Posts Tagged ‘google’

I’ve had a little fiddle round with this site to add Google +1 button, Tweet Button and Facebook like. Not because I exepect anyone to use them but so I can use all three in anger. The formatting needs a bit of work still but all three seem to be working.

Back in October I did some fiddling with the Vue sites search engine that uses Google custom search to let you search the sites in my Vue links directory. Each time the list of sites changed I had to manually upload a file listing the sites to be included that was generated from the database behind the directory.  Not particularly time consuming but in theory it could be automated.  I tried to set up the automation but for no readily apparent reason it just didn’t work.

In December my 404 error log checking picked up hits on one of the page that I’d made to automate this.   So I republished that page and now through the magic of the Internet the automation seems to be all systems go.

I’d somehow managed to knock out the redirection of my old blogspot blog to the one integrated here.  I hadn’t realised just how many visitors were coming through from there still so breaking / fixing it has had a surprising impact on the impworks visitor statistics!

I was also seeing occasional 404s on the directory page for tags that didn’t exist so I’ve thrown in a simple tag cloud page to give visitors to that page something to chew on.

I’ve moved the Too Many Ideas RSS over to Feedburner mostly to get a better idea of what Feedburner has to offer. The existing feed is still there and will carry on working but if you want to try the new feed you can subscribe to it on:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/impworks

The first added extra using feedburner lets me offer is subscribing to the feed by email.  I’ve added the form to my site – its a bit ugly but changing the design breaks some of its functionality.

I’ve also added a tweet this link to my blog.

I’ve tweaked the display of the Vue links directory and the Google custom search of the site’s in the directory to hopefully make them easier to use.  I’ve also worked through all the python script and so they’re all displayed with a code highlighter.

The original Knight Rider used to end with the refrain of Wilton Knight’s last words to Michael…

One man can make a difference

Tonight I thought I’d share how one page (and a tiny bit of PHP code for WordPress) made a difference to my site.  At least its made a difference for Google.  I’ll apologise for the over stretched Knight Rider references now.

I’d noticed in Google Webmaster tools that around five hundred of my site’s pages were no longer in the Google index that used to be.  I’m not sure if this was the result of Google’s Caffeine launch but the timing of the fall is quite close. I’d also seen a 5% drop in visits to the site but that could be just a random fluctuation in the numbers.

There are some pages I exclude deliberately using robot meta tags like tag index pages and category pages.  They don’t have any useful content so I didn’t want to risk a duplicate content penalty.  Even deducting those from the total number of missing pages and 300+ pages were no longer in the index.

A bit of investigation (the obligatory bit of any Knight Rider episode where Michael would wander round a warehouse filled with cardboard boxes with a torch) and deduction hinted that the missing pages were old blog posts.  The missing ones were buried deep in the blog.  They are in the XML sitemap but Google’s spider just wasn’t getting deep enough through links to think they should be in the index. I’d trusted the sitemap to keep real content in the index but it doesn”t seem to be doing that anymore.  The XML sitemap had become C.A.R.R. to my site’s K.I.T.T!

I can’t just drive into the back of the FLAG mobile unit and get Bonnie to fix the problem.  I had to come up with a solution for myself.  So I added a rather uninteresting Too Many Ideas Contents page that lists every page on my blog by title. It was pretty easy to set up in WordPress with a little bit of code in a plug-in…

Source code

function show_all_posts($atts) {
	$posts = get_posts('numberposts=-1&orderby=title&order=ASC');
 
	foreach($posts as $post)
	{
		$text.='<li><a href="'.$post->post_name.'">'.$post->post_title.'</a></li>';
	}
 
	return '<ul>'.$text.'</ul>';
}
 
add_shortcode('show_all_posts', 'show_all_posts');

I dropped the [show_all_posts] shortcode into a page and magically the list appeared.

Then all I had left to do was wait and see if it worked…

The impact was like Michael hitting Turbo Boost – the day after I published the page Google indexed 500+ pages on my site rather than the 200 it was doing in June and July.  Its done that every day for a week now and the number of pages has actually risen slightly to a high of 617 pages.

The 300 missing pages are now back in Google’s index so I think I can safely say…

One Page Can Make a Difference

Google launching Buzz has crystalized a thought that’s been running through my head for a while.  Ever since the WWW came on the scene there have been a series of landgrabs for bits of the Internet.  Bits that give revenue which might be page impressions giving advertising revenue or e-commerce giving cold, hard, cash revenue.  Sometimes its been the potential for revenue or the myth of potential revenue.  That’s where we had the first big crash when the bubble burst.

At the moment a pile of the players are going after the social networking pie.  Google Buzz, Twitter, Facebook and all the other general purpose networks are all busy trying to tie us into their set up.  The problem from a users point of view is that we end up with our network fragmented depending on where our friends are.  These networks are quite crude at the moment.  Basically they tend to be quite private or quite public but with messages shared with everyone or just one person.

Then there are all the niche network sites built on old style forums where we meet up with people who share an interest.  There are all sorts of sites which may have something you’re interested in from personal blogs by friends, news sites and everything else in between.

Keeping up with all of those takes time.  RSS and Atom feeds made it easier to keep up with sites by letting us know when there was something to read rather than having to trawl over the sites every few days.  TweetDeck lets you pull your social networks together in one place.

So after all the preamble here is my real thought – is the real winner down the road not going to be whichever social network grabs the most members or gets the model right but will it be the tool that we all use to keep up with Social Networks, RSS, forums and Email in one place.  I don’t know if it will be a web app, something you install or a mix of both but I wish that was the Buzz Google had launched today instead of the one we got.  That would seem to me to have been closer to Google’s mission to organise the world’s information.