Top 10 best practice to ruin a blog
What’s a blog without traffic? It’s a meaningless piece of crap. So if you want to ruin a blog, do with style and without taking it down completely. Here are some ideas:
- Display a splash-screen without a link to the real content. Users will go mad, search engines even more
- Host an exe file and force the download. Search engines will love it and when a user clicks on a result pointing to your site, they will see a warning page instead your site.
- Transform your website in a subscription based one and ask for an exaggerated price per month
- Rewrite your site in Flash and ask for an nonexistent Flash version, say v.22. This way even if the user upgrades his Flash plugin, they won’t see anything but the notice for upgrading.
- The same but in Java.
- Use a nonconformist character set. Users will can’t read it, search engines will display weird characters on the results page
- Put a HTTP authentication prompt on the root of the domain
- Simply use white characters on a white background
- Install Wordpress then stop the MySQL server
- Build a nice redirect loop, bouncing the user from one page to other in 5 second interval
That’s all, have a nice day
2 simple ways to prepare your blog for Web 3.0
Web 3.0, or semantic web as web-experts say, is about data sharing between services and better identity system for end-users.
The idea is very simple: every user has an attention profile (APML) and should have an OpenID. For example if you are a Digg user (many other service supports now APML, this is just an example), your attention profile is situated at
http://digg.com/users/YourUserName.apml
, login and download it, then open it in a text editor and have a look. It will contain your interests in XML format. You have to log in because it’s inaccessible for strangers.
This XML file if uploaded on another service, will show, for example news which are related to your interests. It won’t show techie news if you like only anatomy.
How could this attention profile be used on blogs? I can think of two possibilities. The first is, since a blog is a personal log (or that was anno 2003, now it’s more business opportunity, or kinda), you can create your blog’s attention profile using a plugin published by Notzi. Basically it will create an XML-like APML feed containing the blog’s categories and all the tags. It can also be used to let the users who are browsing your blog to upload an APML file and then show the posts relevant to their interests. Since only a few user know what is APML and how to use it, currently is almost pointless to have such a feature on a blog. On the other hand, it can be cool because the APML enabled blog will be one of the first who supports this format and is something new and interesting.
The second possibility I can think of is to monitor the subscribed users’ clicks, what categories they accessed, what posts did they read and so on. Then based on the collected data publish for their personal use an APML file. That simple. The created attention profile then can be used on other websites to get better service, or they can mix it with APMLs gotten from other services, thus creating more precise attention profiles.
For the second possibility there’s no plugin I know of, if there is I’d be happy to know about it.
OpenID, I think the greatest innovation on the net in the past few years. While enabling APML on your blog can be optional, OpenID on the other hand should be enabled by default. More and more websites support and provides OpenID, which simplifies the end-users’ life by instead of having to remember username and password for every site they registered on, they have to remember only one: the one to their open identity.
To enable it on your WordPress blog, you simply have to install a plugin. Your blog will support OpenID both as a supporter site and as a provider, subscribers will be able to log in, common users to register as subscribers and comment using their OpenIDs.
Why to support these two formats? Well, because they get each day more and more attention on the net, they started to become standards which has to be followed. If you support them from the very beginning, you and your users can only win.
Also not forget that if Yahoo! and Verisign already adopted OpenID, Digg adopted APML. These adoptions I think means something… What about You?
Web 3.0 - Dare to think
Imagine a web where your browser knows what you want to search for.
Imagine login-protected websites which automatically recognize you and can use your details you allowed to be used.
Imagine a service like Digg or FaceBook which knows which news items you have interest for or which new members would you like to connect with, services which aggregates news items from hundreds of thousands of RSS feeds and you get only news you are interested in.
Imagine your fridge ordering products you are low on from the local grocery.
These are not futuristic ideas: these are all part of Web 3.0!
Website owners might think that Web 3.0 will be just another a headache, they just managed to make their sites Web 2.0 and now comes the next era, but it’s really not. Details about the users always been collected, but these details were not published neither for third-parties (at least not me) or the user itself.
The basic of the Web 3.0 era is that some data collected about the users is shared amongst web services. This enables for the web services to be extremely intelligent from the end-users’ point of view, as this way the services know the users from thier first visit. Currently every service learns about each user, but it can take several days or even weeks to have an acceptable knowledge about a user, which does not end at browser type or Flash version. Webmasters should know what their users are interested in, not flood a techie person with information about Greek literature or language lessons.
What will bring this for the webmasters and service owners? Just think a bit: how many browser tabs did you close in the past 7 days just because the webpage you opened wasn’t interesting for you?
Digg recently started to support “APML” (Attention Profiling Markup Language), a small green icon on the right sidebar. If you click the icon, then download the file to your PC and finally open it in your favorite text editor, you will see a code block, containing your interests, what you dugg, what categories you favor and so on. This is your attention profile, probably the base of Web 3.0.
Now take this APML file and use it on NewsGator, you don’t have to choose and/or specify new feeds, the service would find them for you.
Devoracles.com also supports APML, currently in beta. The idea is to show for our users posts which are relevant to their interests, for example we’ll not show you SEO related posts if you use to come only to read PC/Hardware reviews. The posts irrelevant to your interest will still be available, but not suggested for reading. As said before, it’s in beta state, we’re still experimenting the feature but our expectations are high.
Another Web 3.0 standard is OpenID. OpenID enables the users to create a profile at an OpenID provider then use that profile to log in to various websites which are OpenID enabled. Such OpenID providers are Yahoo!, MyOpenID.net and Verisign. This means the mammoths of the internet already joined the party, they are offering OpenID for their users. The problem is that there are only several thousand websites where you can use your OpenID, even if the idea behind OpenID is to simplify the users’ life: instead of remembering the username/email and the associated password on each website you register an account on, you have to remember one simple string like: yourname.myopenid.com. That’s it.
Devoracles.com supports OpenID, too. Scroll down the comments form and you’ll see that you can comment either by providing your open identity or by the legacy way, providing your desired nickname, e-mail address and optionally your website.
Another interesting direction of the web, which probably can be ported into Web 3.0 is Google’s Gears. While for Web 1.0 it was enough a dial-up internet connection, Web 2.0 is more bandwidth hungry: a broadband connection is necessary. This is mainly caused by the Flash animations, the multiple Javascript frameworks which are loaded on each page load and the graphics which makes some websites so dam cool (ex. http://ma.tt). Web 3.0 will be even more resource heavy: imagine 3D worlds where you can shop for your favorite DVDs or chat with your friends, the accent was on 3D; rendering 3D objects will put load both on the webmasters’ servers but on the end-users’ PC and connection, too.
Here can Gears help a bit. It has a feature, Local Server by name, which is able to store and then process some data on the end-users’ end, not requesting new connections and making additional transfers. This can reduce considerably the bandwidth load on the end-users’ end, but on the server’s side too.
And finally, why did I chose the title “Dare to think”. Because the possible uses of the above mentioned standards and applications are endless. The fridge ordering products is not sci-fi, the websites knowing you are neither part of the far future. We only have to think what would ease and make our life more interesting, so will Web 3.0 become a reality.
Wondering when will my PC order for itself a new RAM module…
Financial crisis and the web
2008 seems to be the financial crisis’s year. People with the fear of loosing money, they withdraw their savings from the banks, creating even bigger problems for the already unstable economy. The federal government even though tries to help, the effect is late from the party.
Brokers on the Wall Street loosing everything they have, sit in front of their PCs thinking about “What now” and what could they do to end the recession.
Just as everyone, spammers and phishers are also affected by the global financial crisis. More and more spam and phishing message is traveling on the global net, seemingly seeking people who they can fool with their blatant messages and steal their identity, personal data and money. What they earn is clearly money: personal data can be sold, identity can be used to access financial services and so on.
The other day I found through an over-digged article on ReadWriteWeb which tries to predict what will 2008 bring for us, obviously the article was published in 2007.
The most mind blowing prediction for me is that 2008 will start with a recession or fear of recession. Interesting, that this became true, probably too true. After in the Q2 of 2008 CitiBank almost crashed the NASDAQ, other mammoth banks and insurance companies also entered in crisis.
But how all these affect the web?
E-Commerce & Auctions
The mammoth e-commerce and auction websites like Amazon, Walmart and E-Bay are suffering the most by the economical recession.
The buyer mass slowly started to re-think their life, they spend less offline, they spend less online. This creates enormous issues for the e-commerce mammoths as they can’t exist without paying clients.
Trends shows that all these websites are in recession since the beginning of this year, can this recession be changed? I can hardly believe.
Advertising
Seemingly the advertising networks are the only which earns with the global financial crisis. Advertisers in the hope they will have more clients they spend more on online advertising. CPM and CPC ads still brings nice revenues for the publishers, or even better revenues than in 2007. This means that advertisers are using the advertising networks just like before the worldwide recession, or even more.
CPA ads were never the favorite of the publishers. If the CPAs didn’t get the attention of the publishers before the economical recession, this made the CPAs even less popular. Since there is less buying power there’s less people who actually make conversions for the advertisers, and CPAs only pay if conversion was made.
Trends show that the two most popular online advertising solutions, AdWords and the former Overture, Yahoo! Search Marketing, has increased traffic since the beginning of the global financial recession. Just a coincidence or it’s something more?
Overall Net Traffic
People got even less social in 2008. After Twitter’s 2007 success, there was a small recession in its popularity, MySpace continued its continuous recession, Digg lost at least 5% of its traffic.
Surprisingly, it seems all the users which are absent from the above giants moved to Facebook. I never thought Facebook, a service created by a guy just like You can increase even more its userbase and traffic.
Although many trustworthy editor and net-guru predicted that Facebook will crash under its own weight, this service is more popular than ever, and its traffic is increasing with a 17% rate. Monthly!
It was also predicted that Google will have issues in 2008. People will protest against its expansion policy, many said some new competitor will show up and ruin Google’s fame, and so on. None of these happened so far. At least not in this context. Google was and many thought will be the number 1 search engine forever but this year it got a real competitor: Yahoo! They were always in the front line, either Google or Yahoo was the most popular, they were changing the pole position just like we change our underwear. But for about 4 months, Yahoo rules the web, considerably. As of why, I have no idea, maybe you tell me?
Even more interestingly Google’s traffic recession can’t be explained by people choosing a new alternative. While Google’s traffic decreased below Yahoo’s traffic, Yahoo’s traffic was steady. The traffic simply started to disappear from Google since the end of April.
The overall traffic on the net, data based on the number of requests sent to the root servers, shows a classy recession in the public traffic too! Maybe people to save some money chose to just not have internet connection? Maybe they don’t have money to pay the costs of having internet at home? Does this explain Google’s traffic recession, too, since more than 32% of the total internet users used Google before April and now only about 28%?
I’d be happy to read your thoughts about how the financial recession affected your life, please share your thoughts.
Digg’s popular content - Analysis
I was wondering if there is a pattern about what content will be popular on Digg. So i dug myself in the world of digg and started counting. Yes, I was extremely bored.
The result was very interesting: while there is a very clear pattern of what categories will get the most diggs, the media doesn’t really matter. Here are two graphs: the first graph shows the top ten categories which got popular on Digg, most of them got a few thousand of diggs already.
Click to enlarge
As you see, the most popular category is clearly the Comedy category, followed by the US elections and then the Odd news.
On the media side there wasn’t a very clear winner:
Click to enlarge
Images are slightly more popular, but as I said the other two medias are just behind it.
So, if you desperately need traffic and you decide to submit your content to digg, make sure that it can be categorized as Comedy and it’s an image.
Happy digging
The charts were created with an online software named ChartAll.com.
Windows XP doesn’t find hard drive yet there is
This is a very common scenario I encountered hundreds of times.
While I know for sure the hard drive exist and works correctly, on a clean Windows XP install the software can’t find any hard drive, or if I’m installing Vista, it halts at around 80%.
I know that this sounds weird, but the issue happens usually with SATA hard disks and almost never with traditional IDE hard disks. The problem in 99% of the cases is that by default the SATA hard drives work in AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) mode, that’s not good for XP because it wasn’t designed to work in that mode.
To solve the issue you simply have to enter the BIOS and switch the SATA mode from AHCI to IDE.
A much complicated solution is to get AHCI drivers for the hard disk and during install load them from a floppy disk. The problem appears if you want to install on a notebook, since modern notebooks don’t have floppy drives.
That was all. This solution will work both for XP and Vista.
If you have any question, feel free to ask, would be glad to help.
Gone fishing … Sorry… phishing: Bank of America
October 4, 2008 by Thomas I
Filed under Bulk, Online Security
I received a mail. Ok, I receive many but this was exciting:
Dear Bank Of America customer,
Protecting the security of our customers and the Bank Of America network, as a preventative measure, we have temporarily limited access to sensitive account features. To restore your account access, please take the following steps to ensure that your account has not been compromised:
After updates :
1.Login to your Bank Of America Online Banking account. In case you are not enrolled for Online Banking, you will have to fill in all the required information, including your name and you account number.
2. Review your recent account history for any unauthorized withdrawals or deposits, and check you account profile to make sure not changes have been made. If any unauthorized activity has taken place on your account, report this to Bank Of America staff immediately. To get started, please click the link below: http://update.Bankofamerica.comThis alert has been sent to you based on your preferences. If you would like to make any changes to your Online Banking Alerts service, please sign in to Online Banking and visit the Manage Alerts section. Because your reply will not be transmitted via secure e-mail, the e-mail address that generated this alert will not accept replies. If you would like to contact Bank of America with questions or comments, please sign in to Online Banking and visit the customer service section.
Bank of America, N.A. Member FDIC. Equal Housing Lender
©
2007 Bank of America Corporation. All rights reserved
Obviously, this is a phishing email. The link you see in the message body pointed to a webpage which looked like a Bank of America page, basically it was a form where I could fill in all my details then send to the hacker which set the page up.
What you don’t see, is the message header. The envelope address’s domain was a private website’s, much likely it was hacked. The domain was andyhefele.com, a really not offensive website, which consist of 3 pages, including the home page.
Another interesting thing is the sender’s IP. Guess what, it’s an IP from Ukraine from the 92.113.128.0 - 92.113.191.255 range, and is under UKRTELECOM’s management.
You can do anything you want with these messages, but don’t answer them and don’t click ANY link from within the message. Well, if you want to loose money or your personal data, then click…
PageRank Bug or a miracle?
While for some of the webmasters the last few days can be the most happy day in their short life, some of them are crying at the doors of the Google Dome for a good answer.
Why? Google’s tenth birthday resulted a worldwide Page Rank update in the Google datacenters, which made some webmasters go mad, because sites with a page rank of 6 or even more suddenly dropped to 3-4.
And why some webmasters are happy? Because their domains got extremely high rankings. I saw people whos websites with no 0 or no page rank suddenly got a page rank of 3-4 or even higher.
My case is even weirder. One of the domains I use for development purposes, never opened for the public and behind a HTTP authentication, all of sudden got a PR 8? I guess that’s , well, weird.
The recent page rank update it seems started the day before yesterday, so that makes Friday, September 26, 2008. In a moment all the sites I visit on a daily basis had their page ranks changed.
How do I check page rank? That’s simple: Google Toolbar.
By the way, which is more plausible: Google updated the PageRanks and for some websites they were extremely generous, or as they also released the new Google Toolbar, they adjusted something in the algorithm which calculates the PageRank , and they accidentally coded a bug in the algorithm?
How much page views and hits do you get?
I was wondering about this for long and what I see is only the servers’ hits I manage.
What about you? Do you know a rough number, or if you don’t want to tell this precious info, when was the most hits you got and what caused the high number of visits?
If a conversation starts I will add devoracles’s details too 
Interesting thing about a PC setup which rocks… but kills
Again, I was asked to test a PC: it was a custom built one, high tech gadgets from the CPU to the graphics card everything was optimized for performance.
The thing which risen my attention was, that the manufacturer stated in his letter that the PC is both bullet(!), fire and cold proof. Cold proof… well, a bit of insulation and you’re set, that’s not interesting, but the fire insulation and the bullet proofing…
First of all, the PC’s case was made of carbon fiber, it was really awesome for me as for some reason I adore the carbon fiber’s texture. Carbon fiber is extremely shock resistant so, the bullet proofing was done… partially! Because under this layer a Kevlar layer was hidden, that conferred the case bullet protection. Just don’t ask me why a PC has to be bullet proof. Maybe if terrorists flood your room, then at least the PC to survive, I don’t know.
Under this solid case the fire-proofing layer followed. And this was the interesting part: it was made of asbestos tiles. A very bad idea.
Asbestos is a very dangerous material, but also the most useful in many domains, the most convenient being the constructions industry. The asbestos has extremely good insulation properties, it isn’t inflammable almost at all, absorbs sound due to it’s long-fibered structure, it doesn’t conduct electricity, etc.
The asbestos has only one side effect: it’s extremely toxic. As the wind takes the tiny asbestos fibers and the arrives in the human lungs, it destroys the human body internal organ’s protective layer and forms a type of cancer called Mesothelioma. For this reason the asbestos was banned in almost every country. Interesting is that asbestos, the “miracle mineral” was used even in the fire-fighter’s clothes to protect them from the fire.
While the PC is an extremely good, it’s a killer: long time use causes cancer. This side effect is caused by the asbestos from the case’s insulation which cowardly kills the PC user.
If you are about to buy a case which is advertised as an extremely well insulated and fire-proof one, check what was insulated with. If with asbestos, better run.
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