I’m switching from SK2 to Akismet on some of my Wordpress sites. Anything I should know about it?
On some of my sites, I wanted the ability to force first time commenters to go through moderation, and SK2 overrides this function in Wordpress. Akismet doesn’t, and as far as I can tell it’s working very well [...]

Posted in Tools No Comments »

I’ve created some advertising options on this site that do not pass pagerank. This post is both an announcement to potential advertisers and, for my usual readers, a log of what I’m doing so we can see if it works.
Basically, I’ve set up four 125 x 125 banner zones, all no-followed in the [...]

Posted in Ad Networks 4 Comments »

I finally realized this week why text link ads suck: because a certain search engine trashed them.
Once upon a time, before anything like the search engines we know now existed, text links were how you let people know of other relevant sites. It was a system that kind of policed itself: you put up a [...]

Posted in SEO 3 Comments »

I was mistaken when I reported my monthly earnings had dropped from $424 in September to $401 in October, and that the drop was caused by BlogHer. It turns out the chart where you read your BlogHer earnings had just gotten more confusing, and I was reading them wrong. My October earnings were $419, and [...]

Posted in Ad Networks No Comments »

Once upon a time, there were employers sharing an office building. Everyone knew they offered the best pay in town for their jobs, so everyone went to all three to see what offers they could get.
Sadly, one of the employers - we’ll call them Fooble - owned all the parking lot surrounding the building. There [...]

Posted in The BS Files 2 Comments »

I’ve been checking my sites on Bad Neighborhood this morning. It’s a pretty useful tool. So far I’ve discovered that some of my theme designers’ home pages have hidden links to pharmaceutical and porn pages, which means I was indirectly linking to those.
It tends to err on the side of caution - for example, a [...]

Posted in Tools 1 Comment »

Okay, yeah, I’m going to plug MaxBlogPress one more time, because he just solved another issue for me.
When I upgraded to Wordpress 2.3, the CustomQueryString plugin bit the dust, and there didn’t appear to be any updates, which meant now my archive pages had to have the same number of posts as my homepage. As [...]

Posted in Blogging No Comments »

I’m mulling over what might happen if I banned the Googlebot from indexing some of my sites (via robots.txt), including one that might marginally be considered an “authority site”. Why?
I was reading Mark’s recent post on not letting yourself become dependent on Google (or any other single traffic source). This is the lesson we should [...]

Posted in SEO 5 Comments »

I said in a comment on Mark’s Blog that I imagined the recent pagerank slap had been achieved in part by Googlebots somehow detecting the use of big text link agencies like text link ads. Yesterday, I got an email from TLA asking me to update my Wordpress plugins.
The new plugin forces you to make [...]

Posted in Ad Networks No Comments »

I timestamp most of my Wordpress posts. The other day, I came across a recent conversation about how Wordpress pings the services when you hit “publish”, not when the post goes live. This is not good; you can read more about it there.
Further research suggests this problem has been cleared up by version 2.3, and [...]

Posted in Blogging 2 Comments »