Mar 5, 2009
Like any good obsessive-compulsive blogger, I frequently pour over my web site statistics looking for interesting stuff. One thing that caught my eye is that search results coming in from Google tends to link to threaded comment pages for entries.
For example, I’d get hits to /blog/2009/03/05/entry-slug/comment-page-1/, which is an URL that’s pretty hard to actually find on the page — it’s only used for permanent links to entry comments, with an anchor to the comment ID tacked on, like this.
What I’d prefer to see is incoming hits to the actual blog entry URL – /blog/2009/03/05/entry-slug/ in this case. Luckily, there’s a smart and simple solution — canonical URLs. The Google Webmaster blog explains it nicely with examples.
So I simply add a canonical tag referencing the preferred URL in each page. Now, it’s just the preferred URL on my side — this is just a hint to search engines that tells them that this page is a duplicate, and that I’d prefer them to let results point to one particular page of these duplicates. In 99% of the cases it will be respected, though.
The actual code is just a few lines. Add this in header.php of your theme, somewhere in the head:
<?php if (is_singular()) { ?>
<link rel="canonical" href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" />
<?php } ?>
is_singular is a function that returns true if any of is_single(), is_page() or is_attachment return true — in other words, if you’re currently visiting a single entry, a page or an attachment.
With this, each entry sub-page of comments has the main entry URL as their canonical URL. Now to wait a few days and see when the search engines pick up the change.
Jan 1, 2007
When the last 10 posts on your blog spans nearly a full year it’s about time to rethink the whole blogging thing.
Still stuck in southern Sweden. Still doing pretty much nothing at all. Except for playing World of Warcraft. Today it’s new year’s eve, and I treat it like I treat it every year: I ignore it completely.
My sister gave me the first season of Lost for Christmas. Two days later I saw the last episode. 30 minutes later I came home with the second season. The plot pacing is a bit slow, but half the enjoyment is to see the flashbacks and discover how people were before they crashed on the island.
I think I’m going to abandon WordPress and try Mephisto instead. While WP has served me well, the jungle of plugins I need to update annoys me. And I really don’t like the theme format.
Aug 7, 2005
I don’t like the verb “blog.” Actually, I kind of hate it. I despise sentences like “I blogged about this or that.”
But then I thought to myself, “Self, what is it you’re doing here if it’s not blogging?”
Well, I feel like I’m going the same thing I’ve done since 1995 or so, only some people now call it blogging. I still call it writing. This is a blog, but I write on it.
I like words. One might even say I’m a big fan of them, both the words themselves and their visual representation. Typography is how I got interested in etymology. Sadly, blog turned into a hyped-up overused word that started to replace the already perfectly good word write.
Jun 29, 2005
As another attempt at decentralizing stuff I tend to do at more than one computer (I recently switched from Thunderbird to Gmail, despite having a very fine IMAP server available), I’ve now started using NewsGator to read most of my feeds.
I use FeedDemon on the laptop. I could easily install it on my stationary machine as well, but then we have the problem of feeds appearing as unread on both machines.
NewsGator has since bought FeedDemon, and will integrate them later — things I read in FeedDemon get flagged as read in NewsGator, and vice versa. I have a few issues with the NewsGator interface — a few changes could make it so much easier to use — but no major gripes.
Also, am I a geek when I put my compilation of World of Warcraft plugins in a Subversion repository so I can check them out someplace else?
Dec 12, 2004
The change should have been completely transparent and invisible to you, so here’s the info: I’m running WordPress now.
So that’s the fourth time I’ve switched blog CMS this year. Movable Type → WordPress → Textpattern → MT again → WordPress.
The main reason for switching is that the comment spam problem for Movable Type has become completely unbearable. It can quite literally kill a server. MT-Blacklist helps, but has a flaw that allows some comment spam to pass right through it.
And then there’s the whole “rebuild on every comment” aspect. If MT gets hit with 50 spams in 10 seconds, that’s 50 mt-comments.cgi processes that are all rebuilding a page. Sometimes the same page.
The TextDrive servers can easily push 20,000,000 hits per day. Yet mt-comments.cgi can effectively push the server load up into the 300s. This data speaks for itself — 94% of the hits are to mt-comments.cgi. 3-400 of them are proper comments, the rest is spam.
WordPress and Textdrive are dynamic. There’s no page to generate every time a comment hits.
I still get spam, though. Spammers monitor web services like Weblogs.com and go spam them as soon as they see an updated blog there. I get some spam every time I write a new entry.
Enter Spam Karma. So far it’s stopped spam dead in its tracks, and this far more CPU efficient than MT-Blacklist. It works great, and the focus is to require as little interaction as possible from the blog owner.
In closing, WordPress has matured immensely since I last tried it. This will be my weapon of choice for quite some time now.
Aug 24, 2004
Today I read my first feed in a long while. I’ve been clean otherwise. I just kicked the habit when I switched from Windows to Linux, mainly due to the fact that all available feed readers for Linux suck.
I thought I’d miss it, but I didn’t. I quit, cold turkey.
Now that I’m back on Windows again (mostly because I missed a couple of games) I re-installed FeedDemon and eyed a couple of the thousands of accumulated headlines, but I marked most of them as read without reading them. Not very interesting stuff to read.
There are a rare few sites that I always read, though. Expect me to sniff around and make a whole bunch of comments on your latest entries.
Also, it only took two weeks from reinstalling Movable Type to getting hit by comment spam.
Aug 29, 2003
It appears that Fox gave up the fight concerning their stated ownage of the phrase “fair and balanced.” Good riddance.
Googling for the phrase lists Fox News as number one, but the rest of the hits on the first page appears to be blogs. Good work, grassroots!
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