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Wordpress Category as Subdomain Plugin

GiladG — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 23:54:20 +0000

This is a plugin which I adapted from an older version (see History). I made the required adaptations to Wordpress 2.6.2 about a month ago after I saw that it isn’t properly working and that comments on the developer’s blog go unanswered.

I debated releasing this plugin for a couple of weeks but after seeing so many people trying to get it to work I decided to release it on my blog. My personal project relied heavily on sumdomained pages and this function has been tested in full. The category part of this plugin, while adapted and seems to work properly has not been fully tested by me and I would appreciate any comments about any problem you may have ran into.

Description:
This plugin will take a category of your choice (i.e. www.myblog.com/some-category/) and will turn it into a subdomain (i.e. somecategory.myblog.com/).

History:
This plugin was initially written and released under the name Subster Rejunevation by Dax (aka BiggNuts) and maintained until version 2.1 of Wordpress.

Next Adam Dempsey took a stab at adapting it for Wordpress 2.5, however, according to the comments the plugin did not work properly beyond Wordpress version 2.2.2.

I took this plugin, adapted all functions to work properly on Wordpress 2.6.2 and released on 9/20/08.

Todo:
Subdomain tags

Download:
* Version 0.44

View .htaccess / Hidden Files in CuteFTP

GiladG — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 07:10:40 +0000

I was testing a new host and ran across the problem of hidden files. Apparently any .ht file (i.e. .htaccess) is considered “hidden” by some hosts and therefore cannot be viewed when using CuteFTP and other programs. So how do you view .htacccess / hidden files in CuteFTP?

You must use “Server-Side Filtering”. To set it up in CuteFTP:

1. Click on “View -> Filter…”.
2. Make sure “Enable Filtering” is checked.
3. Make sure “Enable Server-Side Filtering” is checked.
4. Under “Remote Filter” type “-a”.
5. Click “OK”

How-To: Enable Mod_Rewrite on Apache2

GiladG — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 07:10:42 +0000

In order to enable Mod_Rewrite on Apache2 / Ubuntu:

sudo a2enmod rewrite

You will then need to reload Apache for the addition to take effect:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

When Search Engines Index Search Engines (Or Why I don’t Use Yahoo)

GiladG — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 17:40:43 +0000

Every once in a while, I try using Yahoo for search. Most of the times it is because I didn’t find something in Google, and other times it is simply because I feel bad for them. Regardless of the reason, I always get smacked in the face and bounce back to Google for a while (or until I forget).

Yoday was one of these searches. I was looking for "cardinals jersey" (relax, I am not a fan), and whose at #1? The top ranked organic results was Become.com (Shopping search engine), but the problem was, the Become.com didn’t have any products on that page, but only Google Ads. So should Yahoo even index / give authority to all these possible search results off Become.com?

Tags: Search Arbitrage, Become.com

Confuse the Enemy

GiladG — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 17:48:35 +0000

They know who you are, they know what you like, they know what you’re into and they even know what mood you’re in. I am still not sure if enemy is the right term, but search engines have been tracking your whereabouts for years now. The recent AOL mistake of publishing their user’s search terms had shown how easy it is to track surfers, find trends in their searched and in some cases even find their names.
So what can you do to maintain a bit of that privacy we used to have before the Internet days? A new Firefox extension called Track Me Not may be a useful solution:

TrackMeNot runs in Firefox as a low-priority background process that periodically issues randomized search-queries to popular search engines, e.g., AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN. It hides users’ actual search trails in a cloud of ‘ghost’ queries, significantly increasing the difficulty of aggregating such data into accurate or identifying user profiles.

The extension will allow you to edit the list of words used, to “confuse the enemy” and seem to work fine so far (for me). John Bettelle, on the other hand, had to add “Now, who will be first to make this illegal or against TOS? The search companies, or the government?!”

Your Site isn’t Accessible? You May Get Sued

GiladG — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 15:54:20 +0000

Now this is an interesting piece about a recent case filed against Target.com for lack of accessibility in their website.

It seems as if Target is being sued for having it’s site inaccessible to the blind…

A federal district court judge ruled yesterday that a retailer may be sued if its website is inaccessible to the blind. The ruling was issued in a case brought by the National Federation of the Blind against Target Corp. (Northern District of California Case No. C 06-01802 MHP) The suit charges that Target’s website (http://www.target.com) is inaccessible to the blind, and therefore violates the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the California Unruh Civil Rights Act, and the California Disabled Persons Act. Target asked the court to dismiss the action by arguing that no law requires Target to make its website accessible. The Court denied Target’s motion to dismiss and held that the federal and state civil rights laws do apply to a website such as target.com.

So far I can understand that this applies to sites which have an actual presence / storefront, and doesn’t apply to Internet only merchants, however, if you have a company blog that represents a business with a storefront you may want to take precautions…

[via Threadwatch]

Google is Looking for User Input on Adwords Ads

GiladG — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 09:04:45 +0000

Last week Google introduced their questionable “landing page quality control” which caused quite a few webmasters to go crazy. This, however, seems to have not been enough as today I noticed another effort to get more input on landing pages, this time Google flat out asks “Was This Link Useful?” after returning from a landing page.

Not that I have a problem with this implementation of quality control, but obviously, if I hit the back button the landing page was not 100% satisfactory. Another issue is what happens when my competitor gets this question after purposly clicking my ad, and then he’s gracious enough to vote “No”, will Google then raise my minimum bid?

Google Ad Before Clicked

Google Ad After Returning From Landing Page

Redirect non-www to www in Wordpress

GiladG — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 19:59:33 +0000

For years now, search engines have been struggling with the different variations of domains. For some off reason requests for www.seoweblog.com, seoweblog.com and seoweblog.com/index.php, while obviously return the same page, get indexed as 3 different pages…

The consequinces: Pagerank splits, Backlinks split and lastly you’re risking getting filtered for duplicate content by the new filters at Google.

Over at b5media, we’ve been looking for a way to redirect all non-www request to the appropriate variation of the address, and since all blogs run Wordpress it’s been a challenge to do it through the software itself rather than through the Apache server settings.

Last week, Matt introduced a plugin that takes all requests for the www version of a site and return a consistent non-www address with the appropriate redirect methods. The plugin, while working good, is only a partial solution as it does not include the index.php requests.

I took the same plugin and created a complementary, improved version of it. Since I like to have all www addresses, I’ve redirected all non-www to www and all index.php to /.

So far it seems to work fine, however, I’m open for suggestions, comments or complaints…

Download: yes-www.zip

Installation Instaructions:

1. Unzip the file.
2. Upload to your Wordpress plugin folder.
3. Activate from within Wordpress admin.

Updates:

Date	Version	Changes
9/10/2006	0.30	The plugin caused an error when using the wp theme editor. Aparently, it caused an endless redirection loop when editing the homepage. Anyways, now it doesn’t…
6/20/2006	0.20	Previeus version did not process GET queries such as search queries… Added processing for queries and rewrote plugin for smaller / faster version. (Thanks Aaron for your contribution)
6/19/2006	0.10	First version, my first plugin ever, may lack be missing some details, please let me know if anything is not-working / missing.

Portfolio Style SEM Campaigns

GiladG — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 19:58:17 +0000

Portfolio-based campaign strategies are of particular interest to agencies that manage media beyond search engine marketing (SEM). They look at media plans from an overview perspective, often because they can’t accurately gauge the effectiveness of specific media buy elements. Portfolio-approach skeptics may point out a portfolio-based media campaign results in higher media spending than a campaign based on strict direct marketing maximum-allowable methods. After all, agency commissions are generally based on a percentage of spending.
[Read More]

T1MSN Search (Mexico) Algorithm Change

GiladG — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 06:36:05 +0000

A good post by Nacho, reviewes the latest algorithm changes made by the different search engines over the last few months.

The poster claims that T1MSN (Mexico) has recently switched its’ algorithm to favor Mexican hosted sites for ranking preference. Therefore, most people with US hosted sites are noticing a decline in traffic.