Posts Tagged ‘php’

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

I think I need a few extra hours in the day – if I did each of the following would probably be its own post…

Having finished a fascinating book on illegal gambling in the UK in the ’50s I started reading the first volume of Michael Palins’ diaries on Saturday and there a great read…

One unfortunate combination of words set an idea for a humorous, slightly strange Murder Mystery short story idea off and I wrote the first four pages yesterday…

That stopped me finishing the longer game writing project thats so close to having a complete first draft its bugging me…

So I was going to tackle it in the evening but I got an e-mail with an offer from Cornucopia3D for GeoControl2 which I’ve been tempted by for a while. So I ended up playing with that instead…

Plus Kim’s got a new novella out, Flesh and Shadows, with a very cheesy cover but I’ll probably give it a read because despite the cover its supposed to be Science Fiction not Mills and Boon…

Oh and having decided not to take out a subscription to the new version of Pyramid magazine because now its themed of the first six issues I’d only found three I was interested in. So inevitably the latest issue is one I wanted to pick up…

Then there’s the vue video tutorial from Quadspinner I want to write a review of for my Vue News Blog…

I’m just glad that The Wire (which is good but not as good as some of its exponents would like us to believe) is on three nights a week so I know when its finished its time to get some sleep or I don’t know how I’d know to end the day.

All the pictures in this gallery are experiments with lighting and atmospheres in Vue.

Duel: Foreground assembled in Poser 6. Scene assembled and rendered in Vue 5 Infinite. The scene is lit with one set of lights while the foreground figures are lit separately.

Misty Hills: A misty landscape rendered in Vue 6 Infinite.

Night Tree: A picture of a tree on a hill made using Vue 6 Infinite.

In Search of Phlogiston: Scene created and rendered in Vue 5 Infinite.

Reed: A reed reflected on misty water.

Willo-the-wisp: A willo-the-wisp over misty water created using Vue 6 Infinite (version 6.5) and including plants from Realms Art Wetland Plants.

Dark Skies: Scene created and rendered in Vue 5 Infinite. The title is a line from Enya’s “Storms in Africa Part II”

Ardent Veridian: A landscape made using Vue 6 Infinite.

Duckbill Point: This picture was created and rendered in Vue 6 Infinite using a terrain made using Chipp’s TerraPack.

Misty Lake: Created and rendered in Vue 5 Infinite.

Wooded Lane: This scene created and rendered in Vue 5 Infinite using an EcoSystem I made with plants from the Incredibly Lush Underbrush pack from Cornucopia3d.

Lonely Meeting: This scene was originally created in Vue 4 and then updated to Vue 5 to take advantage of EcoSystems.

In the ten years I’ve spent working on the web I’ve been involved in the development of the odd website here and there. Here are a few of the ones I’ve had a more personal involvement in.

The Early Years

The Mudhole / Spodbox years

Back in 1996 Mudhole / Spodbox: I set up my first website on Mudhole which later moved to Spodbox. I’d not come up with the impworks back then but if I had this would have been impworks 0.1 beta through impworks 0.5 or something similar.

Venice Architecture Competition

Back in 1997 I made a website for Dan Newport’s entry in an architecture competition. Back then white text on a black background was what all the cool kids did to make their web sites look stylish.

WWW Authoring by Example

In 1997 and 1998 I was working on the Internet Express, a project that took twenty computers and the Internet around libraries in Merseyside. I demonstrated on a course about making web pages. With only a few hours to cram everything into we couldn’t teach everything so I created my WWW Authoring by Examples website to expand on the course.

Bifrost

Bifrost 2003 Web site

I’ve been the webmaster for the official website for the SFSFW’s annual event since it first had a website back in the dim and distant past.

Bifrost 2005 Website

impworks

impworks 0.9

impworks web site 1.0

The impworks website has been through two phases so far (with a huge abandonments in the middle when I didn’t find time to work on it).

After a version which was little more than a holding page I built a new site using php and smarty. Eventually, when free open source content management systems, matured I decided the time had come to move to WordPress and the result is this site impworks 2.0

I’ve finished an article for Ragnarok, The Panzerfaüste Song Book, porting the shanty rules from Strange Grogge to Panzerfaüste and bringing the songs up to date. Needs a bit of checking before I send it off but hopefully its ok.

I’ve also just finished a short article for Ragnarok for the game Slag!. Three new systems and four ship designs using them. Need to make graphics for each of the designs but otherwise done. Frustratingly it would be done but when I finished the drawings last night the file not only failed to save but destroyed the earlier save in the process.

Issue 53 of Ragnarok, the Society of Fantasy and Science Fiction Wargamings magazine, is out now and includes an article by me – When Ants Attack – for use with the game Tusk.

This issue, and the last three back issues are also now available from Wargames Vault as PDFs.

I’ve just spent the evening messing around with Vue 7. Nothing really to show from tonight but I made the yet to be titled picture above last night. I’ve resized it for the web from a larger, print quality render and cropped it a little too. The ship is from Cornucopia 3D and the Water Dragon from Daz. Vaguely inspired by my long since finished nautical Ravenloft campaign.

I wouldn’t be up this late but I’ve not been well and I can’t sleep. I was just doing the final rounds of checking on the flat when the whole building shook. At first I thought it was a Fire Engine going past outside at speed but from the way my inner ear was acting like I’d just gone through a railway tunnel I realised that wasn’t right. A quick google later and I found a USGS web site with some information about an earthquake in Lincolnshire. I’m going to try and go to bed again now while the Earths not moving…

Tonight I have mostly been playing with the php5, the Zend Framework and the Gdata API. Nothing to show yet because I’m getting to grips with it although the impworks web site is now entirely php5 driven. Although thats not really very impressive as all I did was change a htaccess file so the php extension runs php5 instead of php4. Happily it all appears to be working without any hitches so far.