Web Development Insight

Don’t get confused: a regular sitemap (links on a webpage which summarize your website) is not a Google sitemap.

A Google Sitemap file will inform Google of the URLs on your site, including the dates when you last changed them. If and when Google is ready to crawl your site, it will take this information into account and use it to optimize it’s visit. If it already knows your site a bit and you signal that you have changed one of those pages (added a new link to it or just fixed a misspelling), then it will go have a look as soon as your site is up again.

Microsoft and Yahoo have joined Google to adopt the sitemap as a standard. sitemaps.org has an FAQ on sitemaps along with the XML schema and a few other tidbits.

Publishing a sitemap will not get your site crawled more often; it will just optimize the search bot visit when it does crawl your site. Likewise, it will *not* get more of your site crawled, but it might concentrate on the more important parts. When it does crawl your pages, it will process them regularly, meaning that any content you have on it will usually get used for web search.

How to Create a Sitemap

Google Webmaster Tools offers a python script that generates a sitemap.

Another popular tool is the GSiteCrawler: it will crawl your site, take a look at all of your pages (and yes, it will make counters count, if your gallery program counts all visits) and use that information to make a Google Sitemap file. In a sense, you are looking at your site with the GSiteCrawler and taking that information so that Google does not have to do as much work (and can concentrate on the important parts).

One advantage of running a sitemap crawler is that if it gets stuck on your site, so will Google and other search indexers.

There are plug-ins for blogs, such as WordPress, that will generate a new sitemap every time a blog is created or modified and notify Google of the change.

Google sitemaps are there to help the search bot; not improve your website’s search result placement.

Doug

Gold is a pretty good hedge against inflation while silver has been based on industrial use. Gold, gold bars, and gold coin have bought the passage to safety where other forms of money have failed. Since the United States operates in an inflation mode the yellow metal has has an allure of some protection. Many financial planners have recommended precious metals such as gold and silver as part of an overall investment portfolio. Gold, in any form, should be considered for an adjunct to long-term financial security. Ask your financial adviser before investing.
Please read our disclosure policy if you have questions.

I will be busy today upgrading to WordPress 2.1.2.

Doug

I am all for saving time. In the old days backing up a WordPress blog meant either using phpAdmin to back up the database or manually logging into each blog and using a backup plug-in.

No more.

Starting with WordPress 2.0 the bundled backup program was taken out and made a separate plug-in. Version 2.0 of the WordPress database backup plug-in takes advantage of WordPress cron program and will email a backup on a regular basis. I use once a week, though the granularity can be once an hour.

Once installed, go into Manage then Backup. On the bottom of the page the time frequency of the backup and the email address is set. Note if you choose once a week, the weekly backups are on the day you hit submit. Since I like getting backups on Saturday I started all my backups on a Saturday.

Note this only backs up the WordPress database; not the WordPress source code.

admin Doug

WordPress released a new version 2.1.1 which is mostly bugfixes and security fixes. Version 2.1.1 includes about 30 bug fixes, mostly minor things around encoding, XML-RPC, the object cache, and HTML code. Here is the file diffs between v2.1 and v2.1.1. (No guarantee comes with this). Download WordPress 2.1.1 upgrade diff. Just overwrite the existing files, upload them, then run the upgrade program.

Read about the upgrade in depth on the WordPress blog.

Doug

The idea behind robots.txt is to keep honest robots out of certain areas of a web site. One file not to include in robots.txt is…robots.txt. The bots need to read robots.txt to find out their restrictions. A robots.txt is assumed to exist in the root directory of a web site.

Another file to leave out of robots.txt is the sitemap file: generally sitemap.xml and/or sitemap.xml.gz. It is imperative that the bots find this file so they can pare down the amount of indexing needed.

Other files not to exclude from bots are verification files: the ones created to prove you have access to the web site. Some common applications are Google sitemap verification, McAfee Site Advisor, and Yahoo Site Explorer.

Doug

I went to install Expression Web but found out it would not install over the beta version. But the beta version would not uninstall - it was corrupt. Searching the web only found other people with the same dilemma…so I thought I’d try a fix myself.

Note that I did -not- have Office 2007 or Office 2007 beta installed - just Expression Web beta 1 - so I’m not sure how this fix will work if you have Office 2007 or its beta installed.

I had Expression Web Beta 1 but I believe the fix will be similar to the CPT 1 release.

*** Make sure to back up your registry before doing this! ***

1. In the %temp% directory (start > run > open then type in %temp%) search for the latest log SetupExe(..).log. Near the end is this:

Catalyst beta product conflict check failed. Office Beta product conflict is detected on the computer, productcode={30120000-0026-0000-0000-0000000FF1CE}

2. Search for the productcode in the registry and delete all the occurrences but when you find the occurrence in a subkey of:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows/ CurrentVersion/Installer/UserData/
S-1-5-18/Products

you need to delete the entire subkey. In my case their were 4 of them that started with 000021 and contained the productcode in question.

For example:
In …/Products there were 4 keys starting with 000021…. Each key had the productcode mentioned above in the InstallProperties subkey. Delete the entire key starting with 000021… not just the InstallProperties subkey.

There were two places that had these 4 keys to be deleted.

Then delete all occurrences of the productcode in the registry…most were in the Uninstall key.

What this whole exercise does is to delete references to Expression Web beta and Office 2007 beta.

Hopefully these instructions make sense. I did not record every place that I deleted the productcode…I wasn’t sure it would work…but it did.

Doug

Gold has always been a hedge against inflation while silver has been based on industrial use. Gold and gold coin have bought the passage to safety where other forms of money have failed. Since the United States operates in an inflation mode the yellow metal has has an allure of some protection. While most people are against inflation, unfortunately it is ingrained in our life.
Many financial planners have recommended precious metals such as gold and silver as part of an overall investment portfolio. Consider one aspect of portfolio hedge and purchase gold, whether it be American Eagles, Krugerrands, or Maple Leafs for an adjunct to long-term financial security. Ask your financial adviser before investing.

The idea behind the PayPal verification seal is to provide a would-be PayPal customer verification that the PayPal account is in good standing. Click on the verification seal, login to PayPal, and find out the status of the account. The instructions on how to put the seal on a website and how to use it have been obfuscated at PayPal.

The friends at Yahoo group NetBusinessSuccess have figured out how to do this.

1. Download the PayPal seal and put a link to it on your web page.

2. Make the seal clickable to the following URL (change the email address to your PayPal email address)

<a href="http://www.paypal.com/us/verified/pal=abc@mydomain.com"></a>

3. The code should look similar to this:

<a href="http://www.paypal.com/us/verified/pal=abc@mydomain.com">
<img src="http://mydomain.com/images/pp-verification-seal.gif"
 alt="PayPal Verification Seal" width="100" height="100" /></a>

Note at this juncture that PayPal verification is only for United States accounts.

[addition 21 Feb 2007]
If you need to hide your email address from spambots here is a tool to do that:

Email Address Encoder

Doug

One of the banes of blogging is spam comments. Nearly every blogger gets them. One way to reduce comment spam is to turn off accepting comments on older posts. Each blog host will have a different way to do this…if it is possible. Check with your host to see how.

Generally trackbacks are a nuisance since they do not require a login to implement. The poor moderator or comment filter must decide whether these are legitimate or not.

Since shutting off accepting comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks before a specific date is not built-in, WordPress has a comment timeout plug-in that does the job.

Doug