SEO basics, best practices, and tactics

• Terrible SEO Advice: Focus on Users, Not Engines
  Rand sparks a debate: “In my view, SEO starts with the user (of course), but cannot ignore the incredible importance of search-engine targeted (and specific) tactics”
• Is Choosing Search Engines Over Users A Fatal Flaw In SEO?
  Jill Whalen responds to Rand: “If you listen to this advice, your SEO will be fatally flawed from the get-go”
• SEO Truths Or Should That Be SEEO?
  SEEO = Search Engine Evolutionary Optimization. The “truths” are mostly based on observation, and fluctuate based on change…
• When the PageRank Toolbar Goes Dark…
  Where PageRank is the great distorter is that many site owners – not SEOs – value their sites by that alone.

Marketing and content

• Can Viral Marketing Be Manufactured?
  The very nature of viral content makes a traditional marketing plan next to impossible. How can a marketer improve their chances of striking viral gold?
• The Web Marketing Checklist: 37 Ways to Promote Your Site
  A useful checklist – All you can do to promote your site online
• 10 Useful Social Bookmarking Websites to Promote Your Content
  What it says on the label
• Link Building With Content: How To Attract Links And Leads
  This article outlines how to merge the practice of linkbait (we call it linkable content) and the strategies of content marketing to maximize the value of your content creation and publishing efforts.
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Tips for News Search
  Tips, background and FAQs for all publishers interested in Google News Search

Pretty graphs

• 4 Visual Charts on the Value of SEO Tactics
  Particularly interesting graph on the value of XML sitemaps, which we’re working on next sprint. Would be a fun exercise to scatterplot where we think each of our sites land on these various other graphs.
• Explaining (Some of) Google’s Algorithm with Pretty Charts & Math Stuff
  Interesting [and heady] charts about the Google Algorithm ranking factors.

The big picture

• Why SEO Training Should Be An Organizational Imperative
  Failure to train people can lead to serious problems, with a frightful waste of time, blown schedules, wasted expenditure and ultimately a failure to effectively capture search traffic.
• The Guardian / Trafigura Thing – Gagged by Carter Ruck Solicitors? Fail.
  The days when corporate malfeasance could be hushed up by a deal cut in the smoke-lined back rooms is over.
• Now is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion
  The key to success in business hasn’t changed – provide good customer service and work your butt off. [Video, full of profanity but great]

Enjoy!

SEO basics & best practices

• 10 Common SEO Mistakes
  This could also be called, “Why SEO touches every part of the business.”
• 5 Common Pieces of SEO Advice I Disagree With
  There’s a lot of “best practice” suggestions out there which aren’t really the “best.” Rand at SEOMoz offers opinions on a few of them.
• The SEO Playbook – Welcome to the Rabbit Hole Alice
  An old post, but an “advanced beginner’s guide” full of value. Quote: “Technology and marketing were formerly unique disciplines with very different types of people. SEO’s are the folks in between.”
• 4 R’s of SEO: Robots, Ranking, Relevance & Results
  It all comes down to this, really.
• Brent D. Payne Interview | Tribune Company SEO
  Brent is the the in-house Director of Search Engine Optimization for Tribune newspapers, which include pubs like the Chicago Tribune and the LA Times. A great case study in practical SEO at a large company.

Content

• Title Tags Revisited – What’s a Title Tag and How Important are They to SEO?
  A solid reminder about the power of the well-formed meta title.
• 6 steps to KILLING long tail keywords for SEOs & Content writers
  A good look at researching and identifying long-tail keyword opportunities, with a bunch of specific detail about how to put various tools to use.
• The Zeroth Law of Writing for SEO
  The zeroth law of SEO is this: Write an article whose title is a question people are asking Google and whose body is the answer.

Technical

• Optimizing Your Web Page Speed
  Load time can impact how much of a site gets crawled and indexed by search engines, but can also affect user experience and conversions. It’s unfortunate this site is so completely wrapped in advertising, because there’s some really useful info buried in these pages.
• A proposal for making AJAX crawlable
  Google continues to work on better seeing what users see, regardless of how it’s delivered.

And completely unrelated to SEO, but so painfully bad it must be shared…

• Windows 7 Launch Commercial
  In Redmond, no one can hear you scream.

Enjoy!

When I was in art school way back when, I developed a few pronounced preferences in the pens that I use. It needs to feel right, it needs to write right, and I need to be able to flip spin it around my thumb when I’m bored or in a meeting. Couple this with the fact that I can also be stubbornly cheap, and hate actually buying pens, you can see where going to an expo – where branded pens are the swag of choice – would be like trick-or-treating for me.

Respect where it is due, I will at least make eye contact and thank the folks at the booth, and when I can I’ll have some basic conversation with them, regardless of how relevant their service or software is to me. Now and then I will admit that I just want the pen, but I don’t think they really mind, and seriously, when I find one I like I tend to keep it in my pocket and use it until I lose it or it dies. The Yahoo! pen I got at ad:tech London last year was outstanding, and I was very sad the day I literally ran it out of ink.

Today I made the rounds of the expo (three floors!) at SES NY, although I did not get another Yahoo! pen as they have changed the design and I already have one from PubCon. I’m sure I missed a few, but as a bit of a ‘thank you’ to the vendors for the ones I did get, I give you my reviews:

ABC Search
ABCSearch is the world’s largest privately held meta search engine, conducting over 100 million daily searches through our network of specialized engines and metacrawlers.

Body: oversized white with orange detail
Ink color: Black
Click or Cap: Click
Grippy: textured orange plastic
Branding/Logo: large blue logo and tagline

Rated on:
Aesthetics: eye catching – 3/5
Mechanics: design is biased to hold one particular way – 2/5
Ink quality: nothing special – 2/5
Spinnability: too light – 2/5

Overall: 2.25

Acronym media
Acronym Media, an independent, global Search Marketing and Keyword-Driven Marketing ™ agency, is headquartered in New York’s landmark Empire State Building. Consistently rated as a top 10 search engine agency by Advertising Age, the firm offers its clients 13 years of search marketing experience and top-notch SEM consulting services from multiple locations around the globe.

Body: orange plastic with whizzy integrated spring design
Ink color: Black
Click or Cap: click
Grippy: no
Branding/Logo: black lettering with tagline and URL

Rated on:
Aesthetics: very space-age – 4/5
Mechanics: so-so – 3/5
Ink quality: boring – 3/5
Spinnability: very good – 5/5

Overall: 3.75

Adgooroo
Monitor competitors, expand keywords, and protect trademarks with AdGooroo. AdGooroo is the leading provider of search engine intelligence. Its proprietary technology tracks search activity across any industry vertical, empowering sophisticated agencies and advertisers with actionable data related to competitors’ keywords, ad copy, natural and paid search via online reports and daily e-mail alerts.

Body: Shiny blue plastic with chrome clip and tip
Ink color: black
Click or Cap: click
Grippy: textured blue rubber
Branding/Logo: white URL which is also their logo

Rated on:
Aesthetics: contoured design is cool 4/5
Mechanics: nice – 4/5
Ink quality: standard ballpoint – 3/5
Spinnability: great – 5/5

Overall: 4

adMarketplace
The adMarketplace Exchange has delivered performance and volume for over 100,000 Pay Per Click advertisers since 2003. adMarketplace is the leading one-stop shop for online marketers to drive performance-optimized PPC traffic from approximately 250 million searches every day.

Body: slim, clear plastic with green plastic clip
Ink color: black
Click or Cap: click
Grippy: no
Branding/Logo: green printed logo

Rated on:
Aesthetics: logo is difficult to read – 1/5
Mechanics: it’s really just a Bic – 2/5
Ink quality: feels kind of scratchy – 2/5
Spinnability: possible but not fun – 2/5

Overall: 1.75

Didit
With award-winning expertise in auctioned media management and targeted online advertising, Didit has been leading the evolution of online marketing with its blend of technology, intelligence, and passion since 1996. Through its multi-disciplinary methodology, Didit combines top-tier SEM strategy, highly sophisticated analytics and modeling, and best-of-breed technology to produce unmatched SEM results for clients across all major verticals.

Body: Shiny, dark green with gold details and wiry clip
Ink color: Black
Click or Cap: Twist
Grippy: contoured, smooth green rubber
Branding/Logo: small gold logo

Rated on:
Aesthetics: very classy – 4/5
Mechanics: twist is awkward in practice – 3/5
Ink quality: dry at first, otherwise un – 3/5
Spinnability: uniquely impossible – 0/5

Overall: 2.5

Interwoven
Interwoven is a global leader in content management solutions. Interwoven’s software and services enable organizations to effectively leverage content to drive business growth by improving the customer experience, increasing collaboration, and streamlining business processes.

Body: amazing rocket shape with blue liquid body and glowing red light
Ink color: black – very small well, won’t last long
Click or Cap: small rubbery cap, will get lost easily
Grippy: no
Branding/Logo: white printed logo, no URL

Rated on:
Aesthetics: skews the standard – 5/5
Mechanics: cap will get lost, but light is coool – 4/5
Ink quality: nothing spiffy – 2/5
Spinnability: not a chance – 0/5

Overall: 3.75

Marchex
Marchex is a local online advertising company and leading publisher of local content. Marchex’s innovative advertising platform delivers search- and call-based marketing products and services for local and national advertisers. Marchex’s local content network, one of the largest online, helps consumers make better, more informed local decisions through its network of content-rich websites that reach tens of millions of unique visitors each month.

Body: Flat black plastic rollerball with metal clip.
Ink: Water-soluble cool Black
Click or Cap: Cap
Grippy: No
Branding/Logo: White text, no URL

Rated on:
Aesthetics: stylish and simple – 4/5
Mechanics: no moving parts – 4/5
Ink quality: Rollerball flows smoothly, I like it – 5/5
Spinnability: kind of light – 3/5

Overall: 4

Marin Software
Founded in April 2006 by experienced search marketers and software experts, Marin Software provides an enterprise-class paid search management application for advertisers and agencies. Combining power and ease-of-use, Marin Search Marketer addresses the workflow, analysis and optimization needs of professional search marketers, saving time and improving financial performance.

Body: gloss black plastic with plastic clip
Ink: Water-soluble neutral Black
Click or Cap: Click
Grippy: Yes, textured black
Branding/Logo: Silver logo with call to action and URL

Rated on:
Aesthetics: shiny, modern – 4/5
Mechanics: basic click – 3/5
Ink quality: very nice, smooth flow, neutral color – 5/5
Spinnability: very good 5/5

Overall: 4.25

Microsoft adCenter
Microsoft adCenter, part of Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions, powers the paid search advertising service. Microsoft adCenter improves advertising performance and return on investment by providing a high quality audience and advanced targeting tools, and gives advertisers the right tools to manage and control their campaigns for top performance.

Body: Pearl white metal with black grip and chrome details
Ink: Black
Click or Cap: Twist
Grippy: smooth black
Branding/Logo: simple black text with URL on opposite side

Rated on:
Aesthetics: styley – 5/5
Mechanics: twist is awkward – 3/5
Ink quality: unexciting – 2/5
Spinnability: too much weight at the back – 2/5

Overall: 3

MobileStorm
mobileStorm powers your business with digital marketing solutions that reach people how they want to be reached — and makes you more money. Our customers love the Stun platform — advanced marketing technologies and many ways to reach their prospects with SMS, e-mail, fax, voice, RSS — even video messaging.

Body: Purple plastic with metal clip, chrome detal and black grip
Ink: Black
Click or Cap: Click
Grippy: smooth rubber with chrome banding
Branding/Logo: small white logo

Rated on:
Aesthetics: busy – 2/5
Mechanics: nice springy click – 4/5
Ink quality: pretty standard ballpoint – 3/5
Spinnability: a little off balance – 3/5

Overall: 3

Offshoring.com
Offshoring is the practice of relocating business processes to another country as a means to decrease staff costs while increasing productivity. At Offshoring.com, we specialize in providing companies with dedicated personnel in a wide area of fields, including IT services, contact centers, and backend business processing.

Body: Forest green plastic with chrome and black detail
Ink color: Black
Click or Cap: Click
Grippy: Textured rubber
Branding/Logo: white logo and tagline

Rated on:
Aesthetics: nice color, clearly swag – 3/5
Mechanics: click button is almost pointy – 2/5
Ink quality: standard – 3/5
Spinnability: way too lightweight – 2/5

Overall: 2.5

Omniture
Omniture, Inc. is a leading provider of online business optimization software, enabling customers to manage and enhance online, offline, and multi-channel business initiatives. Omniture’s software, which it hosts and delivers to its customers as an on-demand subscription service, enables customers to capture, store, and analyze information generated by their websites and other sources and to gain critical business insights into the performance and efficiency of marketing and sales initiatives and other business processes.

Body: contoured silver with black grip and metal wire clip
Ink color: black
Click or Cap: twist
Grippy: contoured black rubber
Branding/Logo: logo

Rated on:
Aesthetics: very space age – 4/5
Mechanics: twist is odd, nib is wobbly – 2/5
Ink quality: nothing to write home about – 3/5
Spinnability: possible but not easy – 2/5

Overall: 2.75

Sedo
Sedo is the global marketplace for buying and selling domain names and websites with offices in the US, Germany and London. Sedo offers our users all the tools needed to buy and sell domains among a community of users stretching around the world, including domain appraisals, brokerage services, promotion and last, but not least, Sedo’s popular domain parking program.

Body: purple with white grip and silver
Ink color: black
Click or Cap: click
Grippy: white textured rubber
Branding/Logo: silver logo

Rated on:
Aesthetics: contoured design is clearly from the same supplier as the adgooroo pen, but still cool – 4/5
Mechanics: looser than the adgooroo one – 3/5
Ink quality: took some real effort to get working – 1/5
Spinnability: great – 5/5

Overall: 3.25

SendTec
SendTec is the premier customer acquisition ad agency with expertise in multi-channel integrated direct marketing, both online and offline.

Body: white metal with black grip and chrome clip and details
Ink color: black
Click or Cap: click
Grippy: smooth black rubber
Branding/Logo: logo and tagline, heavily printed so you can feel it

Rated on:
Aesthetics: pretty classy for swag – 4/5
Mechanics: nice click and feel – 4/5
Ink quality: standard – 3/5
Spinnability: good – 4/5

Overall: 3.75

The Search Agency
The Search Agency helps businesses develop effective online marketing strategies and improve their Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization results.

Body: clear orange plastic with white grip and chromed plastic clip
Ink color: black
Click or Cap: click
Grippy: white textured rubber
Branding/Logo: white printed logo

Rated on:
Aesthetics: orange is an acquired taste – 3/5
Mechanics: nice click – 4/5
Ink quality: very dry – 2/5
Spinnability: so-so – 2/5

Overall: 2.75

Yellowpages.com
“Need something?” For more than 125 years, consumers have trusted the Yellow Pages to deliver comprehensive information on local businesses. And today, wherever, however, and whenever they “need something” local, they use YellowPages.com.

Body: bright yellow shiny plastic with black details
Ink color: black
Click or Cap: click
Grippy: flashy black rubber racing stripes
Branding/Logo: black printed URL/logo

Rated on:
Aesthetics: distinctive – 4/5
Mechanics: strong spring, very solid – 4/5
Ink quality: sadly standard – 3/5
Spinnability: actually very good – 4/5

Overall: 3.75
On averages alone, the Marin Software pen wins, and that or the Marchex are likely to be in my pocket for a long time…though the Interwoven Rocket is easily one of the ‘must haves’ from this show. I am surprised to note that there is not a single blue ink pen in the bunch.

What does it all mean? Nothing, I’m sure, this was a lark that gave me an excuse to go check out the vendors. But if I’ve helped just one person have a better writing experience this week, then my work here is done. For now.

All company descriptions lifted from the exhibitor listings at the SES NY website; all other opinions are my own and should in no way be taken as reflective of the quality of the services or software provided by the merchants or of their respective marketing departments.

Now, even back in the pre-internet days, the library (remember those?) had a search function. You would start at the card catalog and find the book you wanted. These days the card catalog has been replaced by a terminal screen, but the function is the same. Or, you could wander the stacks – organized by category – and manually find things that looked relevant. Or had good reviews on the back, or had a pretty cover.

Search engines are the card catalog of the web, though each of them has their own version of a Dewey decimal system. Based on a couple words or concepts, they’ll deliver a set of pages which they’ve determined match your needs. Just like some of the books you find in the card catalog won’t really be what you want, some web pages in the SERPs are going to be more useful to you than others. At the same time, search results can be the equivalent of the categorized stacks in the library, letting you browse through a variety of pages around a related topic.

What a physical card catalog doesn’t do, though, is offer suggestions of things I might like. Search engines are aiming to do this with personalized search results, as are sites like Amazon (with the “Amazon suggests” feature), Last.fm, or Stumbleupon. These sites want to be the friend who passes me a book and says, “I think you’ll like this.”

The thing is, even if someone knows me really well, they’re not always right…because frankly, personal preferences aren’t rational. Even within a genre I like, some things will work for me and some won’t. I can’t really tell you why I like James Bond books but not Mike Hammer books. And if my Last.fm playlist leans towards melodic singer/songwriters like Cat Power or Neko Case, their algorithm is never going to even consider offering me any Norwegian death metal or west coast hip-hop. But I like both of those things, too.

So to the original question: no, personalization won’t replace search. We’ll always have a need to find new things, and there will always be personal, irrational filtering that a software program will never be able to consider. And now and then I’m still going to want to just browse the stacks and pick up something with a pretty cover.

As I discuss in my previous post, the ability to have a post here automatically propagate out to my Twitter feed and to Facebook is fantastic, and with Twitpress handling permalinks properly it’s a done deal. Potentially nefarious SEO uses notwithstanding (grin), I’m mighty pleased by this.

Thanks Tom!

Also, I’m on vacation for a week starting tomorrow, and while I have several things in draft mode, nothing is ready to be auto-publishing while I’m away…though I may post-date one or two things.

I found a basic, but functional, plugin called Twitpress, which does exactly what I wanted. Except…I’m also using the All In One SEO Pack, which rewrites page URLs into an SEO-friendly format. (Really, a must-have plugin.) Twitpress by default will tweet the stock version of a post URL:

http://RelevantText.com?p=24

instead of the format I want to show:

http://RelevantText.com/making-the-most-of-server-errors-20080111/

Now, I know that a)Twitter links are nofollowed, so this doesn’t really matter for the spiders, and b)Twitter also automatically turns long links into tinyurls, but it still bothered me (more on why in a minute). So, I set about to fix the plugin.

After reading through what the plugin code was doing, I surfed through the WP database tables a little bit, and discovered that I needed to change one line in Twitpress. Hooray!

In the twitpress.php code, replace line 85:

$proto = str_replace("[link]", get_option('home')."?p=".$postID, $proto);

with

$proto = str_replace("[link]", $post->guid, $proto);

‘guid’ is a field in the wp_posts table, if you care.

Bingo. I’m very pleased with myself.

So why, you may ask, do I care about how the links look in Twitter if they aren’t spiderable? Because I’ve also installed the Twitter App on Facebook, so any time I update Twitter, my Facebook status updates as well…which means the link is then being pushed out along the newsfeeds of all my contacts there. The link is still not spiderable, but it is potentially much more likely to get seen, followed, and possibly linked to. Through the tinyurl redirect, it now goes to the right version of the URL, and when people subsequently link to the post, I want them using the right one. This, I think, will help that along.

Jan 14 Update: After my initial excitement, I’ve discovered that this is still slightly buggy – notifications occasionally appear on twitter with the p= URL, and sometimes with no URL at all.  This seems to only happen when a post is first published, and not when later edited, but I’m not clear why, as the ‘guid’ field is populated with the first publish of a post. So, this is cool when it works, but I’m still looking at it. 

I was reminded today that people often don’t deal with 500 server errors at all, but on a large dynamic site these errors are just as bound to happen as 404s, and they’re far more troublesome. They are unpredictable, untrackable (unless you want to trawl through server logs, which I for one don’t), and harbingers of doom for your site because more often than not, they are indicators of something very bad going on behind the scenes…and you can bet your AdSense check that if a user sees them, a search spider does, too. When a spider hits a server error, it’s usually dead in the water, and that spells disaster for your rankings.

The good news is, it’s actually not too hard to deal with them properly.

One of my large corporate sites was having some massive issues with server response time last year, and as a result we were seeing a significant uptick in the number of 500 errors being reported in Google WMT’s crawl stats.

For the most part, it seemed like simply backing up and reloading the page usually got past the error, but GoogleBot isn’t going to do that. We really had no way of knowing just how pervasive the problem was, but we knew it was affecting the user experience, and clearly killing GoogleBot on a regular basis. While the technology group worked on the backend issues, we stemmed the problem from the front end by creating a custom error page to display any time a 500 error occurred.

The criteria were minimal:

1. Improve the user experience when an error occurs
2. Provide search spiders a way to continue through the site, and
3. Be able to solidly track the number of server errors being delivered as part of our overall statistics

Fortunately, both .NET and Apache make it very easy to define a custom page to display when a server error happens.

In Apache, it’s dead simple – add a line to your .htaccess file like this:

ErrorDocument 500 /friendly500.html

(the nice thing here is that you don’t need to tweak the server config file, which you probably can’t do if you don’t manage your own servers…)

Microsoft servers are a little more involved. For a friendly error page in .NET, IIS tells yout to edit the web config file to include this code:

<customErrors mode="On" defaultRedirect="errors/friendly500.html">
</customErrors>

As noted here on Techrepublic, you may define different pages for different errors:

<customErrors mode="RemoteOnly" defaultRedirect="errors/ErrorPage.aspx">
<error statusCode="400" redirect="errors/friendly400.html" />
<error statusCode="401" redirect="errors/friendly401.html" />
<error statusCode="403" redirect="errors/friendly403.html" />
<error statusCode="404" redirect="errors/friendly404.html" />
<error statusCode="408" redirect="errors/friendly408.html" />
<error statusCode="500" redirect="errors/friendly500.html" />
<error statusCode="503" redirect="errors/friendly503.html" />
</customErrors>

The page can have either an .aspx or .html extension, but keep in mind that if the server is having problems there’s no sense in trying to deliver another dynamic page. Keep it static.

One caveat : IE will try to display a friendly error message of its own, unless the error page is over 512k, so put some text on it.

As our existing 404 page is essentially a sitemap, we quickly realized that we could simply duplicate it as ‘error.html’ and with a few text changes, use that. Users now get a friendly “Oops!” message, and spiders and users alike have a variety of useful links enabling them to continue navigating the site instead of going elsewhere.

Results?

A snapshot report from Google WMT in July showed 218 server errors that happened during their crawls in the previous two weeks. Today, there are none listed at all. (To be fair, the tech guys have been doing loads of work to make things run better as well, and credit where credit is due.) But we can also now see in our statistics that regardless of what GoogleBot is seeing, the error page has actually loaded…um…let’s just say “rather a lot” this month so far, and we can now start assembling solid numbers of how much the server issues are affecting the user experience and to argue for even more improvement work on the backend.

November has gone in a flash. Thanksgiving found us with 10 people around a not-quite-big-enough table, most of whom had absolutely zero sense of tradition surrounding the meal because they’re Brits. But it was tasty.

The UncleFromGermany is visiting, and it has been a crazy week of living London-style: six shows in 7 nights, taking Saturday off only for the making of the large meal. In order: The Country Wife at the Haymarket (totally fun), Billy Elliot (uncle’s choice), Parade at the Donmar (fantastic), a sneak preview of Kenneth Branagh’s film version of The Magic Flute (could have been so much better, could have been so much worse), the RSC’s King Lear (with Sir Ian McKellan, outstanding), and another version of The Magic Flute as done by a South African company tonight. Some would say this is why we moved here.

In more geeky news, I’ve spent some time this month trying to do a facebook app as a work-related experiment, with little success thus far. As in, I can’t get their basic ‘Hello world’ to work. I’m sure I’m doing something dumb. I hope to be making more progress on that as the week goes on.

I’ll be in Las Vegas next week for PubCon. For those of you who know me through other channels, this is a big search engine marketing thing. Assuming I can get out of bed in the morning, which assumes I’ll be getting to bed at all, there are definitely a number of good-looking sessions. I haven’t been to a conference like this in quite a while, and certainly not in this field, so it will be quite an experience, I’m sure. Not to mention…Vegas, baby!

I’ve also got the standard assortment of email accounts at Yahoo!, Gmail, and MSN, which also get used as logins for various other places like Google Reader, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon, and on top of that, as I’m doing research for things at work I’ll end up with more logins for more sites, and a lengthy list of sites to try and keep up with.

How the heck do I keep all this stuff straight?

It’s mighty helpful that browsers will remember passwords, I’ll say that. And I have a small stock of regular usernames and passwords I use, so if I haven’t saved the login for a particular site, there’s decent odds I can come up with it from memory.

I also have a private wiki set up for tracking my daily tasks and some other information, so I’ve got a page there with a table of account info.

But keeping up with all the various sites on a day-to-day basis, particularly the networking sites, is a little more tricky.

Google Reader gets a lot of use for keeping up on a load of invdividual blogs all at once. Livejournal has customizable reading groups, so I can hit one page and see the latest posts from a filtered list of my entire network. Most of the sites have some little alertbox or email functionality. But I’ve realized that what I really want is a way to hit a variety of my sites from the same place in a single go, with a minimum of effort. I want a social network aggregator.

Conceptually, the new personalized portal sites like iGoogle and My Yahoo! could do this via gadgets or whatever, but what I’ve seen thus far is at best clunky and at worst would involve building my own custom widgets. Too much work!

Last week I came upon 8hands, which apparently accesses a variety of different social networks all at once. I thought, “Hey! Perfect!” But then I realized it is an installed application and not a web-based service. I can’t for the life of me understand the benefit of this. Not Perfect!

So I started digging around, and came across a really useful article on mashable about social media aggregators. Seems like I am not alone in realizing this would be handy, and it appears to be quite the developing wave in this whole Web 2.0 thing.

So far I have checked out several of the options, and haven’t found a clear winner yet.

Spokeo has a great interface and is pretty easy to use, but I don’t like how it doesn’t allow you to actually interact with the different sites. It is essentially a feed reader of my contact’s activity. Close, but no cigar.

MyLifeBrand seems promising, but if I’m required to acknowledge reading and understanding the TOS, I’m waiting until it’s not a blank page.

Most of the list appear to be more about controlling profiles and assembling links to the various other sites, and most seem to suffer from a lack of interactivity with the source sites. Not so useful, really.

The most promising of the bunch seems to be the as-yet-unrealized SocialStream project, which appears to consolidate all of your online networks into and lets you to post, read, respond, and connect with new people, all in a single online interface.

I am waiting.

But, of course what has prompted the switch to WordPress and the idea of doing a regular blog again at all is all the search engine research and work I’m doing online these days, so it would make sense to yammer on about that now and then as well.

My next bit of wordpress fun – and work research – may be to write my own plugin. One of the online properties at work is now running their own blog, also on wordpress. They are also taking a n RSS feed of info from their ‘parent’ site, thereby promoting one through the other. Works great. Except that we’ve done a lot of work to give the search engines a clear path into SEO-friendly pages, and the RSS feeds are not actually delivering the right URLs…so they’re pimping out the wrong pages. And it will probably be easier for me to whip out a bit of code that will do a custom rewrite of the RSS output on the wordpress side than it will be to get the parent site to change the outbound RSS feed.

Maybe.

Because sometimes it’s interesting to know, I’ve got the following plugins installed:

All-In-One-SEO pack
Because I’m working in SEO right now, I’m paying attention to this kind of stuff, and it’s best to have it set up properly right off the bat. One thing I never bothered to resolve on the old blog setup was setting individual page titles for each post. Wouldn’t have been that hard to do, though the way I’d set up the original Dreamweaver template system did throw in some challenges. But I’m moved away from that template now, and this plugin will help keep this part straight.

Did You Pass Math?
A comment-spam protection plugin. A simple math question must be answered before a comment can be posted, which should prevent spambots from commenting. Of course, you need to register to comment anyway, so I’m guessing I’m safe.

NoFollow Case-by-Case
More SEO stuff. The default on wordpress is to render all links in comments with the “nofollow” attribute; this deactivates that default and gives that control to me.

Then I’m doing other customizations on my own.

I wanted to keep the basic look and functionality of my home page, presenting just the latest post in a separate box. The best way I could come up with in two minutes of thinking about it was to display from the wordpress RSS feed. Piece of cake. The snippet takes the RSS feed from the wordpress blog, and processes it using the MagpieRSS library, which I’ve used before but was pointed to again by this post. Magpie parses the RSS into a standard PHP array. so it can be manipulated and styled in whatever way you like. To avoid exactly duplicating the content, I’m trimming the posts using some basic substring manipulation I found in the PHP documentation. (It’s possible that the RSS is supposed to do this trimming, but I’m not sure that it does, so I figured I’d just have some fun with it anyway.)

What remains to do is actually muck about with the template and styling of the wordpress sections of the site now, so I can make it better match the existing areas that I don’t want to throw away. This isn’t likely to be a public post until after that’s a little more settled, so by the time you read this it’ll probably all be fixed, and for all I know the subject of another post.