Recently in Blogging Category

It must be a great source of pride to have your web site surface as the number one search result on Google when you search for just your singular first name. Even with a relatively unique name like "Byrne" I have no hope in hell of appearing above the likes of David Byrne or Gabriel Byrne. Alas my relative obscurity.

Of course what must be even more impressive is when your name is as common as Bill, John or Matt and your website still comes up as the number on search result. I mean come on, how many Matts must there be in the world?

For example, if you search for "Matt" today, guess who comes up? A TypePad blogger who in 2006, chronicled a 6 month adventure that took him through 39 countries on all 7 continents to do one simple thing: video tape himself dancing. Then one year later after gaining a little bit of notoriety he was approached again to go on another round-the-world trip; but this time to video tape himself dancing with other people.



The pride I feel is that it is the company I work for is the one that helps Matt tell his story and millions more like him. Not all them come up as the number one search result in Google for their name, but thanks to TypePad and other blogging systems, their blog and web site does come up as their stories unfold.

One of the primary design goals for the Universal Template Set released in Movable Type 4.1, was to create a template set that was not only compelling on its own, but also something that could be easily configured and modified to create new, interesting and beautiful web sites. This blog is powered by the Universal Template Set and even uses a photo I took myself of the Seattle Public Library.

Every now and again I stumble upon a web site using the Universal Template Set and amazed at how not only how easily users can make their own, but also by its clear design flexibility:

Are you using the Universal Template Set for your blog? Let me know and I will add you to the gallery!

From ZDNet, A look at Obama's IT strategy: The Facebook connection and the scale challenge

Obama kept his IT strategy simple. The campaign didn't customize heavily and it didn't look for bleeding edge technology. It used the same stuff the rest of the blogging world does-Movable Type, PHP, MySQL with a dose of community. The competitive advantage came from using social networking to "empower a highly decentralized, largely self-organizing, network of volunteers," reports Carr.

Today I am happy to announce the availability of the first Movable Type plugin to make use of Movable Type 4.2's built in support for OpenID 2.0. The Yahoo! OpenID plugin for Movable Type allows users to provide Yahoo! users with a specially crafted login experience specific to them:

Movable Type's ability to allow developers to build these customized logins, such as the one for AOL/AIM and WordPress, helps to make OpenID accessible to everyone - especially those who don't understand that a URL can be used to login to a web site.

Movable Type and Drupal are the only blogging platforms that have support for OpenID 2.0 built into its core that I know of.

Make is brand I adore because it teaches us in its many ways that the best way to understand something is to take it apart, and in some cases to build something else in its place. As a hacker, this is something that is profoundly resonate with me as often it is the only way I can understand something.

So when Make, whose website and blog is powered by Movable Type, approached me to update an old plugin of mine to work with Movable Type 4, how could I refuse?

Therefore I am happy to announce the AutoLink plugin for Movable Type.

AutoLink provides users with a way of creating a list of "hot words" on their blog. Whenever these words appear in their content, they are automatically linked to a designated URL. For example, if you were to frequently write about Movable Type, and anytime you mention the phrase "Movable Type" in a post you want it to be linked to http://www.movabletype.org/ without having to enter the link manually. This plugin will do that for you.

To Make and everyone else: I can't wait to hear your feedback.

Clean Sweep is a plugin I released in conjunction with Movable Type 4.0 to help users keep URLs and permalinks valid on their web site even after a major change to your URL structure. The plugin worked by tracking broken links on your web site and allowing you to create rewrite rules within Movable Type for those broken links. So, how did this help me?

1. It increased my site traffic! I am not SEO obsessed. I probably should be, but I am not. So over the years as I have changed my URL structure numerous times and unwittingly broke a lot of inbound links to me. As someone who does not monitor my web server access log for 404s, this went largely unnoticed. Then when I installed Clean Sweep I discovered hundreds of URLs people were attempting to access that resulted in a dead end. As soon as I fixed them people entered my site as opposed to leaving, and many of them stuck around to look for more content. Traffic went up immediately.

2. Ad revenue went up! This is naturally the result of #1 above as there is always a correlation between ad revenue and site traffic. I will add though that many of the links coming into me were simple a cut and paste error somewhere on the Interweb. These are broken links I could never anticipate. Clean Sweep allowed me to catch all possible ways someone could attempt to come into my site and correct them before they hit a 404 page.

3. I fixed broken images! Web pages were not the only thing people were trying to find but couldn't. I also found a number of images and screenshots that had managed to break over the years. As a result my content actually got better and looked as professional as the day I published it.

Today I released a new version of Clean Sweep that is smarter than ever before.

This new version (1.1) will look at the URL being requested that could not be found and attempt to auto correct it for any common causes for broken links. This new simple rule set will automatically correct the following mistakes:

• Change underscores to hyphens - many users like hyphenated URLs not only for their aesthetics but for their purported SEO benefits. Users wishing to switch to using hyphens can now do so without affecting their page rank and without losing traffic.
• Map legacy Movable Type URL formats - old, old, old versions of Movable Type created file names that used an entry id as opposed to a basename. Clean Sweep will automatically detect this and redirect a user to the proper destination.
• Look for entries with a common basename - users who have switched from a category-based permalink to a date-based permalink will now have Clean Sweep redirect users accordingly.

These changes have added one last benefit for Clean Sweep:

Clean Sweep now allows me to clean up a lot of cruft that had built up on my blog and to safely change my URL structure without worrying about how Google might penalize me or how it might impact my users.

Want to test it out? Check out these URLs and see how majordojo redirects them accordingly:

• http://www.majordojo.com/archives/000675.php
• http://www.majordojo.com/2005/07/goodbye_bookque.php
• http://www.majordojo.com/personal-projects/goodbye_bookque.php