Think Visibility September 2009
Posted by David WhitehouseI attended Think Visibility this September on behalf of Bronco, it was my first conference I’d attended and I must say I found the experience very interesting. The conference was held in Leeds at a casino (I forget the name, but it was a pretty cool venue).
First up was Joost de Valk, who I met just before he kicked off Think Visibility, he’s a friendly guy and he really knows his stuff, you can check out his presentation here. It was a very useful, and a highly technical presentation on speeding up WordPress and various other things 
It’s given me the kick up the ass I needed to sort out caching on my site and start using smush it.
Next up was Judith Lewis who gave a very useful presentation on universal search results, this made me realise how much I was missing out on by not doing a YouTube video for every blog post I do – perhaps I should start doing this! I met her afterwards, she seemed like a nice lady (hey anyone that gives out free chocolate has to be kind, right?)
After that there was Julian Sambles from the Telegraph and following on from that we got to choose which presentations we watched. You can view all the slides from ThinkVisibility here. Zoe Piper also did a useful presentation on the content network, which I’m sure will come in handy sometime
On the whole it was a great event organise by Dom Hodgson – who was really friendly and helpful, helping me decide which presentation was best for me
How to get Feedburner subscription links at the end of every post
Posted by David WhitehouseI’ve had a lot of visitors for my site with the keyphrase “feedburner at the end of every post” so I thought I best write a guide on how to do it.
Firstly I want to make it clear that I am using WordPress, if you are not using WordPress then I suggest you do so asap.
Once you have WordPress setup I suggest you install the Add Post Footer Plugin
Once you have this simply add some code in the plugin options and hey presto, you have a call to action to subscribe to your blog at the end of every post!
How to use nofollows correctly
Posted by David WhitehouseOk so today I read an article by Aaron Wall about nofollows being largely a waste of time, I didn’t quite understand what he was talking about until I scrolled down on my RSS reader to find Matt Cutts had already blogged about this.
Basically, in a nutshell – no follows don’t pass page rank, but they do reduce the amount of page rank passed on by other links.
So for example, if you have a PR 10 site and 10 outgoing links, 9 of which are nofollowed, only 1 will actually pass any link juice. In this situation you might expect it to pass all 10 (minus a dampening factor), but it doesn’t it only passes 1.
So here is my advice on how to use nofollows correctly and what action you should take:
- Ensure you are “dofollowing” all internal links – otherwise you are just shooting yourself in the foot – don’t page rank sculpt, you are just reducing the amount of juice that stays on your site.
- Reduce the overall amount of outgoing links you have on your site, these might include social tagging links
- Dofollow all your external links, unless you see them as a direct competitor or you deem it a “bad neighbourhood”
DofollowNofollow links from commenters –you may get a little spam, but if you keep on top of the moderation it should be fineyou will be spammed!.
So far I’ve dofollowed all my internal links (that I have noticed) and removed any nofollow external links completely. I’ve also removed my social networking links on each post which were detracting the link juice through my site significantly.
On a final note, I’ve dofollowed nofollowed my blog comments – I want to encourage people to use my blog – perhaps it’ll but I don’t want to get it covered in spam (I hope not) – so feel free to comment on this post!
The plugin for WordPress I used to use to dofollow my comments is called NoFollow Free in case anyone is interested (by the way the link is dofollowed).
How to fix _weak_escape() error after upgrading to WordPress 2.8
Posted by David WhitehouseI just got the WordPress error: Call to undefined function: _weak_escape() when trying to login to WordPress admin after upgrading to WordPress 2.8.
I looked it up and someone mentioned it was a problem to do with the redirection plugin – but to hell with disabling that, I love that plugin!!! So instead I looked into the file causing the problem:
wp-includes/wp-db.php
At a further look it didn’t seem to like the function _weak_escape, so I simply found what this function did, all it does is addslashes, so I embedded this into the code which was calling _weak_escape and hey presto! It works!
Here is the full code I used:
function escape($data) {
if ( is_array($data) ) {
foreach ( (array) $data as $k => $v ) {
if ( is_array($v) )
$data[$k] = $this->escape( $v );
else
$data[$k] = addslashes($v);
}
} else {
$data = addslashes($data);
}
return $data;
}
Hope that helps some of you out there!
I realise this isn’t the best fix for it – ideally you want to get it so it doesn’t believe _weak_escape is an undefined function – but I’m not sure what the cause of this is, I imagine I could try removing the underscore or searching at php.net – but it’s late and I want to go to bed! If you find the solution please let me know in the comments and I’ll give you a link
Getting Search Queries for Adwords in Analytics
Posted by David WhitehouseI think I have come up with a way to determine the search query used to trigger an keyword based ad and then input that data into Analytics.
I’m going to write a plugin for wordpress over the coming weeks – so if you want to see the terms a user searched for, rather than the keyword you bid on in Adwords, in your Google Analytics then watch this space.
Blog Setup
Posted by David WhitehouseI’ve finished setting up WordPress after following the guide on Yoast. Well worth going through by the way, I highly recommend it.
Now I’ve just got to get myself a new theme, as this one is messing up in FireFox it appears – not good. Anyone know where I can get a good theme?
Also need to remove the blog roll and start putting a post about each friend instead (sorry guys).
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