Clicks and Bits » Blog

Keep on Keepin’ On

sh2 — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 16:07:44 +0000

Keeping track of my writing:

Huskerzone: Husker Basketball Posts Nine Straight Wins
The much maligned Husker Basketball Team cruising in preseason, getting ready to flop in conference play. (post actually written on the 3rd, but back dated to keep football at the top o’the blog. Will adjust shortly.

Tumblr: sh2.tumblr.com
Working towards one of my New Year’s Resolutions, I started taking a picture of every meal. That stream of photos is going on my neglected Tumblr page. Multiple updates daily.

Currently Reading:
Medium Raw (Anthony Bourdain)
Listened to the audio book when it came out, reading the print edition now.

4-Hour Body (Tim Ferriss)
Slow-carbing it for weight loss. Good jump around book, not a read cover-to-cover book.

Oregon Beer, Coffee, Wine, Spirits and more…

sh2 — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 18:20:12 +0000

Friend of Clicks and Bits, and partner in numerous other ventures, David Burn, recently launched Liquid Oregon, a blog/resource for all kinds of tasty beverages flowing out of the craft drink mecca of Oregon.

Subtitled, “It’s in the water,” is an apt description of what appears to be an over-abundance of the craft trade. Numerous craft breweries, premier coffee roasters, and a valley producing some of the finest wines in the country. Something is clearly happening in the water.

David’s description of the site is “Liquid Oregon is dedicated to the promotion of locally-produced coffee, wine, beer, micro-distilled spirits, drinking vinegars and artisan sodas.” I think he is underselling, you are also getting a master narrative from a fine wordsmith.

Give him a visit and spread the love: http://www.liquidoregon.com/

Mark Cuban’s Keynote at BlogWorld

sh2 — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 22:30:41 +0000

All 1 hour and 13 minutes of Mark Cuban’s Keynot at BlogWorld. For the unaware, Mark blogs at BlogMaverick.com

PayPerPost acquires Performancing

sh2 — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 16:28:30 +0000

Interesting. PayPerPost buys select assets of Performancing.

Reading further, the deal does not include the Firefox Blog Editor or the Ad Technology, but was primarily for Performancing Metrics – a stat analysis package – and Performancing Exchange – essentially a classified section for bloggers.

I wasn’t overly impressed with Metrics, mainly because I’m more comfortable within my custom-tuned tool-set. As for the Exchange, I can’t say I’ve been there in a while, but it makes sense for the audience PayPerPost is trying to reach.

As for the general implications of PayPerPost, everyone is trying to monetize the blog space but I’m not really in favor of a clearing house approach to paid promotional posts. On a number of sites I’m involved with, we accept advertorials, but we find the opportunities and negotiate directly. Typically they provide more impact for the advertiser at a better price and are more in tune with the blog’s audience. And, we adhere to strict labeling policy indicating all paid advertorials.

WordPress Blogs and Google’s Supplemental Index

sh2 — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 17:42:57 +0000

It seems that WordPress-based blogs have a tendency to be dropped into Google’s Supplemental Index pretty quickly. The general consensus is that this is due to the duplication of content present within WordPress. A typical installation will generate a minimum of five instances of a post – more if the post is identified in multiple categories.

To alleviate the problem, include the following Javascript in which ever template contains your tag information:

';
} else {
echo '';
}?>

You may also want to block the Googlebot from your Feeds as well. Add the following to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/trackback/$

Poisioning your RSS feed for Splogs

sh2 — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 18:27:45 +0000

One of the sites I write for regularly has a rather large visitor base, 5k daily uniques to the site and over 2k rss feed subscribers. We’ve always published a full article feed for the convenience of our readers but in the last year we have constantly battled splogs – spam blogs who exist only to aggregate others’ feeds for monetization purposes.

We’ve experimented with few different tactics, but lately have settled on “poisoning” the feed with blatant copyright information with links back to our site and requests to inform us if they find our feed on a non-approved site:

© 2006 thesiteinquestion.com. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at may be guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@thesiteinquestion.com so we can take the appropriate legal action.

While it may be a minor inconvenience to our subscribers reading our feed in their own feed reader, it amounts to 2-3 lines of text following some white space at the end of each post and should be fairly unobtrusive.

Another tactic we’ve tried in the past is stuffing hidden links in our feed. Taking a page out of the link-spamming technique of including a hidded div and creating keyword rich links to domains that feed into affiliate programs. While this was highly successful in creating backlinks to sites (blackhat SEO Tip to think about), many of the web-based feed readers were running into display problems with the hidden div (namely bloglines.com). We’ve since discontinued the practice until we can perfect a way to avoid the display issues.

I hate splogs.

My Usual WordPress Plugins

sh2 — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 17:21:28 +0000

A friend asked me what WordPress Plugin I use in a typical install. For your enjoyment:

Feedburner Plugin
Feedburner Feed Replacement which forwards all feed traffic to your Feedburner feed without the need to mess with your .htaccess file.

Google Sitemaps
Now that Yahoo and MSN have agreed to start using the XML-based sitemap structure implemented by Google, most sites will benefit from creating a Sitemap file.

WordPress Database Backup
Included in the default installation of 2.x and up. Backup, Backup, Backup. I run nightly backups of all the WordPress-based sites I’m involved with and dump them to a dedicated gmail account.

Optimal Title
If you have any interest in getting traffic to your site from search engines, use Optimal Title. Google has a nasty habit of dropping pages from a basic WordPress installation into their supplemental index because of the way WordPress titles pages. Using Optimal Title to list the entry title followed by the blog name is one way to avoid the supplemental mess.

Spam Karma 2
There are Akismet fans and Spam Karma fans. Spam Karma is more than adequate for the sites I’m involved with. Akismet is included by default and the ultra-paranoid will have no problems running both together.

Statcounter for WordPress
Statcounter for WP drops the Statcounter tracking code in the footer of all pages in your site. Best of all, it is a text box-based append so you could also use this to add whatever tracking program you use – not just Statcounter.

Related Entries
Related Entries encourages stickiness by adding related links to previous entries in your posts.

Ultimate Tag Warrior
UTW is the “multi-headed hydra of a plugin.” Tags have become ever so popular and with UTW you can tag your entries, keep things organized, or include the AJAXy search box which is also included.

There are few others I use a on regular basis, but the above represent my most often used. Your mileage may vary.