by WebKeyDesign | Dec 29, 2005 | Webmastering
With all the talk of Google Analytics and Mint, it was easy to forget about about Tom Dyson’s tiny Peastat. If you need quick stats without a lot of graphics and without having to login to some other site, then try looking at Peastat: A small Python based script, it gives you plenty of information and it does it quickly.
Peastat is divided into four sections. The top section is a quick summary, while the next three sections are what most webmasters would be interested in. The Recent Popular Pages, tells you what pages are the most popular right now, the Recent Refferrers clues you in on what sites are sending traffic your way, and last, the Recent Popular Search Terms give you the all important key words that vistors are using to find your site.
Learn more about Peastat on WebKeyDesign’s Forum.
by WebKeyDesign | Dec 28, 2005 | WebKeyDesign
This week I added a new section to WebKeyDesign: The WebKeyDesign Store is an online shop for all those books that you need to read when you first start learning web site design. I figure that the store would help make WebKeyDesign more popular in general with our site visitors and search engines, and secondly it comes in handy for refering friends and clients to yet another source of self-help. Many times I get asked about how to learn HTML and other web technologies like PHP and MySQL, and usually I can recommend a book or two on the subject, but I always end up having to look up my recommendations on Amazon.com, so I figure why not just make an Amazon based web store? This week, I got around to putting something together that works.
The WebKeyDesign Store is powered by Associate-o-matic’s Amazon Shop script. This is a PHP based script. Most of the other Amazon scripts that I found were based on Perl, but I chose Associate-o-matic based on their Lite script which is commissioned based. Most scripts cost around $99, and their look leaves a lot to be desired. Although I did find BlueLightSoft’s AJAX based Store scipt interesting, I decided against it because it is still in testing stages.
by WebKeyDesign | Dec 27, 2005 | News & Trends
If you have a blog and care about your content, you definitely need to read Om Malik’s post on Wholesale Blog Plagiarism. Apparantly Om Malik’s popular Om Malik on Broadband Weblog has been for a long time the target of plagiarism, otherwise known as splogging. Sploggers have been using the RSS feeds from Om Malik’s site to republish his content word for word on their site. The main purpose of this is to of course make revenue from the advertisements of the splog site. Although splogs and scrappers sites do sometimes improve the original website’s pagerank, the lost ad revenue may be more important to bloggers than any pagerank improvement. When it comes to Om Malik’s blog, his popularity I would think would make his content not really suitable for splogging, but obviously sometimes sploggers do not really think these things through I guess.
In general bloggers may need to start considering just how much is their content worth and if RSS feeds should be curtailed to only include post summaries instead of the entire post. But even then, scrappers can use any combination of Perl and PHP to copy any content they wish, so the war against splogging is not going to end by turning off RSS feeds.
The irony of course is that many bloggers see themselves as non-commercial entities that spread information for free, but the minute they realize that someone else is making money off their labors, the converstation takes quite a different tone. However, can you really blame them? In Om Malik’s case, the site’s content is a literal copy, word for word; this makes it not only plagerism, but outright insulting.
by WebKeyDesign | Dec 27, 2005 | Web Site Basics
With WordPress 2.0 coming out this week, it only seems fitting that I write something about Content Management Systems. Many webmasters find it hard to choose the right CMS or weblog script to run their site. Other than trying out the demos on sites like OpenSourceCMS.com and reading an occasional review, most CMS scripts are not very well reviewed. Just recently though, MacInTouch.com started one of their user contributed reports on the subject of CMS scripts. Although the report is for webmasters currently interested in running a CMS script on Mac OS X, the information and user comments on different scripts is helpful for your basic Linux server setup.
Content Management System (CMS) Report
by WebKeyDesign | Dec 21, 2005 | Webmastering
Last year, Charles Arthur interviewed a link spammer for The Register, detailing why and how, link spammers target weblogs. The entire story is interesting in that the spammer describes how most sophisticated comment spam is actually done through proxy machines so that the spammer is not penalized by his own isp. However, the story of link spammers is no different than most other stories on the Internet. It all eventually leads to the idea that the ethics of committing such actions are very debatable, but that due to lack of consequences, the strategy continues to be very popular. This reminds me of something I read a long time ago about how locks on doors are not really for thieves, but for everyone else; meaning that a thief will break your window to get inside and rob you, while a normal person will only be tempted if you leave your doors unlocked. This is the same reasoning for spammers. If they can make money by spamming you, without being penalized, they will. In the business world marketing is everything and the temptation to view link spamming (or any type of spamming) as legitimate marketing is so great that many spammers do in fact view themselves as any number of labels, such as: affiliate, search engine optimiser, advertising consultant, or simply marketing.
The Webmaster’s Spam Problem
Regardless of what the ethics are, Comment Spam, is in the end the webmaster’s problem and no one else’s. This means that just as the link spammer invests lots of time in tweaking his arsenal of spam tools, the webmaster must invest in some counter initiatives to protect his site and content. For WordPress users, the WordPress Codex has lots of helpful information on combating comment spam, but while browsing a blog myself, I noticed a completely different strategy. The webmaster for a blog had added a warning to the bottom of her blog that warned spammers that any comment spam would result in their domain being reported to Google as a spammer.
Google actually maintains a Report Spam page, in which you are encouraged to report domains that are using deceptive practices to achieve higher search engine rankings. I am not sure if Google would accept link spammers and the domains they market as actual spam domains, but ultimately it is up to Google to decide this. I will note that Google is known to check the sites of the person who submitted the complaint as well, so Google does not take these complaints at face value.
A while back Google worked with MSNSearch and Yahoo!, to implement the nofollow attribute for links, which was suppose to prevent blog comment spam by giving no emphasis or weight to comment links, but obviously this has not totally deterred link spammers. The rel=”nofollow” attribute is implemented in WordPress 1.5 and other major blog scripts, yet I still receive many comment spam entries weekly.
It is evident that dealing with spam is going to be an ongoing task for webmasters, and that this is just one of many problems we have to deal with as the price of having a space on the Internet.
