Webstraction's is First Blogger Classic blog to go DoFollow

If you are using Blogger and hosting your blog with your own Web Hosting solution (aka FTP Classic), then you will now be able to remove the NoFollow attribute from the comment author's links. Blogger Classic blogs hosted at Blogspot.com are still S.O.L. for the time being.

I do believe this blog is the first official FTP Blogger account to go DoFollow. Go ahead and give the comment area to this post a test run.

Past comments will still temporarily be NoFollow until (A.) somebody attaches another comment onto the post or (B.) I republish this entire blog. In the case of the latter, that will not be happening for another couple of days. I am in the process of adding on more functionality scripts which will be detailed at Tips 4 Blogspot in the near future. Fair warning, you may see some unpleasant side-effects while viewing this site during that time period.

UPDATE :: The Remove NoFollow Tutorial is available now. It will require that you enable PHP for your FTP Classic Blogger pages. Adding PHP to your blog will allow you to create server-side includable header, footer and sidebar files, amongst other little goodies.

The scripting package I am working on is called pfBlogger and will open up all sorts of possibilities for FTP Classic blogs that were never before possible -- think trackbacks, personally hosted commenting, spam filters, stat tracking etc. Major features and documentation will be hosted here at WebStractions (accessible via nav menu above) while the Tips 4 Blogspot site will be geared for instruction on it's usage.

I am actually getting pretty psyched over this, and I can officially add it to BUMPzee's DoFollow list as well as, Andy's ultimate list of of DoFollow & NoFollow plugins.


Technorati Tags: dofollow, nofollow, blogger, blogspot, removal, php, script, ftp, classic

Greasemonkey script to pre-fill comments form

Filling in the comment forms for blogs can be tedious. Name, email, website over and over again. Some blogs will remember the information for you if you have submitted at least one comment, but if you like to spread your comments into new territory -- then it becomes laborious.



Greasemonkey scripts are perfect for this type of pain. The Pre-Fill Comments script will auto-complete the fields for author, email and Url and put the focus on the comment textbox itself. While this was designed to work for WordPress blogs, it should work with other blogs that use the same ID's for their fields. Even so, I think a little tweaking under the hood (if you are good with that type of thing) may extend it to other types of blogs.





Via Techie Buzz













Technorati Tags: greasemonkey, script, pre-fill, form, comments, wordpress

Speed Painting Rocks!

When I first saw a video of speed painting, I couldn't believe my eyes. The people who put these videos together are talented indeed.

The speed painting of Jessica Alba took the artist, MediaMaster, 7 hours to complete using Adobe Photoshop CS and an Aiptek Tablet.

The video compresses this down to 7 minutes with background music from Ian Van Dahl's "Nights on Java". It fits beautifully.

MediaMaster is a 24 year old Flash Designer from Brazil who also specializes in Vector Art. More of his works are on display via Deviant Art.

YouTube Link for the Jessica Alba speed painting video.

If you are a regular viewer of ABC's Lost, then you may enjoy the Kate, Sawyer, Sayid, Hurley and John Locke speed paintings.

Those are pretty tame compared to MohaFoto's rendering of Evangaline Lilly set to Tom Jone's "She's a Lady. But this speed painting makes a twist half way through, when he undresses her and gives her a bikini ("Bad to the Bone").

This is my first computer drawing to which I tryed to add a little extra ... It took 18hours and 36minutes to draw this video, full resolution is 5750x4650pixel.

This Evangaline Lilly speed drawing is available on YouTube also. But the higher resolution version on his website is much nicer and check out his gallery while you are there.

Special thanx to Free CSS Templates for turning me on to this.



Technorati Tags: speed, painting, photoshop, graphic, artist

Online video conversion service - vixy.net

This service allows you to convert Flash Video / FLV file (YouTube's videos,etc) to MPEG4 (AVI/MOV/MP4/MP3/3GP) file online using compressed domain transcoder technology. It converts FLV to MPEG4 faster and less lossy than a typical transcoder.

When you submit an url, it will download and convert to the video format. Then you can download the converted file.

FLV to MPEG4 Conveter engine is also available as OpenSource. You can download the source code via subversion: http://sourceforge.net/svn/?group_id=183657




Technorati Tags: video, converter, online, FLV to MPEG4, sourceforge, OpenSource

Selective Page Indexing Directives

Following up on the new Yahoo "class" directive for isolating non-content on a web page, I have come to one conclusion -- the Big 3, and others, have their own methods of explaining to them what your page is about. Each method is often-times confusing and hard to implement. Factor in the possibility that the most novice of web page creators, who probably will not have a clue, then you have chaos at it's best.



I came across an obscure page which details directives handed out by various search engines. The page is not totally encompassing, but it sheds a lot of light on how the major and minor search engines are competing for your Html input. This input is always geared for their consumption, and if not used, then you will be at a disadvantage for their indexing abilities.



In-page directives are always geared toward the SE provider that suggests them. Depending on the notoriety of the SE, they will be inserted into pages or not. Web page builders always have to keep up with the additions, which usually does not include minor or startup search sites.



The playing field is not even when it comes to directives. They who are strongest usually prevails, but at the cost of numerous forum and blog posts which generally promote the bigger of the pack. You know who I am talking about.

The robots.txt Summit

Yahoo's indexing directive (ill conceived) was born from a Summit that was supposed to deal with the robots.txt method of directing SE's to the main content of web pages. During the summit, the idea of robots.txt evolving to meet the current Internet needs was discussed. The term "evolve" went off on a tangent that I found hard to believe.



The simplicity of robots.txt has been an easy concept for virtually every webmaster. Meta declarations in the Head of the document to NOINDEX or NOFOLLOW have been adopted and used by most.



The evolvement of robots.txt into the Body of the page must be equally simple. There has to be a way of relaying "indexing" information to ALL robots. Proprietary tagging should not be allowed by any entity.

One Solution

In the beginning there was robots.txt, then the Meta Robots directive. Following in the simplicity of both, we should have a solution that is par with both concepts.



A new tag should be introduced -- <robots attr="directive">



The attribute can be discussed amongst the SE providers. My options would follow the original concept of robots.txt and the Meta alternative -- Index and Follow.



Adding onto this concept and the prevalent need to identify "actual content", the attribute of "content" would be added. Possible directives could be: Content, NoContent



Surrounding your intent with a <robot> tag will not only make it simpler for us, but make it easier for the SE's to drill down into our pages.



Also, if the original thinking of the SE's was to identify "content". Then why not say so. Why identify non-content through nefarious means?

Top Two Dozen Blogs About Blogging

Daniel Scocco's Top Blog List actually contains 25 blogs, but I dismissed one, thus the "two dozen". It wouldn't take a rocket scientist to determine which of the blogs I dismissed.



The list is based on an Todd And's Power 150 algorithm with a little of Daniel's own flair. He included Alexa data into the mix and tweaked some of the original ranking factors.



Monthly updates will be reported on his site, but I am not sure what the Url will be.









Technorati Tags: top, bloggers, list, blogging, ratings

Yahoo's Robots-NoContent: Another shade of NoFollow

Have you looked closely at Yahoo's new "robots-nocontent" tag? The tag was born from discussions at a recent Robots.txt Summit in which one topic focus included the adding of support for web pages to identify main content non-relevancy.

So what is considered non-relevant to the main content? Priyank Garg of Yahoo!Search summarizes it as navigation, menus repeated across the entire site, boilerplate text, or even adverting. So, basicly everything outside of your main content area is non-relevant.

This tag is really about our crawler focusing on the main content of your page and targeting the right pages on your site for specific search queries.

Actually the term "tag" is a misnomer. Yahoo's proposal is that you implement this with a class attribute (ie: class="robots-nocontent") for any content that is extraneous to the main unique content of the page. The Slurp help page cites numerous examples of how to apply this class to your Html -- too numerous.

Maybe I am not getting this. Wouldn't it just be simpler to identify what is the main content? Since it is apparent that Slurp cannot distinguish repetitive tendencies across the pages of one domain, then let's spell it out for them with a class="robots-this-is-content-dummie".

It would be a lot simpler to implement also. Just wrap your content with DIV element and you are done. You might have a section on the sidebar for "related" reference purposes, then wrap one around that too.

Give them their own tag <robots>

The usage of the class attribute is all wrong anyway. This is more of a relation than a class, more aptly it is meta-information which can aid the robots in distinguishing relevant content passages from the fluff.

To date, we have two methods of conveying information to robots on what not to index -- the robots.txt file and the meta noindex in the head section of our pages. Why not their own tag element for meta information inside the body of the page?

My suggestion is to use a new tag -- <robot attr></robot>. Inserting an element in your page that the browser does not recognize, will not be displayed to the viewer. For all intents and purposes, it is invisible except to the spiders.

The new robot tag could have an attribute of their own choosing. For instance, the Yahoo attribute would simply be slurp="directive", Google would be googlebot="directive", etc. Directives could be "content", "content-related" and (ugggh) "no-content" -- but there would not be a need for the latter, now would there?

Another possibility is to keep in line with the other methods of communication -- attributes of Index and Follow could be used. The attribute of Rel (relation) could be used also in the form of "main", "related", or "plagiarized". I made that last one up to see if you were awake or not. But when you think about it -- quotations or full passages lifted from other sites should not qualify as content.

There is a need to have this form of control at our disposal. The method that is used needs to be thought out a little better. Yahoo's premature birth of their new baby was not even close, it was slipshod and messy.



Technorati Tags: yahoo, slurp, robots-nocontent, robots, nocontent, robots.txt

Delicious Bot is tagging MyBlogLog

I was reading Alpesh's Blogosphere and he noticed that his blogs at MyBlogLog are being tagged from the files over at Delicious. If you hover over the tags, you will see the unmistakable icon doing the handywork.







I haven't noticed any tags coming over yet. So really don't know how long this will all take to transpire. Anybody noticing anything on their end?



The bot, according to the statusbar is called mbl-deliciousbot and has its own member profile. Clicking on it will bring it up. The About Me reads:

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website -- the primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too.



http://delicious.com

Welcome to the neighborhood!



I never thought I would ever talk to a bot, but I left him a welcome message anyway.



Update: There is another report that MyBlogLog is also crawling Technorati tags. Bot name is, duh, mbl-technoratibot.

You can opt-out of tagging if you wish. The setting for this can be found on the Edit Profile page.


Technorati Tags: delicious, mybloglog, tags, bot