The Surgery

I’ve started jotting down some notes about SEO’ing The Surgery.

Have a look at the bottom of the “Great WordPress Installation” page. I’ll let you know how it pans out. My aim is to be the Number 1 result when someone Googles the word “technology”. (Who said I wasn’t an optimist?)

BTW Lidija Davis has got some great SEO tips and tricks on BlogWell.

What is Search Engine Optimisation? SEO is the manipulation of a webpage or blog, to increase its favourable exposure to search engines such as Google. The aim is to drive traffic to your site through organic search results, i.e., to have a good search result ranking when someone searches for keywords contained in your site.

While it’s not an exact science, there are many things which can be done to increase exposure to search engines, and just as many “bad” things which will cause search engines to switch off and look elsewhere.

Here’s a wiki on SEO. Notice I put the link under some meaningful words, not the word “here”. There’s a free tip for you!

Warning: SEO is highly addictive and will chew-up hours of web browsing, coding and time spent fiddling around in Google Webmaster Tools. Enjoy!

At last, at last, my WordPress blog is running on a real computer; not something held together by pieces of twine, electrical tape and garden stakes.

I have updated the page on My WordPress Installation, for those interested.

Do you notice the speed improvements with pages loading in your browser? It was definitely worth the hard work… and not too much hard work involved actually.

Many thanks to Graeme Callaghan for all his assistance.

Okay okay … I’m revisiting Twitter, under some duress.

Follow me, if you’re into that sort of thing:

• Go here;
• Search for rk5075 ; and
  
• Click the Follow button.

Interesting, intellectual and entertaining “twits” are not guaranteed.

I recently created a website, for a customer who wanted a shiny new blog on a WordPress server.  I took the opportunity to use WordPress.com to do the hosting.

I set up the blog, registered the domain name, and then used a new feature (new for me, anyway) which lets WordPress.com use your domain name.

What this means, is that instead of “my_wordpress_account_name.wordpress.com” as your web address, you can have WordPress.com host “my_domain_name.com.au” which appears in the title bar of people’s web browsers when they’re viewing the blog.  This costs US$10/year per domain, which I think is pretty good value.

How to do this

• If you have an existing domain, log on to the domain’s registrar.  Change the delegation to WordPress.com DNS servers: “ns1.wordpress.com” through “ns3.wordpress.com”;

• From your blog’s dashboard in WordPress.com, go to “Upgrades / Domains”;

• Enter the domain you would like to appear as the address for your blog. This can be pre-existing or WordPress.com will register it for you (if the domain is available) for $5/year;

• Click “Add domain to blog”;

• If you don’t have any “WordPress.com credits”, you will be prompted to login to PayPal and purchase 10 credits (this will cost about AU$11.00);

• Return to the “Dashboard / Upgrades / Domains” screen.  In the domain table you will still see the original “wordpress.com” address for your blog, with the function set as “your blog URL”. You will also see a new entry, which is the domain name you just paid WordPress.com to host. Click on the link that says “Put blog here”. Otherwise if you type the new domain name, it will just redirect to the WordPress.com address.

That’s it! Now if you type your new domain name, or your old “wordpress.com” address, you will see your shiny new blog. Most importantly, the address in the title bar will be your new domain name.

Happy blogging!

More reading; WordPress.com Support Forum on Domain Hosting.

In the last episode of Tech Talk Radio, Silicon Valley reporter/cyber-goddess Lidija Davis was extolling the virtues of Twitter. This is a social networking site which, probably like many other people, I’d heard about but never used.

My first impressions are that it seems to be a “cutdown” version of Facebook, in that you can see status updates from friends and family and follow updates which other people post. You can also access Twitter from your mobile which is cool.

The thing that Twitter does well for Australian users is incorporate an SMS gateway. You can receive notifications to your phone and also update your status with text messages. Someone correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think Facebook does this in Australia. Facebook’s carrier pre-selection screen says that “Facebook Mobile Texts are currently available only in US/Canada/UK on the listed carrier networks”. Bugger. You’d think with all that advertising that Facebook would be able to offer fraction-of-a-cent text messages to its valued customers.

I didn’t test the Twitter SMS features personally but Graeme Callaghan did on the show last week and it seemed to work well.

The thing I don’t like about Twitter is that you use obscure codes to send personal messages and such things. You have to type “@username” to reply to a message, and then something with a bracket to send personal messages… too hard I’m afraid. I want to just click a button that says “personal message” but I can’t.

Also, status updates are limited to 140 characters. Huh!?!?! Maybe this is to ensure compatibility with SMS messaging (which is limited to 160 characters), I’m not sure. But if you want to type a longer message to someone (not just a status update) you have to send three, four, five or more mesages. Bleh.

The exciting thing with Twitter is that status updates and personal messages correspond directly with status updates, public messages and private messages in other social networking systems: Facebook, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger and MySpace to name a few.

If I’m logged in to Facebook, there’s no reason why a friend on MSN shouldn’t be able to send me a message. If a friend posts a funny photo in a MySpace account, why can’t I view it from within my Facebook account? And why can’t I see it from my HSDPA-enabled mobile phone or PDA?

What we need now is a gateway and a common language which works between (currently unconnected) messaging systems. And throw-in a legacy email connector for good measure, if you must.

Some people have already had the same idea and written their own Facebook/Twitter interface, like Stuart Robertson over at Design Meme. This is great to see, and uses existing technologies like RSS and PHP. You can see the way that social networking is headed with these types of projects.

The connection of social networking sites and instant messaging systems will certainly spell the end of email. Thank goodness.

Why do I hate email so much? Well, apart from the fact that 95%+ of all email traffic is unsolicited, it spreads viruses, and the protocol can’t innately transfer binary information? Maybe this is best left for another rant.

My conclusion? If you like Twitter, use Twitter. I won’t be using Twitter, because it doesn’t do everything I need it to. But it does do some things better than Facebook. Most importantly, I like Twitter because it encourages people to use social networking and modern communications systems to keep in touch. And keeping in touch is what it’s all about.

I have changed The Surgery’s Permalink format, and a few permissions problems on the web server that were bugging the hell out of me.

Click on the “My WordPress Installation” page for more details.

I’ve started a new page about my recent WordPress installation.

If you’re interested in hosting your own blog server, check it out.

But why, I hear you ask, would you want to run your own blog server? Why not just use Blogger, or a site hosted by WordPress, or MySpace, or any of the other hundreds of blogging sites available?

The answer is partly for the technical exercise, and also for the flexibility you get by running your own system.

Click the page link to read more…