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Dead Programmer’s Blog

Digitivity — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 01:49:00 +0000

Yes, there are snarky programmers’ blogs other than Digitivity. A programmer in NYC has a blog called Dead Programmers’ Cafe at http://www.deadprogrammer.com/. Yeah, he’s written about dead programmers, though that’s not the main focus of the blog, which seems to be interesting or not so interesting stuff happening around New York City.

It’s nice to be able to vicariously experience the city through Dead Programmer, although it’s also nice not to have to deal with trying to run a software firm in NYC.

Autoblogged: Autopost Plugin for WordPress

Digitivity — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 19:46:00 +0000

Posted in Links

http://autoblogged.com

If you’re looking for an autoposting plugin for WordPress, I found one called Autoblogged while research auto-scheduling plugins. It takes RSS feeds as input, and after applying filters and rules you specify, it posts the results as blog entries on your WordPress blog. Related posts:Showing Related Posts in WordPress with the YARPP Plugin to Increase [...] Related posts:

Digitivity’s 201st Article!

admin — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 16:13:44 +0000

Posted in Articles

So this marks 200 articles published on Digitivity. It's come a long way from having to beg Google to come and index the site site. These days, Googlebot visits the site only minutes after a new articles is published, and it's on the Google SERP first page for many queries within minutes after that. So what do you like or not like about Digitivity? What would you like to see in the future? Related posts:

Promote Your Articles with BloggerDen, Digg for Bloggers

Digitivity — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:03:02 +0000

I just found out about a new blog aggregation site called BloggerDen at http://www.bloggerden.com/

It bills itself as Digg for bloggers. As opposed to Digg, which covers general topics with an emphasis on technology, BloggerDen is geared toward blogger-specific issues.

Blogging: Blogging, Writing Tips, Tools, User Interaction, Analytics, Domain Names
Making Money: Making Money, AdSense, Affiliate Programs, PPC, CPM, E-commerce, Banner Ads
Marketing: Marketing, Social Networking, Social Bookmarking, Link Building, Paid Services, Directories
SEO: SEO, Alexa, Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Keywords, Tips & Tricks
Design: DesignWebsite, Design, Graphics, Software, Tutorials, Inspiration, Photography
Development: Development, XHTML/CSS, PHP, JavaScript & Ajax, Databases, .NET
Content Management: Content Management, Blogger, WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, Pligg, DotNetNuke
Offbeat: Offbeat, Technology, Entertainment, Funny, Gaming, Lifestyle, Videos

Unlike Technorati, signup for BloggerDen is dead simple.

All you need to enter is your username, e-mail, and password:

One thing you should do after signing up is upload an avatar image in your profile if one isn’t pulled in based on your e-mail.

Submitting links to BloggerDen

Unlike Digg, it’s OK if you submit your own articles to BloggerDen.

After you submit the URL (which is supposed to be unique in the BloggerDen system):

You then set the tags and add a description:

My comments

Although BloggerDen is a total Digg clone, down to even the header and highlight colors, that’s OK because Digg frowns upon some of the articles that bloggers like to read and share. If they can prevent total spam submissions, I think it’ll be useful.

What do you think?

Feed Errors in CommentLuv: Getting Unbanned

Digitivity — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:11:11 +0000

I encountered a problem a week or so ago with CommentLuv.

Whenever I’d go to comment on another site, CommentLuv would say there’s a feed error, and it wouldn’t let display my last blog post in the comment.

I thought it would go away just by fixing the feed, but it didn’t. Here’s how I finally fixed it.

CommentLuv Feed Errors

It seems that whenever you have three problems with your feed, CommentLuv bans you:

Supposedly, this is based on your IP address and website address combination. CommentLuv then wants you to visit their site to unban yourself, but you can’t do that without being a member. I think this is a kind of a way to get people to sign up. Otherwise, CommentLuv could just:

unban you automatically when you try to comment after your feed is fixed.
unban you when you visit the unban URL.

If they allow you to use CommentLuv without signing up, there’s no reason you should have to sign up to unban your feed. They say “This is done because constant requests to a faulty or non-existant feed will freeze up the server.” But why would CommentLuv make constant requests to a faulty feed? It only contacts the feed when you go to comment on someone’s website.

Anyway, after you do sign up, you need to visit http://comluv.com/member/unban-url/ to remove the ban.

Removing the CommentLuv ban

At the Unban page, CommentLuv asks you to enter the URL of the site that has the bad feed:

After you fix your feed, enter the URL and click Submit, CommentLuv verifies the RSS feed and unbans you:

Ensuring your feed has been fixed

You should make sure your feed has been fixed before you try to unban it.
You can check if your blog is working with ismyblogworking.com.

Another way is to enter the feed URL in Firefox. It’ll parse and display the feed if it’s OK. It it’s not, it’ll give you an XML error.

Check If Your Blog Is Working with ismyblogworking.com

Digitivity — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 17:35:09 +0000

I ran across a neat website the other day that checks your blog (or non-blog website) for a number of problems.

Even if you’ve been diligent in setting up your website, there’ll probably be a few things that ismyblogworking.com can tell you. You just enter your site address, hit Enter, and it gives you a report on your site.

Checking Johnchow.com

For example, let’s take a high-traffic blog, johnchow.com. Even John Chow’s blog has a number of problems.

Slow network speed. It took 2.21 seconds to retrieve the page, whereas it takes about 0.8 seconds for digitivity.org, and some other sites that I frequent.

Gzip compression is off.
Gzip is the name of a kind of compression format. It’s the standard for compressing web pages. The advantage to that is you use much less bandwidth. ismyblogworking.com will tell you exactly how much. For example, digitivity.org is saving 77% of bandwidth using compression. Most dedicated server plans have fixed bandwidth allocations. Even if you have an unlimited bandwidth plan, your site’s visitors can have a faster experience since their browsers have less data to download.

Information shown by ismyblogworking.com

RSS feed: exists or not
RSS feed: speed
Page generation time
Page retrieval time
Robots.txt: allows search engines or not.
Google indexing: number of results
Bing indexing: number of results
Gzip compression: on or off
WordPress version

Even if your blog doesn’t exhibit any major problems, ismyblogworking.com can give you an idea of how your server might be decreasing in speed over time, which would indicate the need for a new server.

Be sure to check out the RSS alert feature which tells you if your blog is working or not. Put the status updates RSS address into your RSS feed reader to be notified when your blog has something wrong with it.

Installing the cbnet Ping Optimizer Plugin for WordPress

Digitivity — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 20:07:07 +0000

The cbnet Ping Optimizer Plugin for WordPress allows you to avoid pinging blog indexing services too often too soon, which could get your blog banned for spammy behavior.

Here’s the step-by-step process for installing the plugin.

Installing the cbnet Ping Optimizer

In the Search box, enter “cbnet ping” and hit “Search Plugins”:

A list of search results of plugins is shown. Select Install for the cbNet Ping Optimizer:

A description window comes up for the cbnet Ping Optimizer. Click on the orange Install link:

WordPress installs the plugin, and informs you that it’s installed. Once the plugin is installed, you have to activate it. Click on the Activate Plugin link to activate it.

WordPress tells you the plugin is activated:

In the list of plugins, there’s a link for the cbnet Plugin Optimizer settings:

However, due to a small typo in version 2.3.2 of the plugin, the settings link from the plugin list doesn’t work. Instead, you should go to WordPress Settings > cbnet Ping Optimizer.

Resources

cbnet Ping Optimizer

Updating Your WordPress Blog Too Frequently: Avoiding Getting Banned from Ping Services

Digitivity — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:49:17 +0000

When you publish a post, WordPress tells a number of blog indexing services about it.

But it also does that every time you update the post, which for me is often five times in 10 minutes after publishing.

If you ping them too many times, they can ban you for spammy behavior.

So, how do you avoid getting banned?

What is a ping?

The word ping was originally used as the name of the Unix utility ping, which tries to contact another computer on the network to see if it’s visible to your computer.

In the blogging world, ping is used to mean your blog contacting a blog indexing service to tell it when you’ve published a post.

WordPress blog pings

By default, WordPress pings rpc.pingomatic.com when you publish a post.

The settings for this are in Settings > Writing > Update Services.

However, and this is key, it also pings when you update the post.

While this is OK if you’ve come back to the post a month or even a week later and added some material that you want indexed, it’s not so good if you’re just changing some minor errors.

What I normally do is proofread a post before publishing it. But no matter how much you proofread, there’s always something you miss. Sometimes I’ve updated a post up to five times after publishing for minor stuff like:

Adding a picture
Changing the alignment of a picture
Bolding a word
Adding a link
Adding a tag

All of this in the space of 10 minutes or so. In that time, the web indexing spider for the blog index may or may not have even come around to visit your site, and you’ve already sent them multiple pings.

Overpinging

It’s like ringing someone’s doorbell over and over again when they’ve already heard you and haven’t reached the door yet. You’re likely to annoy them, and they might just not open the door whereas they would have if you didn’t keep ringing.

As for the blog indexes, they don’t really like over-pinging. Think about it if you were the blog service. You already receive millions of pings per day for legitimate posts. Would you really want to receive twice or 3X or 4X that number for no reason?

That’s why it’s believed that some of these services actually ban you if you ping too often.

cbnet Ping Optimizer WordPress Plugin

Since bare WordPress pings too often, you have to use a plugin to make it work like you want. The best overall plugin I’ve found for that is the cbnet Ping Optimizer.

It’s a fork of the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer, with the difference being that you don’t have to sign up for their e-mail newsletter to get the plugin.

After installing the plugin, go to the settings in Settings > cbnet Ping Optimizer.

Note: Don’t click on the “settings” link in the Installed Plugin list. That doesn’t work in version 2.3.2 of the plugin.

I checked the “Limit excessive pinging in short time” option and set the time to 15 minutes and click Save Settings:

You can set the blog index services to be pinged either in cbnet Ping’s settings or in WordPress’s own settings at Settings > Writing. On the backend, it’s the same setting shared between the two of them.

Ping log

Another advantage of cbnet Ping Optimizer besides avoiding excessive pinging is the ping log. It tells you when WordPress pinged a blog index, and when it didn’t (i.e., you updated a post in quick succession, but the blog index wasn’t sent a ping due to the settings):

Other WordPress Ping Plugins

There are some other ping plugins for WordPress, but they’re not as fit for the purpose or accessible as cbnet Ping Optimizer.

Smart Update Pinger v2.00

This plugin by Christian Davn is discontinued according to various blog posts.

I can’t find an original source for it, and it’s basically abandoned at this point.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

This is a ping plugin that works with the latest WordPress’s, but you have to register your e-mail to get the plugin. The plugin itself is free and open source under GNU GPL.

Ultimate Plugins Smart Update Pinger

This is also a ping plugin that works with the latest WordPress versions, but you have to register your e-mail to get the plugin.

There’s a Ping Watcher and Ping List Checker plugin too, but they don’t do what the other ping plugins do.

Resources

cbnet Ping Optimizer

How to Claim Your Blog on Technorati

Digitivity — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 17:29:14 +0000

Once you’ve signed up for a Technorati account, you should claim your blog.

Claiming your blog allows you to use Technorati tags to drive traffic to your blog from Technorati, which is the biggest blog search engine and aggregation site on the Internet.

Before Technorati associates a given blog on the Internet with your Technorati account, it needs to verify that that blog is under your control. It does this by giving you a unique code, and asking you to use that code within a blog post.

Once you post the code, you tell Technorati to check your blog.

Claiming Your Blog

After you’ve signed up for an account at http://technorati.com/account/signup/ , go to your Technorati account profile at http://technorati.com/account/ and

Click on “Claim a blog” and enter your blog address (with the http://).

Technorati tells you that it’ll send you an e-mail with blog claim instructions:

Claim Technorati Blog: Claim Status

In my case it was about 15 minutes before I received the e-mail.

The e-mail tells you to use a specific code and also check your account profile for more info:

Claim Technorati Blog: Claim E-mail

When you go to your Technorati account profile for more information, click on “Check Claim“.

You’re shown your blog’s claim status:

Claim Technorati Blog: Blog Claim Status (2)

Here’s what it says

Technorati will need to verify that you are an author of the blog by looking for a unique code. Please put the following short code MFD767KGRM88 within a new blog post and publish it

All this means is that you need need to have the claim code in the text of your blog entry. For me, I’ve already done that since the code is quoted above.

After you’ve published the blog entry with the claim code, go back to the claim status page and click the Verify Claim Token button.

Claim Technorati Blog: Verify Claim

Technorati then goes to your web site and verifies your claim token.

Showing Related Posts in WordPress with the YARPP Plugin to Increase Pageviews

Digitivity — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 15:23:34 +0000

Want a quick way to double your pageviews?

When a reader comes to the end of a blog entry, do you want him to leave your site? Or view another article?

Chances are, if he was interested enough in the current post to open it up, he’s likely to be interested in other posts on the same subject. But people are naturally lazy. They won’t be bothered to search through your archives on the off chance that there might be a similar article that you wrote before.

Much better to simply show your reader a list show a list of posts that are related to a given post. It’s too hard and time-consuming to manually come up with a list, though. Not to mention the fact that your archive of articles is constantly changing.

The Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

So it’s much easier (and better) to use a plugin for this purpose. There are a number of related posts plugins, but I wanted one which:

Is easy to use. One related posts plugin actually requires manual database updates.
Is used by a lot of people. (The more popular a plugin is, the more likely it is to be updated and not abandoned.)
Doesn’t require any changes to your template.
Customizable.

YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin) fits the bill here. You can use it simply by installing it. You don’t have to do anything else (although you can for customization).

In this post, I’ll walk through a simple installation of YARPP, and some light customization.

Installing YARPP

YARPP installs like any other WordPress plugin hosted on wordpress.org. Just go to your administration panel, search for YARPP, click to install.

YARP works by matching post titles, body text, tags, and categories.

If you look at a post to check out YARPP working, you’ll likely see some numbers by the post titles:

WordPress YARPP Default View

These are the match scores (the degree of relatedness between the current post and the related post). These are only show if the logged-in user is an administrator. Your readers won’t see them.

Customizing YARPP

YARPP works right out of the box, and if you don’t want to anything more, you don’t have to.

But you can also

Disallow posts from certain categories or tags from being shown in the related list
Show only posts no older than a specified number of months
Increase or decrease the weight given to post titles, body text, tags, and categories in matching one post to another.
Show or not show related posts for the main site, and again for your RSS feed.
Show or not show a small excerpt of the related articles
Use a custom template file for the related posts list

One thing that I did change was the default HTML that wraps the related posts list.

By default, it is:

Related posts:
<ol>ol>

The default “Related posts” text looks too small for the reader to even notice.

I changed it (i.e., the text right after “Before / after related entries display:”)

WordPress YARPP Wrap Options

to:

<h2>Related posts:h2>
<ol>ol>

This makes the “Related posts” into a level 2 heading (H2), big enough to grab the reader’s attention:

WordPress YARPP H2 Heading

Check out the changes

Log out and view a couple of your posts the way readers will:

WordPress YARPP Related Posts as the User Sees Them

If your option changes don’t work:

Be sure you’ve saved changes
Be sure you’re changing the options for website articles, not for RSS.

You should notice the results right away.

Whereas before, people would come to the blog, read an article, and go away, I’ve noticed that now, they will often click one or even two related articles. The rate at which people leave your site after coming to it is called your bounce rate, and you should see it drop.

Resources

YARPP

http://techie-buzz.com/wordpress/yarpp-best-related-posts-plugin-for-wordpress.html

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/wordpress-plugin-related-posts/

http://epicalex.com/yarpp-templates/