplicate content”. Most people feel that Google penalizes content which exists simultaneously in two places. Whether you believe in the Google “duplicate content penalty” is irrelevant. Google may very well not explicitly penalize one site for plagiarizing another, but there is definitely some sort of effect. Let’s say I write the world’s most brilliant post on the topic of swimming pyromaniacs. There are probably not a lot of other people writing about this. My website would theoretically start to rank highly in Google SERPs whenever someone searches for wet fire-lovers.
   Now let’s imagine that eventually lots of people start talking about swimming pyromaniacs. When other people post blogs about it, they naturally give me credit for exposing this insane practice by linking back to my site. My website receives a SERP ranking “boost” because it is receiving inbound links from other websites mentioning the same topic. (I also — again, theoretically — receive a “boost” because of the age of my post on the topic — I talked about it first — and because of the general popularity of my site.)
   I have advertisements on my site. I get paid when people click these ads. I have a vested interest in ranking highly in Google SERPs.
   But now the exact same content I posted about swimming pyromaniacs is appearing on the Plaxo Pulse website. Plaxo Pulse is a huge website with hundreds of thousands of pages and is growing like kudzu. Plaxo itself is tremendously popular, much more than David Gagne. It is very, very likely that the content I wrote which now appears on the Plaxo Pulse website will rank higher in Google SERPs than that same content on my davidgagne.net website. (When someone searches for swimming pyromaniacs in Google, the Plaxo Pulse link is going to appear higher than the davidgagne.net link.) The huddled masses tend to click what’s at the top in Google. That means that my ad will not be seen. That’s bad for me.

2. Plaxo Pulse steals blog comments.

   Even more nefarious is the fact that the blog entry which appears on the Plaxo Pulse website allows visitors to post comments to it. These comments are not posted to my site. They appear on Plaxo Pulse. This is wrong on so many levels. If I don’t ever check Plaxo Pulse (and, presumably, if I have all my Plaxo Pulse email notifications disabled) I will never know that someone commented on my eloquent dissertation on swimming pyromaniacs. If enough people post comments to the Plaxo Post plagiarization of my writing, it will most definitely appear to be more popular (as far as Google is concerned) than my original essay. In fact there will likely be people that read and comment on swimming pyromaniacs at Plaxo Pulse who don’t even know that davidgagne.net exists, much less that it / I was the author of the topic.

Here is an example:
My friend Bob has a website called Numenware. On January 1^st he posted a blog entry about an esoteric math news item. Bob’s original post is here. Bob’s content is plagiarized verbatim on Plaxo Pulse here. A savvy reader will note that someone named David Fotland has posted a comment to Bob’s blog entry at Plaxo Pulse. This comment was “stolen” by Plaxo. It does not appear on Numenware where it should. If I was Bob I would be quite peeved about this.

A day or two ago I was pinged by a co-worker from my previous job. He wanted to know why, during its recent redesign, I didn’t include keywords in the URLs of the pages on a site I originally built a long, long time ago. I told him that there was no concrete evidence anywhere to support the theory that search engines give any weight to keywords in URLs. He then pointed me to an article at Search Engine Land that begins by stating that, “Keywords in the URL can help rankings,” and, “Hyphens are better than underscores when separating multiple words.”

First I noted that I don’t include keywords on this site, either, and it’s been doing just fine. Then I argued that I find it very, very hard to believe that Google (or any other search engine) has some sort of negative bias against the underscore character but that hyphens are just fine. So basically I completely disagree with the single piece of actual “advice” in the article.

Am I saying that it is wrong to include keywords in your URLs? No. I don’t think that at all. I just don’t think you should be stuffing keywords into your URLs in an effort to boost your pages’ rankings in search engine result pages. It makes great sense to use words in your URLs if you’re doing it to improve the usability of your site or to make it easier for people to link to your site. Unfortunately most site designers and blog engines — WordPress included — fail to effectively do this.

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A few weeks ago a friend of mine asked me to build a WordPress plugin to display a Gunning-Fog analysis on his blog. The math part was pretty easy stuff. I was having a borch of a time getting the plugin to count syllables, so I hunted through Google and found someone else had written a pretty good function to do that. I squished it all together and it seems to be working pretty good.

You can download the plugin here and see it in action here.

Since I installed it 143 days ago, Akismet has killed 23,683 spam comments on this blog. That’s an absurd 165 pieces of spam per day. And the number is definitely increasing daily at what I consider an astronomical rate. I have no doubt that in the time it takes me to write this post I will have earned another dozen. What’s amazing is that I’ve only encountered 3 “false positives” in all that time. (A “false positive” is a valid comment that Akismet incorrectly identifies as spam.) I am quickly approaching the point where I no longer even bother to review any of what Akismet catches. Be warned: If you’re daring enough to mention a drug for erectile dysfunction, any possible gambling topic, or any type of less-than-conservative sexual practices in a comment to my blog, you can safely assume that I won’t see it because Akismet is going to just kill it for me.

Update: As of 03/27/2008 the number is over 370,000.

According to the tag help page at Technorati, all you have to do to have their system “find” your tags is (1) add a rel=”tag” parameter to your links and (2) make sure those links end with the word you are tagging (e.g. something.com/tag). The first part is simple. The second part is easy, but not very practical. More importantly, though, is the fact that neither of these seem to actually work. As far as I can tell Technorati does not read your entire post and strip any tags it finds. In fact it seems that Technorati only reads your RSS and analyzes that to determine how to tag your posts. That’s okay, though, because I can tell you how to convert your WordPress tags into rss category nodes so that Technorati indexes them.

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A little while ago I cobbled together a tagging system here on the site. The tags appear at the bottom of each post and you can use them to find related content. For some reason, though, they aren’t being caught by Technorati. I’m pretty sure I followed their specs exactly, but no dice. Every time I checked, the only tags that would display for a post in their summary were the categories associated with an entry.

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I have been planning to add an “About” page to this site for about four years. Everybody who’s anybody has an “About” page. People who visit and know not what a blog is must wonder what this site is “About”. I just never seem to get around to it. I have no idea what this site is “About”. And every time I take a crack at it I can never seem to be as pithy as all the other great “About” pages I’ve seen on blogs over the years.

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This domain of mine has had stuff on it for a long, long time — before WordPress or MovableType or even Blogger. The original davidgagne.net is, sadly, lost forever. Some pieces of it have been kicking around on my various hard drives and FTP locations for a decade now.

One file that I could never seem to bring myself to delete was an ancient hand-coded HTML <TABLE> listing of a bunch of important events in my life. A few friends of mine actually built a company based on the idea. It was called “ShareTimelines.com”, had a magnificent interface, was all webbed up, and the site — last I checked — is completely dead. I wanted to have that timeline on this site again. I hadn’t updated it in years and years, and I would rather poke hot needles in my eyes than sit and hand-code a bunch of <td>s all day. “It should all be in a database, of course,” I said to myself. “And I should be able to edit it right in the WordPress Administrator, too. And seriously it should be written so that I can just give other people the ability to add timelines like that to their own sites.” ( I should stop talking to myself.)

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If you’re wondering why BlogRolling.com never seems to show your site as recently-updated, it’s likely because you’re not pinging it. I’ve been using the BlogRolling sidebar for years and just yesterday I noticed that my own site never seems to appear near the top of the list. MovableType was apparently pinging the BlogRolling servers, but WordPress by default does not. To make sure your blog is pinging the BlogRolling servers, make sure to add http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/ to the “Update Services” list on the “Writing” tab of the “Options” panel.

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Tags! They’re everywhere! It seems like every site on the ‘net is adding tagging now. Tag clouds — ridiculous, pointless, and annoying — are not the reason. Tagging is a good way to get into Technorati and a good way to get more traffic to your site. It’s a nifty way to organize your posts and to help your readers find what they want on your site. Is it the wave of the future? I don’t know. I don’t think so. Several of the early adopters are now saying that they are useless, and the search engines seemed to be doing a fair job of indexing blogs long before people got tag-happy. But it’s not exactly terribly painful to add this functionality to your site — it only took me about a half hour, so how hard could it be? Plus you’ve got me to explain it all to you.

This how-to assumes that you’re using WordPress to manage your blog. If you are using something else — blogger, MovableType, etc. — then you’ll have to look somewhere else. Technorati is a good place to start.

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Although I can appreciate that it’s a really nifty feature, I am likely never going to use the built-in File Upload feature in WordPress. What has bugged me is that it’s in an IFRAME in the Write Post panel; I think it slows the page load. I was trying to get rid of it, but the best I could find was the Clutter Free plugin from Tempus Fugit. It’s a great plugin, but unfortunately it doesn’t really remove the IFRAME, it just hides it.

So. I dug around in the code and did it myself. If you aren’t the file-uploadin’ type, you only need to change a few lines to prevent the File Upload widget from appearing on your Write Post panel. Open wp-admin/edit-form-advanced.php and look for the line containing $uploading_iframe_ID. It’s near or around line 223. There are a few different ways you can handle removing this.

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I have finally updated two of my WordPress hack tutorials so that they are compliant with v. 2.04.

The first one — DropCaps — allows you to put that nifty “dropcap” into a post. This post begins with a dropcap I.

The second one — Amazon Tags — adds two new buttons to your editing screen. They allow you to link directly to an Amazon item by its ASIN or to add a link to an Amazon search.

The second one includes a link to a zipped copy. You can just extract quicktags.js into your wp-includes/js folder and the images into your wp-images folder and you’re set.

Happy WordPress modding!