Recently someone commented here on one of my older posts. The comment sounded legitimate, so I checked out the URL listed with the comment. It was a Swedish site. Neither Google Translate nor Babelfish have a Swedish to English option, so I have no idea what that site is talking about. So because (1) Google penalizes sites that links to a “bad neighborhood” and (2) I do not use the nofollow tag on links on my site; I had to remove the link from the comment because I can’t vouch for the link. I simply can’t vouch that the site was a “good” site.
Learning to program WordPress plugins
I’ve started work on my first WordPress plugin. So far, I’ve managed to break my development web site several times; gotten the plugin to work partially several times, and added a menu to the “Manage” menu of the WordPress administration system. Of course, the page I’ve created there doesn’t actually do anything yet. It’s very exciting seeing the system not barf when I “activate” my plugin. Hopefully I can release the plugin to an unsuspecting world next week.
Verizon DNS Headaches
Verizon recently started sending users of its residential broadband services (DSL and FiOS) a Verizon Search page instead of an error page if they attempt to visit a web site that doesn’t exist. They are doing this by using the Domain Name System (DNS). If you request a page at a domain name that doesn’t exist, such as planemtike.com, you’ll get a page filled with Verizon’s suggestions of the page you looking for, plus some advertising. If you don’t want to see this page (Advanced Web Search), you need to change your network device’s settings (your router or DSL modem) or your computer’s network settings.
One amazing thing is that Verizon appears to be recommending that you use the same IP address for a Domain Name Server for both servers that your system will query. Screenshot from Verizon Online’s help: 
Instead of relying on your ISP to provide your DNS, I recommend you use a third party service, such as OpenDNS. You can use their name servers,which I’ve found to be much more responsive and customizable than Verizon’s. You can set certain domains to be blocked (advertizers? porn? myspace.com?), you can see the stats on how many requests you are submitting each day. You can even turn on the ability for a help page, similar to Verizon’s, to appear when you attempt a visit to a misspelled domain name. Their name servers are currently set to be at 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.
Other places discussing this issue include:
Selling Photography with —–
(Edited 2013-01-21: The site/service is no longer around.) If you’re interested in making some money off of your photography, you might want to check out —–. —– is currently an invitation-only beta service that will allow you to make money off of your photographs. You can either have ads with the photos, or simply get a little bit each time one of your photos is used elsewhere on the web. I hope I get an invitation so I can experiment with the system.
BlogSecurity.net down?
The web site BlogSecurity.net has been down for nearly 24 hours now. I tried emailing abuse@ and postmaster@ and both messages bounced back to me. That’s a shame, I was really enjoying the site, it was full of good ideas for locking down your blogs. Hopefully they weren’t hacked, or driven off the web by crackers.
Update Dec 1, 2007 8:34am EST: They are back up. They are reporting that they were having DNS problems.
Thoughts on the “Blog Incubator Project”
Daniel from Daily Blog Tips has created a Blog Incubator Project. I think it is an interesting idea, although the current implementation is flawed. The goal is to encourage someone to start a high-quality, popular blog. You come up with a topic you’d like to blog about, pay a $10 entry fee, then next week people get to vote on the ideas. Most popular idea gets the accumulated entry fees. This money will help you offset the expense of starting up the blog.
How much does it really cost to start a blog? ~$10 for the domain name. Hosting at WordPress.com is $10/year. Unless your blog idea requires you to spend a lot on supplies and materials (e.g. I’d love to blog about the OLPC laptop, so I need $400 to buy one), this is simply an easy way to monetize a blog idea up front, instead of waiting for content to develop and advertisers to appear.
Suggestion: An entrant should pay the $10, plus actually start the blog somewhere (theircoolidea.wordpress.org would be free) and describe the idea and give some sample (or real!) posts. Then we voters could vote for the person and content that is best, not just an idea of what the blog may be about.
Switch to my Feedburner Feed
Last week I asked if Feedburner’s stats were inflated. After about a a week of testing, I think they are not, after the first day. Day two of using Feedburner showed the correct number of subscribers (3), and day three showed the additional people who subscribed. Many thanks to Tim King and Luis de la Rosa for signing up so I could see how well things were tracking.
(On an unrelated note, Tim is one of the bloggers I was reading last year at this time when I was considering leaving my full time gig to work at home full-time. As was Luis, a Mac programmer living in Northern Virginia.)
I looked through my server logs, and there are a lot of people reading my site through the RSS feed. Please switch your subscription in your reader over to http://feeds.planetmike.com/planetmikedotcom . Thanks.
Google Traffic Statistics to Planetmike.com
In October Google began futzing with the PageRank of sites. Google apparently targeted sites which were selling advertising and/or links and not including the rel=”nofollow” tag on the link. PlanetMike.com was hit with a penalty of moving from a PageRank of 6 down to a 4. At first I wasn’t concerned, but then got to wondering if I was also missing out on referrals when people searched the web using Google. I also sat down and really thought about what I was trying to accomplish with the web site. Yes, earning a living is up there. But a lot of the ads were simply distracting, and I ended up deciding to remove all of the ads from my site. I asked Google for a “re-inclusion request” and about a week later, my PageRank went back to 6.
The question becomes, did the traffic I receive from Google change during the time my PageRank was reduced? It doesn’t appear so. Here is a chart for the three months of August 22, 2007 through November 21, 2007 (click it to enlarge).
Referrals from www.google.com are the blue line, and the maroon line is any Google site, images, international, and their main site. My PageRank was reduced from around October 25 until the first week of November. The traffic looks fairly regular, although it did increase in mid-October.
Is there a correlation between PageRank and referral?
Traffic Report Updated
Last night I ran the webalizer traffic report for this site. I was thinking that traffic had slowed down since I last ran the report in early February. I was basically right, with about 10% fewer pages per month viewed from February to October. But I’m still very pleased with the numbers. I haven’t done any advertising of the site. And actually only basic maintenance. I’m getting ready for a major design overhaul, and one of the first steps in doing that is knowing the details of what I already have on the site, and what people are looking at.
Are Feedburner Stats Inflated?
I know I am about to commit heresy. Please forgive me, Oh Lord of the Web. But I doubt the Feedburner subscriber numbers are accurate. Everyone who is anyone has a nice little Feedburner icon on their site trumpeting that they have x,000 readers of their blog. How is that enormous number even possible? Feedburner wouldn’t be inflating the numbers, would they? Feedburner is thought to be a definitive source to find out how many subscribers you have, and so it is in their best interest to make web publishers feel good and show them with a little bit of extra subscribers.
So yesterday I signed up three of my sites with Feedburner. After looking at today’s stats report, I think the Feedburner counts are inflated.
I burned the feeds, then subscribed to each feed in: Vienna, Bloglines.com, and Google Reader. Today when I checked each site has six subscribers! It looks like some of those services are using different agent strings, which leads to an inflated count.
So, let’s test this out: Subscribe to my site’s Feedburner feed: http://feeds.planetmike.com/planetmikedotcom and then let me know that you’ve done so, either by leaving a comment here or by email. Make sure you say which reader you used to subscribe.