I began to notice that my blog comments were not posting on the blogs that I visited.

I went through a series of excuses in my mind after each failure to post my finely crafted comment.  I thought;

• What a lame website
• Did I click cancel instead of submit?
• Is CoComment “doing something” here?
• Is one of my 40+ FIrefox plugins playing tricks on me?
• Wait a minute something is going on here

Maybe I am being viewed as a low life spammer.

Where is the trouble?

I knew that quite a few of the recent blogs I visited were WordPress blogs, so I focused there.  I thought a Blogger blog gave the same trouble, but wasn’t sure.

Contacting WordPress Blog Owners

I began contacting blog owners vie email, twitter or whatever I could find.  All replied.  But the puzzle wasn’t becoming clearer to me. Mostly I just received confirmation that they saw no comment.

A friend suggested that maybe Akismet was invovled.  Hmmm.  Akismet is the blog spam solution that is provided in WordPress.  The parent company of WordPress and Akismet is Automattic.

Akismet could be working with only the limited set of information that I as a commenter provided, such as;

1. My local IP address
2. My email address
3. My website address
4. My name
5. My comment

To test my theory and reduce the number of factors I left two comments on www.digiphile.com.  The first comment was made with my customary information.  The second was made with a diffferent name, website, email and comment.

The first comment was not published and the second was published right away. I asked Alex to see if the first comment was marked as spam and it was. He was kind enough to publish both comments.

This proved that it was not the IP address that was being caught by Akismet.

The Solution

I visited www.akismet.com and poked around a bit until I landed on their Contact page, which was very revealing.

The Contact page has a paragraph explaining why the form does not use Akismet.  The reason is that inhocent people contact them about being caught and marked as spam by Akismet.  If Akismet was running on the form, those messages would not get through resulting in very poor customer service.

This was encouraging. I left a short message explaining my plight.  The following day I received a message from Akismet support apologizing for the problem and telling me that the problem is now fixed. Yippee.

Contact Akismet Support

If your blog comments are not posting, check and see if they are being marked as spam by Akismet.  If they are, just fill out this form http://akismet.com/contact/ and if you are inhocent you will get a pleasant reply in short order. Mine was within 24 hours.

Have your comments been disappearing on you?

If you are reading this to learn Google secrets, there aren’t any here.  If you are interested in learning about the flavor of the March, 2009 Google Meetup in Cambridge and some of the people I ran across, read on.

567 Massachusetts Avenue – The Enormous Room

Lovely space for a meetup.  Long room with plenty of comfy furniture.  Bar at the back along with three unisex washrooms.  One suggestion: next time, put a sign on the downstairs door so that everyone doesn’t go into the restaurant and then get redirected back outside and in the next door.

The Beginning

Adam Lasnik was introduced.  He revealed that there were at least another dozen Googlers in the room, including a small handful from Friend Connect.  The crowd was more webmasters, SEOs, SEMs and less marketers and PR folk than other meetings I attend.

It was great to see familiar faces like;

@robertcollins, @seosem, @repcor, @JoselinMan, @myimedia, @recklessstudio, @digiphile,

as well as a couple of people I had never met before, including;

@AdamPieniazek, @knowledgejockey, Vinesh Duggar

And I had the bonus of the always thrilling experience of meeting a twitter buddy for the first time in real life, @manfmNantucket I wish I could have talked to him more.

And @KarenRubin, who I recognized, but couldn’t place.  I finally tapped her on the shoulder and asked. Her posse of Hub Spot co-workers laughed and feared that her celebrity would be going to her head now.  A new acquaintance immediately asked for her autograph. It was hilarious.

Google Content

I listened, but heard nothing that was not already familiar or of vital importance to me.  The preparation was useful. They requested questions on the web and then let folks vote on the questions.  So, Adam had a kind of crowd sourced script for the Q&A in his hand.

Thankfully he also took questions from the audience.  I asked about Web Master Tools. I wanted to know what percentage of the backlinks Google knows about are listed in the console.  I was told that nearly all of them. They try to include all that they know about.

Many answers included the “we don’t pre-announce” products and services line.

Adam told us that Google is indexing most of Twitter pretty fast now.

Friend connect released their API.

Chrome is being developed for Linux and Mac, using dedicated teams to build from the ground up.

They are looking at the semantic web. Hmm.

A question from the web got a hearty laugh, “What’s the secret sauce to better rankings?” The standard Google answer was offered. “The answer is 42.”

Another great question, “whether using Google AdWords would help their website rankings?” Nope.

They held a Google Trivia quiz and offered up a bit of swag, including, 6 T-shirts and 2 coffee mugs.  The mugs were shiny, but not Chrome.

Conclusion

Good group of folks, including some who drove all the way from NY and NH.  Cambridge parking is hard, but there is a city lot directly behind the building.  The subway is across the street.

Googlers answered the questions that they could. This means nothing prospective and everything retrospective.  It was very helpful to put some human faces to the Google Borg.  The big elephant in the room was the common concern about Google aggregating information it gathers, personalizing it and knowing just too darn much about you and me.

I heard from @knowledgejockey who spoke with a Google lawyer in the room who told him that they can’t/don’t aggregate personal information.  Not sure he was convinced though. Tin foil hats on boys and girls.

Here is a challenge for future (MeetUp) event coordinators that support networking. Figure out a way to get people together so that they don’t have to yell at each other.  Please.  Is a bar / night club venue ideal for that? Is a meeting room better?

If Google has another meetup I will be inclined to think up some questions, pluck up my courage (so that I meet more new people rather than talking to people I already know) and attend.  Thanks Google.

How the IE6 beast was tamed

There is no immunity to the folly of Internet Explorer 6.   You can even find a website devoted to the demise of IE6.  JBS Partner’s first Drupal project fell victim to IE6.  After the brand new website went live, we learned that the majority of the client’s visitors use IE6 and were seeing a blank white browser page.  We also learned that they are located in rural areas and use dial-up to connect to the Internet.  I was told upgrading the browser could take over 30 minutes to just download the files.  So, we fixed the problem.  Here’s how.

The Server Config

On a dedicated server, we were running Drupal 5.1.5 on Apache 2.2.20 Unix, PHP 5.2.6, MySQL 5.0.67 and JQuery 1.2.6

I wanted desperately to fix this issue.  There is no shortage of articles on www.drupal.org about IE6, the WSOD and blank pages in IE6.  Rob over at Mustard Seed Media and I searched and searched for an answer to no avail.   Marc Ray over at Right Sprocket volunteered a strong effort. And my old co-worker Bob Caslin looked for a solution as well.

Drupal Performance

Initially it was discovered that visiting the Performance page and disabling Caching and CSS Aggregation stopped the IE6 blank white page problem.  However, that did not feel like a solution to me.  The site would have run just fine, but we hadn’t found the root cause of the issue.

Matthew Saunders referred me to Andy Lasda who found solutions in short order.

CSS Aggregation Solution

One of the requirements of the project was a backup of the database that emailed the .gz file to the site owner.  The 5.2 dev version of Backup and Migrate offers this capability.

However, the 5.2 dev release of Backup and Migrate also contains significant JavaScript to streamline select administration functions. It was this JavaScript that caused IE6 to incorrectly load aggregated CSS files.  This is why the CSS loads failed.  It was especially problematic after using the browser Back button.

It was also discovered that the dev version of Backup and Migrate was causing frequent PHP errors.

Moving to the stable version ( http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/backup_migrate-5.x-1.2.tar.gz ) did  not eliminate these problems.

The Backup and Migrate module was removed. Instead a combination of Mutt, Chron and a little scripting enabled the database backups to be emailed out and then deleted from the server so that they don’t accumulate over time.

Caching Problem Solution

It was also discovered that during the Drupal install file permissions were effected which prevented the web server from caching files to the temporary directory.    The group and owner was set to an account that is not the account that the web server runs as.

Server Performance Bonus

I also asked Andy to review the server’s overall performance. He found that it was quick and responsive.  Music to my ears.  The server load through testing remained at .4 and MySql performed up to standard.

The memory_limit in the php.ini file was increased from 32MB to 96MB which was a good idea.  Also zlib compression was enabled.  The following was added to the Drupal site’s /etc/httpd/conf/sites/www.xyadomain.com conf file.

# Enable file compression by MIME type
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

I truly hope that this is helpful to someone else as they troubleshoot IE6 issues in Drupal 5.1x.

Each server (hardware), OS, software, security patch level and configuration is different. We are hired to get the site working where it is hosted, rather than proving that it works on a developer’s machine.  I can certainly understand why some developers find it faster and more economical to only do projects if the client will host on their server, an environment that they are familiar with.  As in this case, getting to the root of the problem in an unfamiliar server environment is not always meaningful or affordable, while getting things to work is always meaningful.

By the way. I met all the guys listed above through Twitter.  Very good guys.  I can recommend them all.

What have you tried to solve your IE6 issue?

Twitter Tools: Below are a few of the Twitter related tools that I appreciate day-in and day-out on Twitter, whether I am mobile or on my desktop.

Retweet This – This GreaseMonkey script makes retweeting a snap on the web. Adds a nice little Retweet button to your Twitter webpage. Note, it inserts “Retweeting”. I edit this to the now standard and much shorter RT, instead of Retweeting.

When I take the time to figure out how to edit the source file, I will update it here. RT is better than Retweeting.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/26500

Search Twitter - Keep track of all mentions of your Twitter name.

http://search.twitter.com

The following syntax will limit the search to mentions of your name by other people only, thereby excluding your own tweets. In the following example, the username is fairminder. The search string means to exclude from the search the name fairminder when the mention is from fairminder, but search for all other mentions of fairminder.

-from:fairminder fairminder

Twittelator Pro for the iPhone – great tool http://www.stone.com/Twittelator/

Not being entirely intuitive, here a few powerful tricks that I had to look up.

• Reply = Tap once. On the next screen, tap the reply arrow at the top left.
• Scroll down = tap the arrow in the footer.
• Scroll all the way up = double tap the header, where the time is displayed.
• ReTweet = touch and hold the screen. ReTweet and Copy Tweet options become available.
• Add Follower = You meet someone IRL you want to follow. On the Accounts screen, click on <your twitter handle>’s Tweets. Mine says “Fairminder’s Tweets”. Double tap your own avatar (photo). Type the new Twitter name in the Follow field.

There is lots more help here;http://www.stone.com/Twittelator/Twittelator_Hints_Tips.html

Hashtags Add #redsox to the end of your RedSox tweets. Then use Twitter search, listed above, to quickly find all of the Tweets related to the RedSox. Sports games, conferences, meetups and other live events will often start the hashtags flying.

Twitter Karma is great for reviewing who you are following and who is following you. You may find folks that have not tweeted in three months and want to unfollow them. You may find folks you talk to regularly but you have not followed yet. Good information discovery tool.
http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/

A lot of folks love TweetDeck to create following groups.

Free Twitter Background Designer: Create a custom background with images and text in a few minutes and upload it in your Twitter settings page. http://freetwitterdesigner.com/

What tools can you not live without?

The Toshiba Satelite M35X-161 laptop served me well over the last four years. But the Celeron 1.3 GHz CPU has not been keeping up with me lately.  I needed more horse-power.

Enter the Dell Latitude E6500. (more…)

Domainers buy website domain names and sell domains for profit.  Maybe you are not a domainer, but have some ideas about buying domain names for profit.  Where do you start?

If you want cheap domain names, and by that I mean you only want to pay $10 or less for a domain name (the registration fee) and don’t want to sign up with the various drop services, you still have some options.

How to Find Domain Names

You can search for and find domain names at godrops.com

This site allows you to search for recently dropped domain names that have been tasted, but not registered.

Tasting describes the process of registering a domain name, seeing how it performs, and then returning the non-performing domain names to the registrar for a refund within 5 days.  This serves as a quick filter, preventing you from searching through lots of undesirable domain names.

Domains with hyphens, numbers and domains that are not dot coms are undesirable.

How to Evaluate Domain Names

You could simply pick the ones that sound good to you.  This is an unreliable approach for selecting a domain name.

Instead, you might evaluation a potential domain name by gathering some relevant data before making the purchase.

Let’s run through an example. Today godrops.com shows that premiumstoves.com just dropped and is available for registration.

Search Google

Search Google for “premium stoves”, “premiumstoves.com” “premium” and “stoves”

How much search volume is there?
How many paid ads are there?
What do the top listings look like?

Search the Google AdWords key word tool for premium stoves

Is there any search volume?
Is there adequate search volume?
How much competition is there?

Also, take a peak at Google Trends.

Gather information at Estibot

Enter your domain name at estibot.com and look at the collected data.  A domain name that already has traffic and ranks is generally better than one that does not.

Enter in another domain name or two to get some perspective.

The dollar figures should be taken with a grain of salt.

Search the Wayback Machine

Visit the Wayback Macine and enter the domain name.

Was a website ever built on the domain name?
If a website was built, does it look good or not?
Was the domain name parked?
When was the domain first indexed by the Wayback Machine?

Search and Evaluate Domain Names for Free

This quick evaluation demonstrates that premiumstoves.com does not fit my profile for possible acquisitions.

Additional Domain Name Search Resources

Bust A Name – enter a few key words as it searches for matches
Make Words – combine key words into domain names that are available
Dot Center – find expired domain names
Domainsbot – creates and searches for domain names based on keywords
SmartPageRank – helps you find domains based on criteria you set.
If you want to purchase software, consider the Domand Research Tool.

There are hundreds of additional resources to find, select, evaluate and purchase a domain name.

How do you find domain names?

How do you evaluate domain names?

I will be happy to udpate the list with your suggestions.

Line spacing in paragraphs plays in important usability role. Just like with happy couples, closeness shows that content is related. When paragraphs and headings are equidistant it is harder for the reader to know what is related to what.

The WordPress editor will strip out br and p tags that it decides are redundant.

WordPress will strip out multiple returns (enter).
WordPress will strip out br tags
WordPress will strip out p tags

Removing paragraph tags and break tags is not what most bloggers expect to happen. In fact, the removal of paragraph and break tags is a common source of frustration for WordPress bloggers. We want the paragraph formatting to be right. Hitting enter and enter and enter has no effect.

WordPress offers equal spacing between paragraphs

paragraph
paragraph
empty blank line / space
heading
empty blank line / space
paragraph
paragraph

To improve usability give readers spaces

paragraph
paragraph
empty blank line / space
empty blank line / space
heading
empty blank line / space
paragraph
paragraph

Here is how to add empty blank lines or spaces between paragraphs

Select HTML mode

Type in < p >< code >< br/ >< /code >< /p > without the spaces

Copy and paste on each line that you want to add a blank empty line or blank space between paragraphs or headings or ordered lists or whatever.

Veiw the source code below to see an example

paragraph
paragraph
space
heading

paragraph
paragraph

I hope that if you find this helpful or you have another suggestion that you will leave a comment below.


A friend of mine on Twitter @cyandle sent me these questions to answer and post on my blog.  He is also posting the same interview on his blog, Creative Daylight so check his answers out too.


1. How long have you been working in website design and marketing and what attracted you to it?

JBS Partners started in 2002 providing website design and hosting services.  Thankfully the website business has grown as more services have been added to meet client demand.   The attraction to the work includes my interest in art and design, computer and technology as well as general business and Internet marketing.  These are all wrapped up in my website design and marketing business, which is pretty cool.


2. In your opinion, what’s the measure of a good SEO/PR/Blogging professional?

If you think about the design process for a new website, it moves along a design and development continuum.  The SEO work needs to start at the beginning so that the key word research can inform the information architecture, page structure and titles and content.  Clients are pleased when they start to see prospective clients hitting their website and filling out forms, even though we are still fine tuning or tweaking the not-quite-completed website.  Getting results out of the gate is a good measure.


3. Whose Blog do you read the Most?

Mine of course. Each article has to be drafted, written, proof read and then reread.  I used to read Aaron Wall’s SEOBook a lot and the SEOMoz blog.  These are good resources for general knowledge and industry trends.  Lately, I spend more time on IM and Twitter sharing and learning with others, which leads to reading a diverse range of blogs and websites across the Internet.


4. What’s your best “SEO secret” or blogging tactic?

No secrets here. Transparency and openness are the rule.  For some reason clients and SEO’s think that there is a silver bullet answer out there somewhere.  Some of these folks think that there is a lot of mystery.  Although there are a lot of moving parts, it is not a mystery.  The search engines are trying as hard as they can to think like humans.  My advice is to engage, participate and join in the conversation.  Write, comment, tweet, blog, interview and experiment.


5. Search engine algorithms are getting smarter, and a lot of people predict Organic SEO services will become obsolete. How do you plan to adapt?

My experience with clients suggests that they will continue to value and appreciate the blend of search and marketing advice that allows them to compete successfully in the market place.  That will never be obsolete.  There will continue to be best practices as well common practices that should be avoided.  We help our clients navigate these choices.


6. Please Describe the biggest challenge you face in your current job.

There are a couple of challenges, neither of which is insurmountable.  One is educating the prospective customer.  A lot of effort is required to explain abstract services to allow the value to be understood and then appreciated.

The next challenge is maintaining the momentum of a project.  Clients get distracted and project delays are introduced despite a genuine interest in the final results. I have even had clients tell me that they need to be nagged.  Calendar software is my friend.


7. Do you have any advice for someone who is interested in SEO, but doesn’t have a background in it, on how to get started in this field?

Read. You will quickly discern the garbage from the prize information.  Do.  There is no experience like experience.  Design, program, blog do these things and experiment.  Test, test, test, break things, fix them and break them again.  Make connections with knowledgeable people that will guide you and help you find the answers that you need.  Work for yourself or for an agency and then switch.  Understand both sides of that market.  Lastly, build your own properties to generate income.


8. If you could rank for any keyword phrase you don’t currently rank for, what would it be?

One could make a lot of money ranking for Viagra or similar terms, but I would be happy to rank for
boston website design or small business websites


9. Assuming you had never gone into website design and SEO, what would you be doing now?

Well, I was a systems administrator for a large mutual fund company and than a start-up, so I would likely still be involved with computers, networks, operating systems, domain name servers and the like.  And hopefully be in some type of customer facing role. I enjoy intermediating between people and computers.

If there was a departure with the past, I would likely be even more involved with Social Media tools (Twitter, WordPress, Linkedin, FaceBook, Flickr etc.) and helping clients understand and benefit of the new rules of marketing.


10. What’s Your Favorite professional sports team and why?

Living in Boston it feels quite natural to be a big Red Sox fan. I became a fan in 2004.  Before that the newspaper sports section was of no interest what-so-ever.  Now, I enjoy keeping up with baseball.  I have since learned that my grandfather was a Red Sox fan.  For some reason the other New England sports teams have not caught my interest, although I will watch play-offs.
Well that’s the end of our interview.

Thank you to @MelaniePhung for writing the questions for everyone.

Feel free to follow me on Twitter (@fairminder) !

Nick Gerner gave an enthusiastic presentation, Tuesday night at SEMNE in Providence RI, about the underpinnings of search technology and SEOMoz’s new LinkScape tool.

Here is a simple example to illustrate a fundamental point:

1) Search Engineers - they create the search algorithms

2) Search Algorithms – are constructed to provide the searcher with relevant search results

3) Relevant User information – the Search Engines hope to provide relevant results to you

Now, off to the side are the search marketers with a decision to make as to where they focus their attention to improve a website’s search results.  The choices are listed above, 1,2 or 3.  Which do you choose?

1) Search Engineers.  Never met one.  I assume that they must be pretty tight lipped in order to keep their jobs.  Not an easy target.

2) Search Algorithms. Again, never met one.  I assume that they don’t even have lips. Not an easy target.  Now you can setup a test bed with hundreds of domains, scrutinize Google patents or read celebrity SEO bloggers and gather information that may have been relevant.

You can never be certain of every detail and the details definitely change as sure as the sun will rise the next day.  The search engineers constantly improve the search algorithyms to provide more relevant information to searchers. It’s certainly a moving target.

3) Relevant User search results.  I am one who seeks relevant search results.  I have met other people who use search engines seeking relevant results.  Maybe this is a sensible place to focus my attention for the long term.

Technical or Fundamental SEO

If you choose #2, you are called a Technical SEO

If you choose #3, you are called a Fundamental SEO

If you are a Fundamental SEO and focus on the user, you will by default have pretty good aim on the algorithm as well.  Seems reasonable and sounds like the Fundamental SEO’s have a bit of a short cut.

How do you approach your SEO?