A blog on blogging, computers and such

I have had a couple of strange experiences lately. I’ve written a few things that are more than a little critical of a couple of huge corporations. Since then, I have twice had my blog infected with malware or badware, so that Google have blocked people from going directly to my blog from Google search results.

I am not critical of Google. I think that they did the right thing, given the presence of malware on my blog.

But the thing is, I run several blogs. This is the only one that has had malware. And now this blog has had it twice. And this is the only blog where I’ve criticised huge corporations. I can’t prove anything, I have no idea who did it, it is just strange. But I am cynical. And I am don’t really believe in coincidences. Not all that much.

I run a WordPress installation. So, the first time Google told me I had malware, I was running WordPress 2.3.2. I looked through all my posts. Then I looked through my PHP-files. I found a JavaScript that looked strange in a theme file. So I did a clean upgrade to 2.3.3 and changed theme.

A few days later, the malware was back. This time I upgraded to WordPress 2.5, and changed theme again. The theme is clean, the installation is clean, Aximet is there, only clean widgets and plugins. Just as the first time. I hope WordPress 2.5 makes this install more secure. This has cost me lots of time and work. I hate it.

Who knows. I am suspicious. I may be too suspicious. Have anybody else experienced anything similar?

I was hoping Adobe would fix the problems with apdproxy.exe, which crashes my machine ever so often, and that they would stabilize Dreamweaver CS3, which I love, but which also make my PC crash ever so often.

But instead the folks at Adobe seems to have used my remaining confidence in them to upload a program called ComponentLauncher.exe onto my PC, presumably calling it an “update”. This program too will suddenly come alive and steal all my CPU, thus making my mackine useless. Fixing the problem requires turining the program off in Task Manager, or, occationally, closing down everything and rebooting (and sending off a quick prayer that neither CompnentLaucher not apdproxy will kill the machine after reboot).

Searching Google,
I find that a large number of people have the same problem as me.

So, what can I say, apart from “Congrats Adobe - you did it again!” I think Adobe is hell bent on shedding its customer base as soon as possible. Good luck!

Google Analytics is about to get a new facelift from Google, according to Web Analytics World.

Yesterday I had a chance to talk with Google Analytics’ Senior Product Manager, Brett Crosby regarding some of the new features being rolled out into Beta for Google Analytics. The one that I found most intriguing was their new benchmarking functionality which will allow users to compare your site’s metrics versus other sites. With opt-in permission from site owners, Google will be aggregating website data into different verticals allowing users to compare their data with companies in any other vertical.

Here is the blog about it from Google:

Benchmarking now available plus additional opt-in settings

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

We’re happy to announce the launch of two related new Google Analytics features: a beta version of industry benchmarking and a data-sharing settings page. Both are designed to give our customers more choice and better control over their data. We are also launching an integration with Audio Ads today, which we’ll discuss in more detail in tomorrow’s post. All of these features will begin appearing in customer accounts today, though benchmarking reports may take up to a couple weeks to show data.

Industry benchmarking is a commonly requested new service that enables customers to see how their site data compares to sites in any available industry vertical. We believe this data will provide actionable insights by providing context for users to understand how their site is doing. For example, if you have a travel website and you get a spike in traffic on Mondays, you may want to know whether other travel sites get that same spike on Mondays.

You can also compare your site against an industry vertical different than your own. For example, you might see that your industry’s traffic dips at certain times of the year while another industry’s traffic increases. Based on that information, you may wish to explore cross promotional opportunities to drive traffic back and forth.

For more information, take a look at the benchmarking FAQs in the Google Analytics help center.

Of course, benchmarking only works if people can opt to share their data into the system, so we’re also introducing a new data-sharing settings page. On this page, customers can choose whether to opt in or opt out of sharing their Analytics data. To be clear, we are not sharing individual data with competitors; we bucket data into industry verticals and then anonymize and aggregate the data. Once you opt in, it may take a couple weeks for the reports to populate.

You can also elect to share your data with other Google services. This setting will allow us to provide you with additional advanced new features. For example, many of you have asked us to integrate Conversion Optimizer (which is currently only available to AdWords Conversion Tracking users) into Google Analytics. By opting to share your data with Google, you’ll be able to take advantage of these related new features as they become available. For more information, take a look at the data-sharing options FAQs in the help center.

This is good news, especially for larger sites and relatively standard sites where benchmarking is meaningful and usesul. However, at this point too few details are available to make it possibly to really know in any detail how useful this will be. But it is sufficiently interesting for me, at least, to eagerly await momre news and information from Google.

I have previously written a very positive posting about using Windows Live Writer as desktop editor for Wordpress.

I have installed and used Live Writer on my WordPress installation. It works beautifully, but has created huge problems for me. As it turns out, the program for some reason uses ISO code representation of extended characters instead of “standard” HTML (I have the Norwegian version of the program, and I am not certain whether this is a problem in other versions - but it probably is in non-English versions).

That is, « is represented as & #171; (ISO Latin-1, with a blank space inserted after & to prevent from not displaying) instead of  & laquo; (HTML). And so on, for all the extended characters.

So why is this a huge problem: Because in WordPress, plugins like “Sensitive Tag Clouds” and the like assume standard HTML. And WordPress 2.3.x tags seem to be generated on this assumption as well. So my Wordpress installation generates tags that include these odd ISO-code numbers into my Google sitemap. But when that page comes up in a search, and the users wants to open my page, the page can not be found, and generates a 404-error.

So I am losing a traffic due to this program. I have gone through the documentation for Windows Live Writer, and as far as I can see, this is not at all documented. And there doesn’t seem to be any way to configure this. Also, you can only see the representation when you switch from normal to HTML view in Live Writer.

The only solution I have so far found is to write the text directly into the HTML-view instead of using the ordinary views. Then the characters will be correctly represented in WordPress.

So for me this has meant: (a) I have stopped using Live Writer, and (b) I have had to go back and correct all the post I had written using it before I detected the problem.

Be warned! This is not a good program to use with WordPress installations!

– Peter

One of the many signs of Google’s increasingly strong position as the number one search engine in the world, is witnessed in the lacking ability of Yahoo to make blog content searchable for its users.

I have just looked into the stats for my blogs. This is always interesting. But the single most interesting finding this time was that Google has delivered about 150 times as many hits to my blogs as Yahoo has. This difference is so large that it blows my mind. It really seems Google is running in circles around Yahoo as far as blog content is concerned!

I am unable to understand why. That is, I can see some explanations for it, but they only explain part of the difference, I think.

First off, I am using the XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress plugin. This automatically notifies Google and Ask about updates on my blogs, and they are both quick to index the content. But in order to update Yahoo I need an application ID. And the links in the plugin takes me to the Yahoo developer Center. And since I’m not a developer, I don’t register there. And no other info is provided by Yahoo either. So I dropped it.

I have tried to find out how to automatically ping Yahoo, but I am unable to find it on their pages. And info I have found elsewhere, doesn’t work because Yahoo have move their pages with no info about where it is now to be found. This, to me, is arrogance.

Second, Yahoo don’t seem to read sitemaps well at all. Both on my sites and on my blogs they serve up old versions of pages to users.

So, to me, it seems Yahoo is losing the battle because they simply are not adapting to the changes in cyberspace fast enough, and because they are arrogant. They expect site owners to go through a lot of trouble to find out how to best use them. Instead, they should recognize that they probably need us more (as a collective) than we need them, and be a little more humble and flexible. As it is, I think they deserve to loose the search engine war against Goggle.

Overall, I am very satisfied with WordPress as a blogging platform. The platform itself is relatively strict and stiff, even awkward to use, but all the plugins, widgets and improvements from the user community makes it great.

However, my relationship to WordPress is not unproblematic. Our relationship is not one of peaceful coexistence. In some regards, I am very dissatisfied. I have written before about lacking quality control with templates and plugins that are downloadable even from WordPress’ own site. Templates where columns drop down, widgets don’t work properly, and so forth, translates into grief and dissatisfaction with WordPress itself. I suspect I am not alone in feeling this way when I lose time and get annoyed because something is not working properly.

Lack of proper support for foreign languages is probably the one thing about WordPress that annoys me the most. I have a Norwegian language blog. Here is what happens: I publish a new post entitled “Nye bøker våren 2008″ (translated: New books spring 2008). Now, when this is saved using the title as URL, WordPress saves it as “Nye bker vren 2008″. In other words, it drops the Norwegian characters “ø” and “å”.

This may seem like a small thing. But then there is Google. Google supports foreign characters. Thus, when somebody searches for “bøker våren 2008″, they will not find my post, because my post (as far as Google is concerned) is about “bker vren 2008″.

Now, this really is annoying. How would American or English bloggers feel if their “books reviews” got listed as “bk rviws” or something similar? For a guy that takes search engine optimization seriously, this is so bad I can hardly even begin to describe it!

I really don’t know where the problem lies - in the code for the WordPress platform, the widgets, the plugins, the templates, or PHP itself. I am not enough of a programmer to know. But I do know that if WordPress wants to capture a part of the growing blog market, something needs to be done. WordPress ought to commit to supporting foreign languages, as well as doing something rapidly with respect to quality control.

– Peter

Yesterday I lost about half an hour of my work time, thanks to Adobe. As I have stated before, I am a great fan of Adobe. I love the functionality of their software - Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Photoshop, and so on. All excellent software.

But all is not well in my relationship to Adobe. A little program that comes with the Adobe software, apdproxy.exe, is really annoying. When I boot up my machine (a new Dell XPS with 2 Gb RAM, running Windows XP), this little program sometimes makes my machine grind to a halt. When this happens, and I eventually get into the Windows task manager (this takes a while because all CPU is taken up by this annoying program), I most often can observe that apdproxy.exe is eating between 95% and 99% of my CPU. Then it is a matter of closing it down. With this done, my PC comes alive again.

Also, I frequently experience Dreamweaver crashes when I am working on my Web sites. In the middle of editing something, often simple copy and paste operations, Dreamweaver simply freezes. Sometimes it recovers, sometimes not.

I wonder why Adobe doesn’t do anything with these problems. They are well known. I am not the only blogger who has expressed dis-satisfaction.

I am getting quite grumpy over this. At this point I have started to wonder what to do? Should I discontinue using software I otherwise love? Or should I simply start sending bills to Adobe for my lost time?

– Peter

Here are two good resources on the proper use of title tags to drive traffic to a site:

The first article discusses both title and meta-tags:

http://www.searchbliss.com/seo-tools/search-engine-optimization.htm

The second article is more narrowly focused on titles:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/best-practices-for-title-tags

The articles are good introductions to this topic. However, the advice to include you company or site name in the title tag of your pages is a bit too strong. My thinking is that usually it is best not to include it - simply because it is a waste of very valuable space! I would say that the ony exception to this rule is where you are willing to invest a lot - including your valuable title space - in building a brand name. For most purposes, say for blogs and most web sites that do not sell branded products, I would, as a rule, say that the name should not be in the title. For these types of sites, it is usually sufficient to display the name of the blog or site prominently on each page.

– Peter

One way to learn about search engine optimization (SEO) is to learn from successful sites. I have found an example of good use of the HTML “title” and “meta”-tags.

If you search using Google, with the keywords “books” and “reviews”, you will find that the number one spot is occupied by http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/ . Why this site, you may ask, and not, for instance, New York Times Book Review, or Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or some other large corporation.

Well, there may be several answers. However, one part of the answer is good use of title and meta-tags. Look at this:

meta name="description" content="Links to free and publicly available professional reviews of recently released books"

meta name="keywords" content="book reviews, reviews of books, book review site, professional book review, fiction, nonfiction"

title>Reviews of Books - Book Reviews

So part of what is happening is that the site uses title and meta tags very, very efficiently! They have chosen an extremely narrow range of keywords, and optimized for just two words - namely “books” and “reviews”.

Now, when I said “part of what is happening”, I did it because another reason they score so well is that the site also is frequently linked to - checking with Google I found 1710 links to the site (please note that this is a relatively low number for a site ranking at the number one spot - the New York Times Book Review, which is ranked number two on the same search, by comparison has 10500 links to their site).

So, what’s the lesson: Decide what to optimize on for a given page, and use title and meta tags efficiently!

Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) in my experience is 5% smartness, 95% work. Being smart involves having a strategy, basically a goal and a set of principles or rules about how to best achieve the goal. I try to implement the least time consuming and most important rules first, and then to do the more demanding tasks later.  Regardless of all the books written on the subject and all the advertisements by consultants claiming to have more or less scientific knowledge about SEO, I do not view SEO as a science. Search engines are based on science, but SEO is mostly art. The reaon, of course, is that the search engines don’t want us (or their competitors) to know exactly what they are doing. Therefore, there is far too much uncertainty and far too many unpredictable elements involved for anyone to know anything with much certainty when it comes to SEO.

Consequently, I think, I examine, I formulate rules, and I implement them, and I study the results. Then I try to learn from my mistakes and build on what seems to work. So far, from what I can see using my site statistics, is that using page titles with the most important keywords in them works well. The same is the case for the use of semantic URLs - that is, URLs for my web pages that use natural language and contain keywords. For example, a page saved as www.mydomain.com/bk1xxx1222.htm does not get as many hits as one called www.mydomain.com/nokia9920.htm

So for the moment I am spending at least an hour, sometimes 2 hours, each  day implementing these simple rules on my web sites. And it does help. Over the last month or so, I have observed considerable increases in the number of hits, both from Google and other search engines, on the pages that I have worked with. But it takes time to do the work, and it takes time before I begin to see the results as well.

– Peter