Archive for September, 2007

It’s time to cut my PageRank in half with yet another BlogBuzz.

• CSS Frameworks + CSS Reset: Design From Scratch
• MySpace News Is Stealing Your Search Results
• Create smaller CSS files
• Fonts, fonts, fonts, fonts. Wonderful fonts! Sorry, I couldn’t resists putting in a Monty Python parody there… 20 Tools For Working With Fonts.
• And you thought your host was bad (or not…)! I stumbled upon this hilarious spoof site when I was searching for some information about VPS hosting plans. No Uptime Hosting (”Stealing your money since 1986″) promises “lots of storage,” “10kb of bandwidth,” “PHP 5, 6 and 7,” “2 Glow Sticks,” a “Free Broken Toaster,” and “24/8 Email Support” in their $20/month “Take-My-Money” plan. This hilarious site has loads of funny things spread throughout, including a Downtime Chart and their “Why Choose Us?” page. Definitely worth a look.
• Converting a Newsletter Into a Blog
• 20+ Tools for Working With CSS
• Google must not like something David Airey did. His rankings have been sabotaged, dropping him several pages below nowhere on a variety of search terms. The question is: Why?
• 100 (Legal) Sources for Free Stock Images
• How much time are you wasting in a day, checking your blog’s stats? In case you didn’t already know, Netvibes can help you there. See new comments, incoming links, incoming Social Networking links, and more all in one place. Now, if only you could get AdSense and Google Analytics stats…
• 5 Step Failsafe Upgrade For Wordpress
• Smashing Magazine presents 10 Usability Nightmares You Should Be Aware Of. I think they’re over-reacting on a couple of points, but definitely worth a read.
• Movable Type already has a plugin that adds an iPhone interface to your Wordpress Admin. Wordpress plugin authors are fighting back with MobileAdmin.
• American Express may have the world’s least secure site. Your Digg username could be too secure…
• Did you know that the “Will it Blend” Videos have boosted Blendtec’s sales by 5x? They’re great DiggBait, and they’re sort of reminiscent of David Letterman’s “Will it float.”
• 80+ Online Communities for Bloggers
• After five years, AOL has updated their Mac software. By now, no one cares.
• Bored with the “standard” RSS icon? Here are 35 Different Styles of RSS Icons that don’t deviate too much from the original design.
• The Best Website Taglines Around the Web. Hmm… Maybe I should change my tagline. What do you think?
• While you’re over at Daily Blog Tips, take a look at their most popular posts for September. There are some good ones in there.

Well, it looks like Smashing Magazine launched a new layout without telling us. They’ve retained the clean look from the previous design, though the main content area isn’t nearly as wide as it had been previously.

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You know that convenient spot on the Wordpress dashboard that shows links leading to your blog? Guess what. As of Wordpress 2.3 it doesn’t work anymore. Some genius thought that instead of pulling the list from Technorati, they should use Google Blog Search instead. Now instead of seeing a list of recent incoming links, it seems to be more of a list of your recent posts. What’s with that? I hope they patch it soon.

Here’s an example:

• The new “Incoming Links.”
• The old “Incoming Links.”

What was the reason behind this change (could it be loading speed?), and why didn’t they notice the bug I just discovered?

Yes, I know there are still a few days until November. I figured I’d publish the November theme a little ahead of schedule though. This month’s theme is called The Morning After.

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Seeing as this is the 200th blog post on Webmaster-Source, I’m going to take this opportunity to fill you in on a little of WSC’s history.

I bought the domain www.webmaster-source.com about a year and a half ago, and put up a static website that consisted mainly of lists of links to other web-related websites (unsurprisingly, I’ve never had great PageRank ). Because of the difficulty of updating the site, there weren’t many new things added until June 2 2007. About a week prior to the second, I decided to turn WSC into a blog, as I’d gotten into blogging six months previously, and I wanted to make better use of the domain. So I started wok on a new design, and I started importing all of my old content into Wordpress. By the second, I had everything up and ready. (more…)

“All the good domains are taken!” is one of the most common exclamations among new bloggers. They’re partly right. You have to be real creative when you register a .com or .net domain these days. Domains are taken for legitamate reasons most of the time, but millions of domains are in the control of “domainers.”

Domainers, for the uninformed, are people (or groups of people) that register large quantities of domains with the intent of reselling them for substantial sums of money. Have you run into a domain owned my a cybersquater (domainer)? Usually the page displayed is generic, and contains ads. Most of the time there’s also a link to make an offer to buy the domain. Yeah, it sucks that the domainers taking half of the good domains and not utilizing them, but they’re not about to stop anytime soon. They’re making hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars off the domains they sell.

So how can you get a good domain with all of this going on? You have three options: (more…)

Yesterday (September 23), I logged into my Wordpress Admin panel to tweak something in my theme. In the “Recent Links” area on the dashboard, I saw a link marked “Is Web Design an Art?” I knew I’d previously written a post by that name before, so I checked it out. It was an exact duplicate of my post on a blog located at “webmaster-source.blogspot.com” (I’m not linking for obvious reasons). Upon further inspection, I found that they’d copied huge quantities of my posts (over the course of a day). I’d found a “splog” (Spam Blog) that had been scraping my feed. Making matters worse, the site was loaded with AdSense ads.

Since then, I’ve contacted Blogger and AdSense, requesting that they take action. I’ve not received a response from AdSense yet (just an autoresponder saying that they’d received my message). Blogger sent an email back though. They say they won’t do anything unless I send them a DMCA takedown notice (through snail mail). I guess I’ll have to prepare one then. Google isn’t very helpful in the anti-splog department, are they?

The splog scraped my content about 11 days ago, and hasn’t come back since. Though with a name like it has, it’s probably only a matter of time. What’s the best way to stop them? I can’t find an entry in my Feedburner stats, nor in my server logs. I have no idea what IP is scraping the feed either. I assume it’s automated, but I’m not quite sure.

If anyone has anti-splog tips, feel free to post them in the comments.

You’ve probably seen the amazing web hosting deals offered by companies like BlueHost, HostMonster, and LunarPages. The claim to offer something like 300GB of storage, and 3000GB (3TB) of bandwidth for the low price of $7/month (or similar).

Do you really think that’s possible? Looking at storage space alone, a 500GB Hard Drive costs $150. Do the math, no one can afford that. You’re paying $7/month for your hosting account ($84/year), right? Now, you’re buying what’s called shared hosting. For $7/month you have access to a small slice of a server’s resources. There are probably 100 other websites hosted on the same computer as you. So, that would mean that computer would need 30000GB of storage (300GB x 100 users). That’s 30 Terabytes, or 60 of those 500GB hard drives! There’s no way any webhost could afford that, and there’s no way their servers would accept that much storage. (more…)

Here’s yet another big pile o’ links.

• Advanced Glow Effects tutorial (cool)
• According to Ars Technica, insiders cause more computer security problems than malware. I totally agree. If you go to a public library, chances are (despite the IT department’s precautions) that you’ll find stupid toolbars and other junk installed. The problem with public computers is: clueless users.
• Ars Technica reviews the iPod Touch.
• Hey jQuery users! Do you wish you had something like Script.aculo.us for your preferred JS library? Now you do.
• Mozilla presidents kicks Ballmer, trashes DRM, quotes Spiderman.
• Warning: Use These 5 Surefire Headline Formulas at Your Own Risk.
• Top 10 Tips for driving traffic AWAY from your website. What about Frames, all manner of rotten ads, and MySpace-like design practices?
• Have you ever wanted to float an HTML element on the same line as another? It’s a common technique, and a useful one as well. Here’s a nice tutorial if you don’t know how to do it.
• Well, the Diggers have discovered a Firefox Sports Car. It looks cool, but isn’t “OMG! Firefox Sports Car!” over-reacting a little? I like the comment “The IE car must have crashed.”
• When AJAX Can Help Your Blog. AJAX has a plethora of uses, just please don’t load your content with it!
• The Secret to Massive Digg/StumbleUpon Traffic Without Spamming.
• Attractive Online Diagrams, Charts And Maps.
• Best of August 2007. Yet another huge list, courtesy your friendly neighborhood Smashing Magazine.
• Wordpress has got to pick up the pace. Movable Type now has a version of its Admin panel for the iPhone. That’s totally cool…if you have an iPhone.
• Finding the Right Host (part of a tutorial series over at BlogSolid).
• John Chow has some advice for you. You’ve heard of BlogRush, right? Now, what if you feed BlogRush a different set of headlines than the ones in your main feed? Disclaimer: If you BlogRush folks don’t like this, don’t shoot the messenger. Blame John Chow, not me.
• Wordpress 2.3 is just around the corner, coming this Monday. While you wait, read about 10 Things You Need to Know About Wordpress 2.3. Also, Lorelle has a Heads Up on Wordpress 2.3.
• On the subject of Wordpress, it’s always nice to improve the Administration Panel with some useful plugins.

The blog NorthXEast (which I read) is, unfortunately, up for sale. It’s a great blog, with a cool layout, and some strong stats. It has

• 75,000+ unique visitors a month.
• 103,000+ pageviews per month.
• PageRank of 4
• $175 current monthly revenue
• 2000+ RSS subscribers, growing at a rate of 100 per week.
• 33 Posts
• Technorati Authority of 704 (rank of 4000)

The blog is listed for auction at SitePoint, and the bid has already reached $5,500. Unfortunately I don’t happen to have an extra $10,000 on hand.

NorthXEast is a great blog with an interesting style. I hope whomever buys it will

• Keep the same cool design
• Keep up the good content
• Maintain good practices, and refrain from dancing, talking George W. Bush ads.

I’m one of those 2000+ RSS subscribers who wants NorthXEast to keep going as a great blog. So, if one of you bloggers has some extra cash, and feels up to the responsibility, how about buying NxE?