Tag Archives: blogging

Using Bad Word Filters to Boost SEO & Productivity

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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If you’re a webmaster, administrator, or moderator of any large blog, forum, or other community site, you’ll find that a lot of time is wasted spelling out URIs to various useful links, whether they’re to guides, reviews, downloads, or forms. On a big website with lots of members (especially that kind that don’t use the search feature), you’ll find that dozens of hours or more are wasted looking up and writing these URIs for your readers/members to follow.

Compare [url=http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Windows+XP]Windows XP dual-boot guide[/url] to XP dboot — it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out which is easier, quicker, and simpler to use. But of course, your readers have no idea what “dboot guide” is or where they can find it – that’s where the “bad word filters” come in.

Most forums, blogs, wikis, and just about any other “web platform engines” have a plugin, module, or admin center feature to enable the filtering of swear words and their ilk. Simply create a new entry that replaces a quick and easy-to-remember “keyword” with a fully-formatted link of your choice. You can replace “qwerty” with “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” or (much more usefully) replace things like “gsearch ” with “http://www.google.com/search?q=” which lets you type things like “gsearch EasyBCD” and have them automagically replaced with the appropriate link.

You can use this to boost productivity (by speeding up the process of finding, posting, and formatting links) and to increase SEO (by converting keywords to internal links to the respective pages). For instance, replacing all instances of “NeoSmart Technologies” with NeoSmart Technologies:

<a href="http://neosmart.net/" title="NeoSmart Technologies" style="color: red; font-weight: bold" rel="follow">NeoSmart Technologies</a>

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Wanna Blog for NST?

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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NeoSmart Technologies is hiring once again! This time, we’re looking for bloggers/posters – nothing mind boggling nor anything too difficult: we have another (non-profit) project for the community we’d like to get kicked off, and with our current resources and staff tied-up beyond belief with their current workload (working hard to get you the software, support, and research at the quality levels you’ve come to expect from us!), we’re happy to announce our first open blogging position in years!

We’re not really able to say too much right now, but here’s the (partial) low-down:

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WordPress 2.2 Adds Tagging Support!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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It seems like the latest SVN commits to WordPress have added tagging support to the popular open-source blogging platform… and it’s about time, too! It’s no longer stuff you have to add by plugin, so WordPress is finally getting with the times and adding this much-requested functionality to the upcoming WordPress 2.2 (due to be released April 22, 2007). See for yourself:

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What on Earth is Wrong with Akismet!?!?

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Akismet sucks. No really – if it can’t tell that 400 duplicate comments made to the same blog but different pages by the same IP address linking to the same domain in a matter of 4 minutes are to be considered spam, no thanks – we’ll find something better.

Seriously though! This has happened 3 times in 24 hours. 100 or so comments each time. Each “wave” comes from the same IP, links to the same site, contains the same exact (non) words, and is just as ridiculously obvious as being spam…. They don’t even get flagged as “moderated,” they go straight to the inbox (so to speak..)!

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Creating a (Unified!) Vendor-Neutral Markup Standard

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Take a look at any blog, wiki, forum, etc. Specifically, look at how posts are created, filtered, and displayed. There are dozens of different ways for authors to specify the formatting and content of their articles/posts, and hundreds of ways to render the results. Some blogs rely on now-famous 3rd-party markup implementations like Textile and Markdown, some use bbCode, and quite a few still rely on plain old HTML. Then you have vendor-specific proprietary implementations and many more, popping up as the need arises.

We’re not trying to standardize markup formats, on the contrary, there is no real benefit – and the web can always do with a bit more diversity. But what does need standardization is how post-markup data (the article text) is stored in the database and later rendered. In the past, this wasn’t a problem: each “platform” had its markup format, and stored the output straight in the database. Then the platform triggered the markup language’s bundled HTML renderer and converted the database contents to HTML for display.

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The Stupidity of Multi-Part "Articles"

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Authors of online content seem to just love multi-part articles. Usually they’re guides or reviews, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a big site or a no-name blog: authors just love to leave you hanging. It’s not good “visitor retainment practice” — it’s just annoying and pretentious. It leaves readers with half a thought (which can be far more dangerous than none), and it leaves the author looking like a stupid kind of guy.

It’s one thing when you say “Part 1 of the Mega Vista Review” – you can succinctly sum up an entire section or sections of the topic, completely contained within its own article. But it’s quite another thing when you say “How to play solitaire: Part one, shuffling the deck.” But that’s what most sites seem to love to do, and it’s just plain wrong, on many levels. Most importantly of all, not only does the reader no benefit, but the authors also do themselves no good: that reader isn’t going to come back a month from now to read part 2!

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Wikipedia Takes our Money & Links, Gives Nothing Back

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Wikipedia has just completed it’s annual Fundraising Drive – a million dollars in pure cash have found their way to the Wikimedia foundation. Wikipedia used to be cool, and donating to a non-profit organization like Wikipedia was definitely one of the most altruistic and philanthropic deeds one could do. But in the past, Wikipedia used to take money from the community, and use it for hosting and other expenses. But now Wikipedia takes something else too, and this time, it doesn’t give back to the community. Wikipedia wants you to link to it, but it’s now officially unwilling to “link” back to you.

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Why I Joined Habari, and What It’s All About

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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People have been bombarding my email asking me questions about Habari, and most importantly, why I joined it. I wasn’t planning on blogging about any of this until I officially became a committer in the Habari project, but after reading this post, I feel the need to share my reasons.

I’ve been a loyal contributor the WordPress project and a ardent (for lack of a more aggressive word) WP-Hacker for what seems like forever – even though it isn’t. WordPress is my first-love when it comes to blogging, you may have noticed. But yeah, I working on Habari too.

I didn’t leave WordPress. Not because Matt is the devil-incarnate nor because I’m put off that he wouldn’t hire me (not even interested), but because Habari is a challenge. It’s something I’ve always wanted to work on.

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The Need for Creating Tag Standards

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
45

Web 2.0, blogging, and tags all go together, hand-in-hand. However, while RPC standards exist for blogs and the pinheads boggle over the true definition of a “blog,” no one has a cast-in-iron standard for tags. Depending on where you go and who you ask, tags are implemented differently, and even defined in their own unique way. Even more importantly, tags were meant to be universal and compatible: a medium of sharing and conveying info across the internet — the very embodiment of a semantic web. Unfortunately, they’re not. Far from it, tags create more discord and confusion than they do minimize it.

To Space or Not to Space, that is the Question

This one is probably the most obvious obstacle and the most destructive when it comes to tallying tag popularity or making those pretty tag clouds: Can tags have spaces in them or not?! If tags don’t/shouldn’t have spaces, then what do you do with multi-word tags that you just can’t shorten? Do you replace the spaces with underscores, dashes, or just take ’em out? Does it matter?

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Opera is Good to Bloggers

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Generally speaking, the one sector of the online world where websites attract far more attention & traffic than money is the blogosphere. Whereas other websites stand to benefit quite a bit from the meager investments they put into their site in the first place, bloggers must work long and hard for their 15 minutes of fame. And let’s face it: it doesn’t usually pay off (money wise).

That’s not to say that all bloggers are necessarily poor and hungry (ok, well maybe that’s exaggerating it a bit, but you get the point), but if you were to do a survey, you can bet the sites that pay more to stay up than they get via AdSense or YPN are blogs and the bloggers that own them. Another fact of life is that, for most people, seeing a website 5 minutes out-of-date isn’t that big of a probelm – especially when you keep in mind that around 90% of the internet is static, more or less.

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