Alistair Lattimore » Blogging

WordPress 3.0 Upgrade

Al — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 11:27:34 +0000

WordPress, the popular open source blogging software that powers this site and literally millions of others around the internet, has been updated to version 3.0. Version 3.0 has been some six months in the making, has seen contributions from 218 developers around the world and has resulted in a lot of new features and over 1217 enhancements and bug fixes.

I’ve gone through and updated all of the sites I own with the latest version, which is why my site looks different at the moment as I haven’t installed my old theme or bothered to make any changes to the new default Twenty Ten theme that ships with WordPress 3.0.

As predictable as the sun rising, the upgrade from the 2.9.x series of WordPress was simple, fast and no fuss. Back up your database and site contents in case something goes wrong as a precaution & then hit the go button. By the time you’ve depressed your mouse button, the upgrade is nearly complete.

I now just have to go through the paces of installing and checking all of the WordPress plugins that I use work with version 3.0, which should only take about half an hour or so.

DoFollow No Longer

Al — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:03:47 +0000

In 2005 Google decided they were going to attempt to unsettle the online spam ecosystem by recommending that web sites add an additional attribute to a link from site A to site B if they were not verified to be trustworthy. For instance, if someone left a comment on my site who I didn’t know or couldn’t vouch for – I would add a rel=”nofollow” to the link to their site.

While it sounds like a small change, the longer term plans were for search engines to not include those links when ranking a given web sites content. It was common place for spammers to comment spam thousand or millions of blogs, leaving a link to their preferred sites. Before the rel=”nofollow” attribute was introduced, the search engines had no way of knowing if a web site owner trusted that site and as such had to use other methods of measuring trustworthiness.

The intention is clear, by removing the incentive for a spammer by using rel=”nofollow” in the links – it was hoped it would have an impact on the insidious and incredibly aggressive spam ecosystem online. Unfortunately, spammers aren’t the kind of people that just roll over at the first sign of a battle and the war on spam raged on. As the rel=”nofollow’ attribute gained momentum over the years, spammers have subsequently sought out web sites which were considered dofollow – in that they have clean links that the search engines will count when ranking a web site.

As I’ve upgraded WordPress over the years, I’ve been carrying the same set of themes or templates forward through the upgrades and hadn’t bothered to upgrade to a newer base theme. Of course this meant that links from my site were dofollow links and were valuable to the spammers. So valuable in fact that my site has been listed countless times on different forums as being a dofollow blog – essentially proclaiming to the spammers of the world that they should target my site for high quality backlinks.

I’m happy to say that after a recent upgrade to WordPress 2.9.x, I ported my current theme over to a new base theme provided in the 2.9.x code base which uses rel=”nofollow” links by default. In fact, if I want to allow people to have clean links – I’ll need to specifically allow them by use of a plugin – which is fine by me.

This will no doubt upset the spammers out there that thought they’d be getting easy, free dofollow links from my site. While I understand why they want my clean links, I also hate having to deal with comment spam – so I’m going to leave my comments rel=”nofollow” from now on.

WordPress Upgrade

Al — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:06:51 +0000

The WordPress development team released the next major update for the popular blogging platform, version 2.9 on the 19th December 2009 – code named Carmen. With it came over 500 bug fixes and enhacements from version 2.8.6 which was the previous latest build available.

When the WordPress team release a minor revision, moving from 2.8 into the 2.9 version space I like to wait until the next point release has been made before upgrading. Normally a raft of very subtle issues will arise when it hits the community and millions of people are using it instead of only tens of thousands.

On the 4th January 2010, WordPress devlopment team released version 2.91. after going through a beta and a release candidate which included about 25 bug fixes and enhancements over the initial 2.9 release.

Instead of doing a standard upgrade, which involves me taking a databae backup, unpacking the WordPress source and uploading it – I instead opted for a completely clean installation. This time around, I still took the backup (good practice) but instead of just uploading the source code – I deleted everything first and then uploaded a fresh copy of WordPress – which mean no extraneous files laying around.

At the same time I’ve gone back to the standard WordPress theme for a short period of time and installed a raft of very popular WordPress plugins to make things run a little more smoothly. In the next few days, I’ll be moving back to my old theme and will update my own WordPress plugins to make sure they work with the latest version of WordPress.

2009 Traffic Statistics

Al — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 13:42:07 +0000

Following on from my 2008 web statistics, below is a summary of what traffic the site took in 2009.

In 2006 the site took about 95,000 visitors, increasing to 145,000 and declining to 135,000 respectively in 2007 and 2008. In 2009 the site took 106,930 visitors over the entire year which resulted in 136,525 pageviews. It’ll come as no surprise that from a traffic driving potential, a lot fewer people are interested in reading about my personal ramblings compared to technical style posts that I used to post.

While last year saw a couple posts catch a moderate amount of attention and punch through the metronomic rise and fall in traffic each day, in 2009 none of my posts really got any traction within the greater internet. Not surprisingly traffic did start to decline towards the end of the year, however I’m happy that it wasn’t obliterated like it was last year when I moved web servers within the same host.

The traffic breakdown, just like in 2008 shows the complete dominance that Google has within the web search market. Yahoo! are still the first non-Google search engine and is still delivering approximately 2.5% of the traffic the they were in 2008. The latest addition to the web search ecosystem is Microsoft’s Bing, which sits at position five. Of course, that isn’t a fair comparison since they haven’t been around for the entire year. If you count Bing, Live and MSN together they drove about 1750 visits for the year putting them in at fourth however by the end of May 2010 I expect Bing to have delivered 2000 visits – narrowing the gap against Yahoo!.

The most popular posts for the year were similar to 2006, 2007 and 2008 but with a few newcomers:

Removing those posts from the top of the list since they clearly dominate, changes things a little:

However still none from 2009 were showing up in the list. Isolating the posts written in 2009 and the landscape is vastly different:

I find it telling that my two gripes about the quality of the Applie iTunes account sign up process are within the list. You’d assume a company with a market capitalisation of nearly USD$200 billion would have such a visible component of their business highly polished but it just goes to show everyone has their problems. Having a home phone plan comparison post residing at position three is just more evidence that the consumer is becoming more savvy by researching online, even when purchasing offline.

Onward and upward for 2010!

Blogging Statistics

Al — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 14:04:31 +0000

At the end of last year, I posted the 2008 blogging statistics for my site including the previous years. In keeping with that trend, below is the amended table which now includes 2009 as well.

	POSTS	AVG. POST LENGTH	TOTAL POST LENGTH	COMMENTS	AVG. COMMENTS
2004	1	478	487	0	0.0
2005	82	1949	159835	511	12.7
2006	103	1837	189259	865	4.5
2007	127	1977	251150	229	1.0
2008	68	1597	108623	78	0.6
2009	77	2114	162804	104	0.8

While I haven’t managed to get back to my peak of 2007 in the total number of posts, I’m happy that I’ve managed to increase it slightly over last year. In 2010, I’m going to try and increase it again to between seven and eight posts per month. While that doesn’t seem like that many, it can be difficult to write at least one post every four days – I challenge you to try it yourself.

For those that are interested in doing the same, I’ve made the blogging statistics SQL script available for you to use.

Clearing The Backlog

Al — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 12:48:54 +0000

I’ve have a reasonable number of older posts, which are half written that I never got around to completing. Instead of deleting them, I’m going to finish them off so they make sense and publish them. I hope we can … Continue reading → Related posts:

Using WordPress via iPhone

Al — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:32:14 +0000

I wanted to install the WordPress iPhone application, however since I couldn’t get my Apple iTunes Store Account to verify and work correctly – I’ve resorted to using WordPress via Safari.

While I have viewed plenty of blogs using a mobile device and was surprised how functional they were, I’d never attempted to use the WordPress administration area. When visiting the WordPress admin with an iPhone or another internet enabled mobile device, you are served the exact same version of the administration interface that you’d receive if you viewed it using a desktop computer. That might surprise a lot of people, however WordPress isn’t mobile device ready by default – you require a plugin such as WordPress Mobile Edition by Alex King. Even with that plugin enabled, it generates a mobile friendly reader experience and doesn’t provide a mobile friendly administration interface.

To my surprise however, it was quite a simple task to navigation around the WordPress administration area using Safari on the iPhone. Thanks to the convenient zooming functionality that the iPhone provides, it makes working with busier sections of the interface straight forward. While functional, it certainly isn’t the kind of user experience that you’d want to use daily – as a good amount of screen real estate is wasted and when you’re using a small screen device – every pixel counts.

As I tested out different sections of the interface, about the only thing that I noticed didn’t work ‘as expected’ was the text area used to write a blog post. By default, I enable the visual or rich editor in WordPress. Normally when you give focus to any form element that you can type into, the iPhone automatically pops up the keyboard. However, because the visual editor is a JavaScript implementation – nothing triggers the keyboard to show up. Of course, selecting the ‘HTML’ tab on the blog posting page fixes that immediately.

All and all, very impressed with how the iPhone handles complex interfaces – it certainly gives me a lot of confidence that there’d be a limited number of sites that I’d have problems with using Safari on the iPhone.

Windows Live Messenger Upgrade

Al — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 09:12:00 +0000

Microsoft recently released an upgrade for Windows Live Messenger. I’ve been meaning to upgrade for a while now, however had heard a few negative comments about it which stopped me from upgrading. This evening I took the plunge, upgraded and so far I’m quite enjoying it.

I haven’t changed any settings away from the default and in liking that:

the contact list font size is slightly smaller, so you can see more people in the same vertical space
grouping contacts isn’t new, however the Favourites might be?
the annoying left hand wall of advertising and other useless services has been moved down the bottom
hovering a contact provides a context menu with a few useful options such as send email or view profile
What’s New scrolls through the recent activity of your contact list. Within the settings area, you can choose who you want to see events from, what type and also what you publish (if anything at all). It’s a great way to see at a glance what your contacts have been doing, in case you missed something.

I’m not that interested in the scene (read: themes), animated display pictures or signature sounds functionality but maybe that’ll change in the future. While I’ve only had it installed for a very brief amount of time, I think it is a positive upgrade from Microsoft for Live Messenger.

2008 Traffic Statistics

Al — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:55:28 +0000

Following on from my 2007 web statistics, below is a summary of what the site saw in 2008.

In 2006 the site had about 95,000 visitors come to the site, which grew in 2007 to around 145,000. With the change in blogging habits through 2008, coupled with the fact that I moved my future technical posts onto a different domain – the site had a slight decline and only saw 134,921 visits over the year. The roughly 135,000 visits generated 176,206 page views which is slightly less page impressions per user compared to last year.

The spike in visits towards the end of May was driven by a burst of interest in zorbing from the United States. It was spread across the different states, however New York drove the most interest for the fun adventure activity. The significant decline toward the end of the year was, not surprisingly driven by a decline in search traffic from Google. There was no single set of search phrases that declined, everything dropped pretty much across the board. The only thing I can attribute it to was that I changed my web hosting midway through November. I was still with the same web host, however the specific web server was different – which hadn’t been changed in a number of years. Fortunately, the search traffic from Google began to recover in January 2009 but it still has some ground to make up yet.

The traffic breakdown for 2008 still reflects the complete dominance that Google holds in the web search space. In 2006, Yahoo! was the first non-Google search engine to show its face at position #11 which improved to five in 2007. Yahoo! have improved their traffic driving potential in 2008 and now sit at position four. Without checking the numbers, it looks as though Yahoo! made it into position four simply because Google Image Search within Australia declined a little. However, in 2007 Yahoo! drove about 1.6% of the traffic of Google web search, which has increased in 2008 to about 2.5%. Great to see such a strong percentage increase for Yahoo!, however they still aren’t competing in web search within Australia.

The most popular posts for the year looks similar to 2006 & 2007, however with a single newcomer:

Given that the same or similar posts have shown up as the most viewed for three years running, it would seem a reasonable assumption that they will again in 2009 unless I start writing about different topics. With that in mind, following is a revised top five list excluding the repeat above:

Removing the heavy hitters certainly changes the landscape, now I just have to wait another nine months to see what the rest of 2009 is going to bring.

2007 Traffic Statistics

Al — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 12:51:35 +0000

Following on from my 2006 web statistics, below is a summary of what the site saw in 2007.

I was pretty happy in 2006 to see approximately 95,000 visitors come through the site in six months however in 2007 I wasn’t able to sustain that level of traffic. By the end of the year the site was visited 146,075 times which resulted in 206,898 pageviews.

The breakdown of traffic sources over 2007 still highlights the complete dominance that Google held in web search. However, unlike in 2006 where the first non-Google search product came in at 11th position – Yahoo! made a showing at position five. It’d be nice to think that meant that Yahoo! was actually competing against Google but when they are sending this site less than 2% of Google web search – it feels like a one horse race.

The most popular posts for the year looks similar to 2006, however with a few newcomers:

I wonder what posts will make it into the top list in 2008, I think we’ll see some familiar faces since there are already repeat offenders from 2006.