Now that is not to say that the information in the links is not good stuff. It is stuff I liked reading but just did not want to write about.

One more thing before we get to the links, not all of them are or will be “new” links. They are just links that I have come across this week.

On to the links:

• Web Metrics Demystified at Occam’s Razor by Avinach Kaushik
• Web Analytics Demystified at Occam’s Razor by Avinach Kaushik
• Tips on How to Apply for a Blog Job at ProBloger by Darren Rowse
• Twitterfeed.com This is how new posts to my WordPress blog get posted to my Twitter feed so the people that are following it can see the new post.

Hope you enjoy the links. Drop me a comment and let me know what you think of the links and the idea of a Link Fun Friday.

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The definition they give for themselves is a good summation of why they are doing this and what they want you to get out of it.

BlogOnExpo is a free digital conference covering the topic of blogging. For many bloggers, attending a real world conference can be far too expensive and time consuming; so, we have attempted to bring the conference experience online. According to the latest State of the Blogosphere from Blog Tracking Search Engine Technorati, there are over 70,000,000 blogs on the web with 120,000 new blogs being added each day. With those kind of numbers, its no surprise that many blogs fail. Our conference will help bloggers improve their chances for success.

I spent some time looking at some of the sessions, and there was a lot of good information to be had. A lot of the information is geared towards how to make money with your blog and not 100% about WordPress or Findability, but there is still a nugget or two you can get out of it if you take the time to look and read the sessions.

The sessions run from the Jan 15th to the 18th and will stay up until the next BlogOnExpo happens in May

Do we like the idea of all online conferences? Can there be the same (or any) level of networking like a face to face one? Drop me a comment and let me know what you think.

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Why would I not want to try and get some sort of revenue through my site? I have this belief (right or wrong) that if you put ads on your blog it makes the advice you give out not worth as much.

Also I feel that if I include ad’s that this is no longer about me wanting to make this a blog for you the WordPress users but a blog about me wanting to make money.

Am I just being stupid about all of this? I am looking at redoing the template for the site. Should I add a section that will display ads of some kind?

Now, I go to a lot of blogs that have ads,  and they have great information and great advice. So am I just being stupid, and I should use ads or am I right in the fact that readers think this belittles the content on the site?

What do you all think? Drop a comment and let me know what you think and what way you think I should go.

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It installed easily and worked right out of the box with little to no problems at all. What it does is add a little check box that
sends readers an email when the comments have been updated.

They can do this if they have made a comment or even if they haven’t, and they just want to be notified when others have posted a comment. The plugin also remembers if you have already signed up and clicked to be informed, and it displays a different screen asking them if they want to manage their subscriptions.

After I installed the plug-in I went to go and test it. I took a look at my comment section. I highly recommend that if you have not taken the time to do this, you should go and do it right now. I found it hard to understand and some errors in the way it asks for information.

This is an often overlooked section of your blog, one that should be important to you. We are trying to build a community and the best way to do this is with comments. If your readers come to make a comment and find problems, then there is a good chance that they will not make one and possibly just leave the site.

So what do you all think? Is it important to get comments, or is it just ok for people to come to the site and read and go away?

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 Spinning Spammers are described as people who are taking posts from real bloggers and then running them through some type of algorithm. This may involve using a thesaurus to find synonyms for the words in questions or an automatic translation program to convert the work into another language and perhaps converting it back to English.

 There is a good explanation of it in this article also on Blog Herald

They then post it on a site, and you get a notice of a track back. If you are good and want to know who is linking to you (and you should), you can go and hand trace the link back to the page it came from. When you get there you will find a post that may kind of look like yours, but at the bottom it has a link that says something like “Go read the rest of the article at:” and it links back to your blog.

So why is this bad? You are getting an incoming link and that is what we all want, right? As the owner of the blog and the post, you did nothing wrong, and there is a good chance that you will see no repercussions from this at all. But there is a small chance that you could get flagged for posting duplicate content or some unkown penalty that Google has yet to come up with.

Besides that, they are stealing the work you have created and that is never good. You took the time to sit down and come up with an idea and write it down. In theory, you also spent time crafting it and changing it until it was just right. All they want is new content to up their AdSense rating and make more money.

How to stop it? Well there are some ways that Jonathan talks about. All of them are good, and I am sure they will work. The one I am trying out is the first one on his list which is the Digital Fingerprint plugin for WordPress. I have installed it and am running it now, and it looks like it works. You can set your fingerprint to anything you want, and they even give you an option to trace the prints right from your dashboard in WordPress.

 After it has been running a little longer I will give you all an update of how it is working for me. In the mean time what do you all think? Should we be worried about this kind of Spam / Content stealing? Are we wasting time trying to stop them? Let me know in the comments.

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I was looking at a SEO blog I read and I found this article SEO Egghead by Jaimie Sirovich » Latest WordPress 2.3.1 Apparently Vulnerable To Hackers. Looks like in the current version of WordPress people can upload HTML and hijack your blog and make it do what they want. Not Good!

This is the only place I have seen this, so I do not have a lot to back it up. I did run the plug-in from Jaimie’s blog on my blog and got responses that I belive let me know that my blog was ok.

The plug-in can be a little confusing if you are not a coder. You can go to this link and copy the code off of the page and open up a plain text editor (texedit on the mac will work or word pad on windows), and pasted the copied text in. Then at the bottom of the text you will see an email adress. Change that to your email address. Then save the file as HTMLTaintCheck.php. It is important to save the file as a php file and not as a .txt or it will not work.

Once you have the file saved, upload it to your plug-in directory and go to the admin dashboard and activate it. What I did at this point was to go to the site live and look to make sure it did not screw anything up, and then I checked my email. I found an email from myself saying all was ok.

Then go in and deactivate it. I would check every day or so until WordPress has come out with a patch for this. Remember, do not leave it running or you will get a ton of emails sent to you, over and over.

If you have any questions or comments on this or how to work out the plug-in just drop a comment and I will get to them as soon as I can.

Thanks for Reading

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I found this on a great site Smashing Magazine It brings out some good points about the problems with making WordPress moreSEO friendly and some great solutions on doing what you can to make your WordPress blog as SEO friendly as possible.

Do you have any tricks for making WordPress more SEO friendly? If so, drop it into the comments.

Thanks for reading.

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It has been a long time between posts. As with every person out there, this is a part-time labor of love for me, and life got in the way.

We are now on a new server, have a new layout as well as a new commitment to deliver news and tips that I have found. Tips which I use to make not only this blog, but all of my projects as findable as possible and hopefully help you do the same with all of your projects.

Thanks for stopping in and as always tell your friends and drop me a note / comment and let me know what you like and what you don’t.

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