SEO, marketing and programming

Nu är blogwalk-uppföljaren uppe. Förhoppningsvis ska det gå vägen denna gång, utan problem med webbhotell och annat. Statistiken fungerar inte ännu, men förhoppningsvis kommer den börja fungera när portalen varit uppe i en vecka. Namnet blev blogg:anser, vet egentligen inte om det är så bra, var ganska trött när jag kom på det. Åsikter?

Andra som skriver om blogwalks död (och återuppståndelse):

• Christian på Skriftligt (Blogwalks ägare)
• Urban Lindstedt på Uppkopplat (Not: Blogwalk är licensierat under LGPL, inläggen från Var är du? går under CC)
• Beta Alfa.
• Stefan Rimm på Loci.se

Andra bloggar om: bloggportaler, bloggosfären, bloggverktyg, pinga, bloggande, blogglänkar

I was surfing the swedish internet when I noticed that a blog service, Blogwalk, had been suspended by the owner and that he had released the source under GPL. I decided to try to run the service.

UPDATE: released, see blogg:anser. However, the service is by no means stable yet. Christian writes about blogwalk here.

A lot of confusion was caused by the fact that he had hard-coded the paths for all files into the code. This caused a lot of trouble, as well as the fact that there was a quite smart caching algo and that the server returned “not modified” headers, which I didn’t realise until it nearly drove me mad! But generally speaking, I must say that the code is very well-written and easy to understan. Thanks Christian!

This post will be pretty small and I will update it when we see the effects.

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UPDATE: I was wrong. As pointed out here, the text “gdymov.com” is present on the page, although it is cloaked using CSS. Since I overtrusted the wordpress site, I didn’t check the source code of that page. Sorry for any inconvinience caused.

While searching I observed a strange phenomenon. For this search, look at the page codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Statistics that appears 9th, the snippet says:

Backlinks (http://gdymov.com/inbound-links-backlinks-wordpress-plugin/): Draws a graph over how the number of incoming links (thus the name “Backlinks”) to …

but the text http://gdymov.com/inbound-links-backlinks-wordpress-plugin/ does not actually appear on the page. So, where did Google get this text? When I examined the source, I found that the ‘title’ attribute of the link contains this text. Thus, this proves that google indexes the content in the <a title='’ attribute.

For those that want really rigid evidence, I can say that this does not work with links that have no ‘title’ attribute (in this example, nothing shows up, though the page has a link to gdymov.com, but contains neither the text “gdymov.com” nor does the link have a ‘title’ attribute).

HTML_QuickForm - this is the package I’ve been looking for for the latest week :) It automates form management in PHP in a very nice manner. I’ve already tested a couple of third-party classes and they either contain bugs (and the project I intend to use it in is critical) or they don’t have the functions I need. I will test it (in particular, I was looking for such a package since I have a big project going on with lots of forms) and update this post with some experiences.

UPDATE: so, here comes some input.

QuickForm is easy to use and has all the functions I expected it to have. One possible bug/problem I found was that you can’t set the default value for a <select> using SetDefaults(…). Neither using indexes or the actual values works :( Other than that, everything is great: forms are constructed with a few lines of PHP, new validation rules are easy to add (one small disappointment was that it is impossible to provide a custom error message from within a validation rule), the form can be “frozen” and shown to the user. Another important thing is that the documentation is reasonably good for such a project (I never had to look at the source code, just dig deeeeep into the help file sometimes :) ).

I like the PEAR packages. Now that I’m pretty sure they work I think it’s worth to take the time to examine some of them. Particularly, these look nice to me: a progress bar, AJAX library (you can’t have enough of them! ;) )

I haven’t posted for a long time since I’m totally consumed by all the stuff that I’ve been doing lately. First thing, I’m working on a *smart* link exchange system. There is much work left, but I’ve started testing it already, so maybe 40% of the code is already written. Second, I got some clients that need attention, and last but not least I’m constructing a Carcasherdotcom Seocontest network, the last page can be seen above.

I’ll post updates on the link exchange system and CS when progress is made :)