Note: I am writing this more for myself so first off I don’t lose the linked post I talk about in this post. As well I think it is a valid discussion bloggers should be having.
The blogging world is wide and varied and when it comes to blog layout we are seeing some shift away from the typical top to bottom reverse chronological displays. More of the news type sites are experimenting with a magazine style made famous by Brian Gardner with his Revolution theme for Wordpress.
On the whole though the reverse chronology layout of content remains the rule of thumb for the vast majority of bloggers. However there are rumblings that this hallowed ideal of blogging may not be the best for that majority of bloggers and one of the best posts I have read so far on the subject is by Chris Pearson.
Darn near every blog is the same, and this is thanks to the fact that just about every Content Management System (CMS) on the planet has the same default IA structure for blogs. Generally speaking, blogs are presented in reverse chronological order – that is, the newest, freshest content is presented first.
Unfortunately, this setup is speeding towards antiquity. It works for news sites, but unless your site falls under this heading, then I’m going to suggest that this is likely not the best setup for you! With that in mind, what’s the problem here?
Chris goes on to lay out a really good argument as to why bloggers should seriously consider bucking the status quo of blog design and start thinking about their content from the incoming reader’s point of view.
When I first started working on web sites way back when with things like Dreamweaver one of the things I had always been told was to make sure I always included keyword meta tags in the header. The reason being that search engines used them as a way to index sites.
Now up until today I had maintained that thought but it turns out that the biggest search engine on the web doesn’t pay any attention to them.
Q: Does Google ever use the "keywords" meta tag in its web search ranking?
A: In a word, no. Google does sell a Google Search Appliance, and that product has the ability to match meta tags, which could include the keywords meta tag. But that’s an enterprise search appliance that is completely separate from our main web search. Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.
URL shorteners have been in the news a lot lately especially given the near closing of tr.im, one of the more popular URL shorteners out there. The problem that services like these present is what happens in the event one of those services that you use decides to close its doors for good?
Well for those bloggers who are using the hosted blogging service at Wordpress.com there is no need to worry about that problem anymore. In a post last night Matt Mullenweg announced that Wordpress.com now has it’s own URL shortening service
URL shorteners are nothing new, Tiny URL has been around for 100 years, but WP.me is different in a few ways.
WP.me is the only two-letter .me domain in the world.
Every blog and post on WordPress.com has a WP.me URL now.
These are all exposed in the <head> using rel=shortlink.
It doesn’t work for any URL in the world, just WP.com-hosted ones.
The links are permanent, they will work as long as WordPress.com is around.
WP.me is spam-free, because we are constantly monitoring and removing spam from WP.com.
The only problem is that for right now this service is only available via the admin backend of hosted blogs on Wordpress.com. Hopefully at some point this feature will be added to the self-hosted Wordpress powered blogs.
Courtesy of both Zee at TheNextWeb.com and David Peralty at Blogging Pro comes word of another security patch / update for the Wordpress 2.8.x branch. Apparently the exploit will let an irritating twat bypass a security check and reset your Admin password – which we all know isn’t a great idea.
Yesterday a vulnerability was discovered: a specially crafted URL could be requested that would allow an attacker to bypass a security check to verify a user requested a password reset. As a result, the first account without a key in the database (usually the admin account) would have its password reset and a new password would be emailed to the account owner. This doesn’t allow remote access, but it is very annoying.
Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go and do some upgrading.
