A couple of weeks after the fact, and I’m only now beginning to get my head around what actually happened at Hack Day and I’m starting to look around the web to see what kind of time everyone else had. Seems like people had fun! That’s really good. I found this bit too! When we got struck by lightning!
The video is called Raining indoors at Hack Day London from joshr and hosted at the extraordinary and hipster YouTube only known as Vimeo.
I’ve been using it for bloody ages now – probably a year or something – and I’ve been asked about it a few times and always meant to write it up. So here goes. If you want to post your del.icio.us links to your website like I do, it’s a pretty easy process, but it has a couple of parts. The first part is the publishing – and this is pretty well documented. Basically you visit the slightly beta-versioned del.icio.us/settings/yourusername/daily URL and fill in the information required and then once a day it’ll post to your site. Easy. But being a bit of a beta-product, the publish-to-weblog function doesn’t really help you format your links. So this is where the second part comes in.
The way I make my del.icio.us links look the way they do is by the slightly laborious process of opening up each post each day, copying it into BBEdit, running an AppleScript and then pasting the finished text it back into the form. I made the script a while back using Automator and it requires you to have BBEdit installed, so I’m not sure that it’s going to be particularly useful for any more than a small minority of you, but if you want it, it’s here: CLean-up Linklog. Basically you dump the script in the Library > Scripts folder of your user account on your Mac and then you’re done. Good luck with it.
In the middle of the comments for a fairly interesting article about the Googledance that never ends there’s a post from a professional search engine optimiser. He says:
My consulting business website ranks highly in google for a number of search terms that are pertinent to my business. I didn’t get that way using a search engine optimization service. It didn’t cost anything but my time and the sweat of my brow. And it’s really very simple how it works. I tell all my methods in How to Promote Your Business on the Internet.
In summary:
- Put content on your site that visitors will want to read – and return to. Not just material aimed at potential customers, but stuff anyone will want to read.
- Post new content regularly
- Ask for links, and offer reciprocal links
That’s the method I used to make a Google search for software consultant turn up my resume as the #4 search result.
I want to make something clear. This is probably one of the best statements about search engine optimisation I’ve ever read, and it’s still horse-shit. The thing that it says that’s actually useful is that you should have a good site. First and foremost – put content on your site that people want to read and update it regularly. That’s a really really good point and something that people should remember. But it’s not something that a search engine optimiser can help you with, so that leaves you with link-exchange. Which is horse-shit. I’m going to say that again because I enjoyed it so much. It’s horse-shit.
Ladies and Gentlemen, listen very carefully when I say this: There is absolutely positively never any reason whatsoever to go to a search engine optimiser and they may damage your business as much as they help it. The reason they may damage your business is because – for the most part – they are designed to hack the system – to find short-cuts and tricks that fool a search engine into believing your site is something it isn’t. And search engines change their indexing methods all the time to compensate for these tricks. All the time. Google do it monthly! And if they find someone using them – often they’ll penalise the sites concerned.
Here – then – is the big secret of search optimisation. Search optimisation isn’t really about optimising for a search engine at all. It’s about making good quality, cleanly designed, semantically-constructed sites that people want to read, that people can link to and which people can get the gist of in a few seconds. If you make a website well for human beings, then as a side effect – more often than not – search engines will spider it well and rank it highly. And they’ll do this because it’s the best site, not because you’re trying to fool them.
For the most part this is all you need to know:
God there’s loads more stuff I could say, but the rule of thumb is the same for all of them. Build sites that are easy for people to use, try not to let the technology get in the way of delivering the information and aspire to making things that work the way the web works, and you’ll never have any trouble with search engines.
Addendum: There’s an interesting article on Google over at Salon today in which – yet again – some of the people who try to mischaracterise the usefulness of their own sites by gaming search engine algorithms claim that not being allowed to lie about their site’s relevancy is terribly terribly bad. I have absolutely no respect for these people at all…
Each day webloggers across the world post news, comments and little fragments of personal information onto their sites. And everything that they post will be forever associated with that specific day in history. But they’re not the only sites to connect a piece of writing or a picture with a day. In fact all over the internet there are hundreds of ‘[something] of the day’ or ‘on this day’ sites – from “Astronomical Picture of the Day” through to “Dilbert Cartoon of the Day”. There’s a whole category on Yahoo dedicated to these things.
This hack allows you to put an automated link on the bottom of each of your posts to the Dilbert cartoon (or astronomical picture, word of the day etc.) that was published on that day. You can use it to add a little context to the events on your site or just to show off your interests.
First things first – what are we trying to link to? These sites often have simple URLs that are based upon the date on which they were initially displayed. For example the “Astronomy Picture of the Day” for February 23rd 2003 has the URL:
antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap030209.html
…where the six numbers near the end are the year (03), the month (02) and the day (09). The Dilbert cartoon for the same day has this URL:
dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20030209.html
…which uses almost exactly the same format except with a the year spelled out in full (2003).
So in order to insert these links on a day-by-day basis, we’re going to have to put the basic URL in place without the date elements, find some way of inserting those date elements and make sure that they’re formatted so they’ll work as a link. We’re going to do this by using some of Moveable Type’s most useful and versatile features – the <$MTEntryDate$> tag. If you insert this tag into your templates by itself it will use its default setting – which is designed for reading and will look a bit like this: “September 9, 2003 11:44 PM”. But you can easily override this by using the format attribute and one or more date-tag variables. Here are a couple of examples of how you might format <$MTEntryDate$> and what the result would look like on your published page:
<$MTEntryDate format="%d %b %y"$> would look like "09 Sep 03" <$MTEntryDate format="%Y: %B, %e"$> would look like "2003: September, 9"
Here are what some of those letters mean:
Month: %b - name abbreviated to three characters eg. Sep %B - name in full eg. September %m - presented as two digits padded with a 0 if necessary eg. 09 Day: %d - two digits padded with a 0 if necessary eg. 09 %e - two digits padded with a space if necessary eg. 9 Year: %y - two digits padded with a 0 if necessary eg. 01 %Y - four digits. eg. 2001
So to make those daily URLs all we have to do is change the original URLs to include the <$MTEntryDate$> tag like so:
From: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap030209.html to: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap<$MTEntryDate format="%y%m%d"$>.html From: http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert- 20030209.html to: http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert- <$MTEntryDate format="%Y%m%d"$>.html
So this is what you’d put into your template:
<a href="http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap <$MTEntryDate format="%y%m%d"$>.html"> Astronomical Picture of the Day</a>
This hack was originally supposed to appear in the ill-fated O’Reilly “Blogging Hacks” book. I’ll be putting all my contributions online over the next few days / weeks.
The instruction manual for Movable Type contains detailed instructions about transferring your weblog from Blogger and Blogger Pro, and these instructions work extremely well if you have not been maintaining your site for very long. But while it’s rare for there to be a problem with the importing process, exporting weblogs from Blogger isn’t always so easy.
The normal transferral process is essentially three stages:
Stage one is the simplest stage and presents no problems. You simply copy this text into your Blogger template page:
<Blogger>
<$BlogItemBody$>
One of the neat features that comes with Blogger Pro is the ability to have your weblog posts e-mailed off somewhere when you publish them. And this presents opportunities to extend your tiny empire right off the web and into people’s inboxes. Why not set up a one-way e-mail list which people can sign up to instead of slogging over to your site each day? Or maybe you would like to start a full discussion list with new debates inspired by your daily fevered rantings!
In order to set something like this up, the first thing you need to do is find a free mailing-list site like Yahoogroups (http://www.yahoogroups.com). Set yourself up a basic list to start off with – and decide whether you want everyone to be able to join in with conversation on the list or not. The only thing you have to do is make sure that the e-mail address you (or you and your friends) use in your Blogger settings are signed up as members to the mailing list and are able to post new messages. When Blogger sends out an e-mail containing the text from your latest post, it will make it look as if it came from your e-mail address. So if that e-mail address is not a member of the mailing list, then it will just bounce right off and no one will get to read it.
The last thing you have to do is go to the settings page on Blogger under the e-mail tab and put the e-mail address of your mailing list in the Blogsend field. If you are using Yahoo then this will be formatted like so:
[name of group]@yahoogroups.com
And you’re done!
Just two more tips for turning your weblog into an effective mailing list. As soon as you click on publish, your post will be sent out to everyone on your list and can’t be taken back. So make sure to edit and revise your post carefully before you publish it – saving it as a ‘draft’ when you’re not working on it. And secondly think carefully about how many e-mails people like to receive in a day – if you’re a prolific poster, why not encourage people to receive all your posts in a ‘digest’ form once a day. That way they’ll never want to kill you with axes.
Some people read a weblog because they like the person who runs it. Maybe they think that person is a highly entertaining, witty and exciting individual. On the other hand, many weblogs are run by geeks (including this one). If you’re a social no-hoper – what are you to do? How do you get people to come to your site and experience the wonderful links you’ve found without forcing them to plough through all the rubbish you feel obliged to write?
The ‘random link’ code does just what it says on the tin. When your visitor clicks onto it, it gives every link contained on that page of your weblog a number, chooses a random one and then follows it. No muss, no fuss…
In order to put a ‘random link’ button on your weblog, you need to insert this simple piece of javascript into the
of your Blogger or Moveable Type template:
<script language="JavaScript">
<!--
// Surprise me button
function goRandom()
{
var numLinks = document.links.length;
var randomNum = (numLinks - 1) * Math.random();
randomNum = Math.round(randomNum);
window.location.href = document.links[randomNum].href;
}
//--></script>
Now you only need to insert the link itself into your template to help take even the slightest effort out of your visitor’s daily visits:
<a href="javascript:goRandom()"">Random Link</a>
This hack was originally supposed to appear in the ill-fated O’Reilly “Blogging Hacks” book. I’ll be putting all my contributions online over the next few days / weeks.
Simple weblogging applications like Blogger can make it a breeze to update your site, but there’s a cost attached – every post on your site has to look pretty much the same. Here’s a hack that means you can style your most recent post differently from the ones that follow. It works by staggering the tags that surround your posts.
Here’s possibly the most basic template for a Blogger you could get:
<html> <head></head> <body> <p>My weblog</p> <Blogger> <p style="background-color: red;"> <b><$BlogItemDateTime$>)</b><br><br> <$BlogItemBody$></p> </Blogger> </body> </html>
The important thing to notice on this template is that the paragraph tags (<p></p>) that enclose the Date/Time tag and the BlogItemBody tag are styled so that they have a red background. This is being done with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) but you could equally do it with table cells or <font> tags. The important thing is that since everything inside the Blogger tags will be repeated for each and every post, all the posts will will be styled in the same way.
Here’s how you’d lay it out if you wanted to style the first post differently:
<html> <head></head> <body> <p>My weblog</p> <p style="background-color: red;"> <Blogger> <b><$BlogItemDateTime$>)</b><br><br> <$BlogItemBody$> </p> <p style="background-color: blue;"> </Blogger> </p> </body> </html>
What you’re looking for in this template is how the paragraph tags have been staggered around your weblog content. The first paragraph tag is outside the Blogger tags and so – because it isn’t repeated for each post – it just changes the background color of the first post. But the </p> and the <p style=”background-color: blue;”> tags at the end are repeated, leaving a paragraph with a blue background open when the next post is inserted. When the second post on the page appears, its background is blue – and this is repeated for every post after that. All that’s left is to close the paragraph tag that’s left open at the end of the page with a simple </p> and there you have it.
This hack isn’t restricted to background-color – you can change the font-face or size, make the whole post bold or put a background image behind it. You can even use CSS to change the posts position on the screen with margin and padding.
This hack was originally supposed to appear in the ill-fated O’Reilly “Blogging Hacks” book. I’ll be putting all my contributions online over the next few days / weeks.