I still have the button at the bottom of each post that lets you bookmark your site with whatever social bookmarking service you like but I’m getting rid of the Digg buttons at the top right. Why?
I’m convinced they just highlight the low Digg numbers. They don’t seem to be encouraging anyone to Digg posts [...]

I still have the button at the bottom of each post that lets you bookmark your site with whatever social bookmarking service you like but I’m getting rid of the Digg buttons at the top right. Why?

I’m convinced they just highlight the low Digg numbers. They don’t seem to be encouraging anyone to Digg posts - even when they comment about how great the posts are. Digg is still a very techie thing, and not all of my sites are for webmastery types.

If you have an RSS feed on your site, there are a number of ways to let people sign up for email updates. But there’s a potential for spam issues if you handle it yourself. RssFwd is a third party service that lets people sign up on their own. To promote your feed, just go [...]

If you have an RSS feed on your site, there are a number of ways to let people sign up for email updates. But there’s a potential for spam issues if you handle it yourself. RssFwd is a third party service that lets people sign up on their own. To promote your feed, just go to this page and grab the code you like. Or if you prefer a simple link you could go to their main page, punch in your URL and then get the URL of the subscription page out of your browser’s URL window and create a link on your site to take people there.

If you use their code (I chose the version where they can enter their email address right there on the site), it takes them to a nice little confirmation page that redirects back to your site. It’s a sweet setup.

And don’t forget to track subscriptions to your site, using a link like this:

http://www.rssfwd.com/rssfwd/subscribers_count?url=[your rss url]

Or a bookrmarklet you can download from the publisher page.

Have you ever made a change on your website only to have it not show up when you load the refreshed pages? If it’s not your browser, it could be your ISP. But failing that, it could be at the server level.
In Cpanel, there’s a harmless way to make sure this isn’t the problem. Go [...]

Have you ever made a change on your website only to have it not show up when you load the refreshed pages? If it’s not your browser, it could be your ISP. But failing that, it could be at the server level.

In Cpanel, there’s a harmless way to make sure this isn’t the problem. Go into "disk usage viewer" and select "Clear File Usage Cache".

Search Engine Journal has an interesting piece about some domain names Google has supposedly bought recently, with the centerpiece as "claimyourcontent.com". There’s a lot of speculation about what this might mean. I’d love a way to keep scrapers out or establish my articles as the primary version of that material. There are other things it [...]

Search Engine Journal has an interesting piece about some domain names Google has supposedly bought recently, with the centerpiece as "claimyourcontent.com". There’s a lot of speculation about what this might mean. I’d love a way to keep scrapers out or establish my articles as the primary version of that material. There are other things it could be, but that’s the one I’m hoping for.

Can you have too much content on your sites?

About a month or so ago, I committed myself, removed pages from v7n that were xxx number of days old, had less than xxx number of page views, and less than xxx number of responses. Just to be sure that I didn’t remove any worthwhile discussions, I [...]

Can you have too much content on your sites?

About a month or so ago, I committed myself, removed pages from v7n that were xxx number of days old, had less than xxx number of page views, and less than xxx number of responses. Just to be sure that I didn’t remove any worthwhile discussions, I went through the list and checked anything that might be remotely worthwhile.

And I did not delete the threads - I simply moved them to a private, hidden, admin-access-only forum.

Within a couple weeks, I started to see the remaining pages performing much better. Within two weeks, search engine referrals were up 7,000 per day.

But as one commenter points out:

I’m seeing a doubling of traffic from Google over the past week or two and have done nothing different. I think there has been a significant improvement in the Google algorithm, although I’ve seen little discussion on that.

I can confirm that I too have noticed an increase on Google searches to some of my sites. Makes it hard to do any sort of controlled experimenting when you don’t know what’s going on at Google. Still, who knows? It makes sense that a link to one of 10,000 pages might be of less value than a link to one of 2,000.

On the other hand, I think Google sometimes does the pruning for you. I have some sites that don’t have a ton of pages indexed by Google, but they get great traffic from the ones that are indexed. That suggests to me Google’s algo is picking and choosing somehow, presumably trying to deliver your best pages.

For the last few updates - maybe starting with Firefox 2.0 - that browser has caused me more trouble than it’s worth. It keeps caching pages when they’re all screwy, and absolutely nothing I do will force it to refresh the cache. Opera doesn’t do this. IE doesn’t do this.
I’ve spent hours and hours [...]

For the last few updates - maybe starting with Firefox 2.0 - that browser has caused me more trouble than it’s worth. It keeps caching pages when they’re all screwy, and absolutely nothing I do will force it to refresh the cache. Opera doesn’t do this. IE doesn’t do this.

I’ve spent hours and hours trying to fix things that weren’t broken, because Firefox kept showing me messed-up versions of my pages. Usually it’s page not found, but today it did something truly spectacular: it served me up a version of this site with no posts. I went into the WordPress admin panel and the posts weren’t in there, either! I went into the database, and there they all sat.

Hmm. I opened up IE - posts present and accounted for. I tried Opera - ditto. Now Firefox is acknowledging the posts if I go to them individually - except for the most recent one - but still claims there’s nothing on the home page.

Anybody know of another browser that saves sessions on crash? As far as I can figure out, Opera’s not there yet and I don’t even know if IE cares about that. That’s the only feature keeping me on Firefox right now.