Andy Hagan wrote a fantastic post called The Lazy SEO Manifesto and it’s hit the social media sites like crazy. Just look at that spike!
Nice one, Andy! btw, personally I’d enable trackbacks and comments for that post.
Archive for January, 2007
I normally stay away from laughing at dumb Americans because they’re too easy a target. This video was too funny to pass up. Featuring cryptic questions like “how many sides does a triangle have?” and “name a country starting with ‘U’”…
Originally seen on shoutfile.com.
Error messages are always a worrying sight, but thankfully this one was easily dealt with. Here’s the message I was seeing today on my newly upgraded to Wordpress v2.1 blog:
WordPress database error: [Can't find file: './homedir/wp_comments.frm' (errno: 13)] SELECT foo FROM bar WHERE …
A quick google tells me that it’s a MySQL error, and can be fixed with a simple MySQL command REPAIR TABLE wp_comments; (replacing wp_comments with the relevant table name if that’s not the right one). Alternatively you can do a repair within phpMyAdmin if GUIs are your thing.
I wonder whether this was related to my playing around with different themes, and the associated compromise of database integrity, or if it was related to the upgrade from 2.0.7 to 2.1…
Technorati Tags: Error, Wordpress v2.1, WordPress database error, MySQL error, MySQL, phpMyAdmin, upgrade, 2.0.7, 2.1
If you host your own Wordpress then take note - there’s a php exploit on the loose that’s taken out several well known SEO blogs. Advice is to update to Wordpress 2.0.7 right now. You have no excuse if you’re compromised because you have been warned!
Updated 23rd Jan: there’s a shiny new Wordpress v2.1 that’s just been released - I recommend you upgrade to this, which includes the fix I mentioned below, along with a host of minor and not so minor changes (e.g. database performance caching)
If you don’t know how to upgrade to the latest version it’s quite easy:
- Download the latest version of Wordpress (this link is always to the latest good copy)
- Upload it to your server
- Unzip/untar it
- Copy it over your current install of WP
- Go to yourserver.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php and click the big button
- You’re done!
That was easy, right?
Technorati Tags: Wordpress, php exploit, Wordpress 2.0.7, how to upgrade
I read an interesting review of Terapad last night from Andy. It was a constructively critical review with many compliments and complaints about the various features of this new blogging platform.
Stephan of Terapad was very quick to reply to Andy’s review, albeit in a somewhat defensive manner. From a neutral perspective I can tell that both of the guys have very valid points and it’s a pity that the discussion seemed to produce a negative outcome when it had so much potential.
Using valuable customer criticism
Yes, criticism is valuable. Companies spend megabucks on user testing so when you have someone offering up golden information for free, thank them - no matter how negatively it’s worded. Stephan is understandably defending the product which he has put heart and soul into. But he doesn’t need to be defensive about it.
Stephan, I think you should step back and view this constructive criticism for what it is - valuable customer feedback.You’ll be getting user feedback from non-technical users and now you’ve had a techie guy hand you on a plate a prioritised list of things that you can change for v2.0. This kind of feedback is golden.
As someone interested enough to create a whole new blog platformyou should view this as an opportunity to communicate with your users and get more people on board.
My recommendation to you, Stephan, is that you take Andy’s list, fix what you can right now. Then take the list, and put it on your blog as “user feedback” drawing lots of attention to it and list Andy’s constructive criticisms and note after each if it’s fixed, or if it’s not then what you’re doing about it.
That’s how to use feedback like this - embrace it, don’t defend against it!
Technorati Tags: review, compliments, complaints, Terapad, customer criticism, criticism, customer feedback, feedback, communicate
07
Jan
What’s a meme?
I was asked yesterday “just what the hell is a ‘meme‘ anyway?”. Quite simply it’s one of those geeky terms that bloggers love to use because they sound complicated and techie, but in reality actually easy to understand: a meme is an idea!
Now if you head on over to Wikipedia, the be-all and end-all definitive source for all information on the planet, you’ll see them ramble along like this:
The term “meme” (IPA: /miËÂm/, not /mÉ›m/ or /mimi/, to rhyme with “theme”), coined in 1976 by the zoologist and evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins, refers to a unit of cultural information transferable from one mind to another. Dawkins said, Examples of memes are tunes, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. A meme propagates itself as a unit of cultural evolution and diffusion  analogous in many ways to the behavior of the gene (the unit of genetic information). Often memes propagate as more-or-less integrated cooperative sets or groups, referred to as memeplexes or meme-complexes.
Yeah, ok wikipedia, whatever… so a meme is an idea, right? Here’s a couple of simple examples:
- General: Just recently some bloggers posted asking several other bloggers to post on their own blogs with 5 things that their readers mightn’t know about them. This meme has spread exponentially to thousands of blogs and is simply known as “5 Things”
- Cycling bloggers everywhere are currently posting lists of the cycling-related blogs they read, this is following another meme
Got it?
Thanks to Spam Karma 2 and Askimet, my various Wordpress blogs’ comments are 100% spam free from automated spam.
So comment spammers, piss off and bother somebody else.
Technorati Tags: Spam Karma, Askimet, Wordpress, automated spam, comment spam
Igor over at bizmord.com posted about deeplinking to your own site early in your posts. It makes a lot of sense from an SEO point of view for couple of reasons:
Whenever your “content” is republished somewhere … many times you’ll notice that the website will show a brief intro to content (usually your first paragraph) and then offer a link to read further. Well, isn’t it nice when your deep links are right there on top, closer to the index page, visible not only to people who read the article but also to search engine’s spiders?
Of course as I discovered writing the first paragraph of this post, sometimes it’s fairly difficult to fit it in naturally!
P.S. Saw your syndicate post on WebPro getting all the link love, thought you should get some of the google juice you deserved, Igor 
Technorati Tags: SEO, syndicate, link love, google juice
Thanks to Jason for the heads-up - it seems that my Wordpress 2.0 blogs are vulnerable to the exploit listed in Wordpress issue #3142, but the effect is relatively minor.
Every logged in user can spy out the metadata of all other users by typing in the URL /wp-admin/user-edit.php?user_id=XXX irrespective if he has the right to do this or not. If not in fact there will be shown the error message “You do not have permission to edit this user.” but after that message the complete form with all data will also be shown.
Here’s the exploit in action:
I guess it’s a source of valid email addresses for spam, though I’m not sure that bloggers are the best demographic for email spam (not that spammers care). Anyway my blogs are theoretically vulnerable to this exploit, but since I don’t currently allow registered users it’s not an issue.
Technorati Tags: Wordpress, blogs, vulnerable, exploit, email
If you recently received a spam mail from amdsoft.com, well you didn’t. Some dirty, stinking scumbag email spammer configured his bulk-mailer to use this domain in the From: address.
But you can quit feeling sorry for yourself - I’ve received over 40 80 “delivery failed” notifications and counting!
