Tag: ‘wordpress’ · TangleBones

Any good ideas?

So, in the inter­ests of min­i­mal­ism, I’ve removed most of the cruft from the site. I wasn’t using much of it, and I can’t imag­ine that anyone else is either. I added in a number of new fea­tures, mostly for myself, that Mark Pil­grim has been using as he makes his site more min­i­mal - inspired by the exact blog posts that I’d been read­ing. It’s a small Inter­net. (In fact we both prob­a­bly found those posts through Simon Willison’s book­marks, which makes it an even smaller Internet.)

I added in OpenID sup­port for those that like it. This allows you to verify that you are who you say you are - sort of. What it really says is that you are the person affil­i­ated with a given URL, which isnt’ the same thing at all. And to be per­fectly honest, it actu­ally allows some­body to say that they know the pass­word nec­es­sary to make use of a cer­tain URL or a way to exploit the system that nobody has fig­ured out a way around, so it doesn’t really mean much of any­thing. Still, handy.

I also added an Open Search fea­ture so if you’re using a sup­port­ing browser (Fire­fox and IE 7 at the moment, I think) you could add Tan­gle­Bones to the list of search tools in your browsers search box. I don’t know why you would, since search­ing Google along with “tanglebones” or some­thing is more likely to get what you want, but it’s mostly there so that I can use it. But since I also made the search results much more help­ful, it’s better than nothing.

One very nice change for me is that the page itself should shrink and grow nicely with each user’s indi­vid­ual font set­tings. If you scale up the fonts, every­thing should con­tinue to work pretty well. Since my eyes aren’twhat they used to be, I find myself bump­ing up the font sizes on many sites, and having my own site in order is impor­tant to me.

Besides all of that and a few behind-​the-​scenes changes, I also made the var­i­ous kinds of pages (date-​based archives, cat­e­gory pages, search results) more con­sis­tent and useful, while also cut­ting back on the amount of mean­ing­less debris clut­ter­ing up the page.

If you see any­thing else that can be removed, let me know. And if you think some­thing needs to come back, I’d like to hear that as well.

But there’s still one clut­tery bit left on the site. Word­Press lets you define a “tagline” or “description” of your site - right now mine says, “A Per­sonal Website,” which isn’t ter­ri­bly useful or descrip­tive. So here’s your task: tell me what to put in there. What short, pos­si­bly pithy phrase sums up this place? I’m at a loss, so any­thing you come up with is prob­a­bly an improve­ment. Anything?

This is getting disturbing

This site has been float­ing along for a little over 6 years. It started as a col­lec­tion of hand-​edited HTML files with some PHP to allow com­ments, changed into some­thing more like a single-​user forum before turn­ing into a blog four years ago. In those four years I’ve tried 4 dif­fer­ent blog­ging pack­ages and two dif­fer­ent hosts. I’ve gotten in fights, said a lot of things I regret, and writ­ten some­where around 500 entries. It’s been a lot of fun.

Two years ago I real­ized that I had a healthy amount of search engine traf­fic, so I added some Google ads to some of the pages. Not because I wanted to get rich off of the site, but because I fig­ured that if I was going to have my band­width eaten up by vis­i­tors from Google, I might as well make some money off them. (Not that I ever really made any money: in two years I’ve earned $148.80.) And since I’ve noticed that very few of the searches that lead people to my site seem to match the con­tent they find here, I fig­ured that maybe Google’s ads would be a win-​win: they might link to the what vis­i­tors were really search­ing for.

Then last year I real­ized that I had a pretty great Google page rank of 6. I was get­ting emails every few weeks asking me if I would place a link on my site in exchange for a few hun­dred dol­lars. The money seemed good, but the way I was approached was a little seedy. About 6 months ago I signed on with Text Link Ads to sell links in my side­bar. It seemed pretty harm­less: I get about $45 a month, and some other sites get a link. (So far I’ve made $272.93, better than Google AdSense, but no reason to think about quit­ting my day job.)

I started post­ing again on this site in earnest back in August. I man­aged to double the amount of traf­fic I was get­ting, and I restored a couple hun­dred arti­cles that had been lost when I tried upgrad­ing my old blog soft­ware last year. I was feel­ing pretty good about the site, so I down­loaded a bunch of plu­g­ins that were sup­posed to opti­mize Word­Press for search engines. I started check­ing my site sta­tis­tics every day to see what I could do to draw more traf­fic. I even briefly flirted with adding two other sets of ads (since removed).

While I was hoping to make a little cash from my blog, what I really wanted was to increase my read­er­ship. It’s not that I don’t like writ­ing for the six of you who com­ment (I love you all!), but I write about a lot of things that I find inter­est­ing that nobody I know seems to care about. It’d be nice to con­nect with some more people who share those interests.

Of course, I’m not so proud that I can’t admit that the main reason for blog­ging is vanity. Not “hey look at me, I’m hot shit” vanity, but “this is neat, and so am I by extension.” As a male of repro­duc­tive age, show­ing off is wired into my per­son­al­ity. I get that. And since I don’t play sports or drive a fancy car, blog­ging about some­thing cool I saw on YouTube is one of my only outlets.

But all of the above is just a pre­lude to what’s actu­ally wear­ing on my mind: I’ve lost half my page rank. About a week ago, Google updated their indices, and a lot of sites that were a PR 6 like this one dropped to a 5. That sucked. But now it appears that I’m on a down­ward slide. I hit 4 on Monday, and as of yes­ter­day, Tan­gle­Bones is a 3. In addi­tion, Google seems to have lost or removed any inbound links to this site. So a link:tanglebones.com search turns up noth­ing. Yahoo! still has over 1800 pages that link to me, but Google has deleted those references.

There’s some talk that Google is pun­ish­ing sites that sell text links, and if so I don’t know what to do. I hate the idea of losing my page rank because it means that my site will drop fur­ther down the list­ings of Google’s search results. It makes the site harder for people to find, and will seri­ously reduce the number of vis­i­tors. I like the money from the ads which I’ve been using to sub­si­dize my comic book habit, but I love seeing the graph of my traf­fic going up. But since nobody really knows what’s going on with Google, there’s no telling if that’s the real reason I’m slip­ping in the rank­ings, or if chang­ing things will do any­thing to improve the sit­u­a­tion. (Another reason for my love-​hate rela­tion­ship with Google.)

So now I’m stuck. I don’t know what to do, and even if I did, I wouldn’t know what I wanted to do. And of course, because Google is trying to stop people form gaming the system, they can’t tell anyone how their rank­ings work. Worst of all, I agree with their secrecy, while at the same time I want to know what to do.

So that’s how my Hal­loween is going. How about you?

Introducing PlainTags for WordPress

I finally got my upgrade to Word­Press straight­ened out (do your­self a favor and upgrade the Google XML sitemaps and Sim­i­lar Posts plu­g­ins), but I was a little dis­ap­pointed with the new Tag Sup­port. It’s a big improve­ment over the old built-​in tag sup­port, but I wish they’d have worked toward fea­ture parity with Ulti­mate­Tag­War­rior. To bring back some of the old fea­tures like tag man­age­ment and auto­mated tag gen­er­a­tion, try out Christine’s Word­Press Things.

One thing that is still miss­ing is the abil­ity to output a plain list of tags. Word­Press assumes that if you want tags, you want those tags to be links. I, how­ever, just want plain old text some­times. So I hacked around in the Word­Press code and made my very first (sorry excuse for a) plugin: PlainTags.

I’m hoping not to have to main­tain this plugin for very long, as this really ought to be part of the Word­Press core code. In fact, there may be a sim­pler way to do what I want, but if there is, I couldn’t find it. Either way, enjoy this plugin, and let me know if it gives you any problems.