Ongoing WordPress hackery…

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Writing a WordPress blog should be easy – but it genuinely takes about ten or so plugins to start actually doing things in a SEO-sensible way. A basic list I’d recommend would look like:-

  • Akismet
  • All In One SEO Pack
  • CSS Compress
  • Google XML Sitemaps
  • Robots Meta
  • SEO Friendly Images
  • WordPress Tweaks
  • WordPress Automatic Upgrade
  • WP Super Cache
  • WP Security Scan 

…though I have to admit I have a further 17 plugins currently active (far too many to list).

For a programming junkie technophile such as myself, the temptation to start twiddling with PHP source code is hard to resist. The dinky little ‘Edit‘ button beside each plugin seems to magnetically pull my mouse pointer towards it, particularly strongly for those ones which haven’t been updated in over a year and don’t quite do what I originally hoped they would.

What’s more, Wordpress ‘themes’ (backgrounds) are more often driven by eye-candiness than SEO-friendliness – dwindlingly few of them have a variable-width three-column layout, which I think is the absolute minimum standard. Though I’ve already twiddled Sajith M.’s “Zen In Grey” theme a thousand times (to use CSS sprites, new graphics, etc etc), I’m still not 100% happy with it: and I probably never will be. But maybe that’s how it works.

Right now, I’m in the middle of coding up a load of small changes to the infrastructure, such as removing the post-category links on list-pages, and the whole new drop-down “[Page 1]” page-selection boxes on multi-page lists (such as on the Cipher Mysteries front-page). This was driven by the shock of finding out that I had ended up with over 130 links on the front page (Google allegedly penalizes pages with more than 100 links), and so needed stripping back.

Incidentally, I don’t really understand why Cipher Mysteries dropped from 10th in Google (in searches for “Voynich”) to about 130th a while back: though it has now clawed its way back to about 20th, the whole thing remains a bit of a mystery to me. Google Blogsearch also temporarily dropped my blog like a hot stone a few weeks ago: this seems to have been triggered by my “cryptography vs -ology vs -analysis” post, which presumably triggered some kind of dictionary-based spam test, purely on the title. Oh well!

Enough of the Internet minutiae – time to crawl back under my rock! 🙂

The 300th post: whither goest 2009?

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“Cipher Mysteries” blog statistics: 300 posts, 11 pages, 1000+ spam comments, PageRank 3 home-page, 41 readers (via FeedBurner) and 15,000+ visitors. Thank you all for the 181 on-blog comments and the hundreds of off-blog emails I’ve received: these really help make this whole thing worthwhile! 🙂

And thanks to an extra 600-visitor surge over two days (from an unknown US-based mailing list’s link to a Stumbleupon link), the blog had more than 3000 visitors during the last month: at the current rate of growth, it should get 75,000 visitors by the end of 2009 (which would be nice).

I’ve also recently started rebuilding the site infrastructure, by moving the stats over from SiteMeter to StatCounter (which has a better API, better reporting and no tracking cookies, though how you make .htaccess allow the StatCounter .js file to be “Accept-Encoding: gzip” I don’t yet know), and by modernizing the icons & transforming them into CSS sprites. Unfortunately, I then got tangled up with irritating browser-related CSS sprite issues. Even so, blog pages are now about half the size they were before and get served up much quicker, which is rather pleasant. 🙂

The main web-tools I used to achieve this were: (1) a free web page speed analysis tool from WebSiteOptimization.com (very handy for blogs with multiple plugins!); (2) a very nice CSS sprite generator on website-performance.org; (3) the CSS Compress WordPress plugin which (very handily) gzips your blog CSS files; and (4) the WP Super Cache plugin, which is (unsurprisingly) a super-duper HTML cache for WordPress. All of which I highly recommend! 🙂

But enough of the blogophile jargon-fest: what can I glimpse looming for 2009 in my polished obsidian mirror? Whither goest the next 100 posts?

Whereas 2008 was (as predicted) the year of the Voynich novel, and 2010 looks to be the year that the Voynich enters the academic mainstream, 2009 looks to me very much as though it is going to be an odd, transitional sort of year – a period of behind-the-scenes activity, which astrologers would normally recognize as a “12th house” (just below the horizon, shortly to rise with the ascendant) kind of vibe. In a strange way, it feels to me as if a future king/queen is preparing his/her entrance on the scene – as if all we have been doing is tamping the road surface for them to drive over it at great speed. Sorry: as predictions go, that’s as close to Nostradamus as I get. 🙂

Regardless, I look forward to being pleasantly surprised by whatever transpires in 2009, and I hope it turns out to be entertaining and interesting for you too! 🙂

Dead links, Google oddness, etc…

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I decided to do a bit of site admin over the last few days, by at least trying to tidy up any outstanding issues lurking in the Cipher Mysteries site, mostly from the changeover from Blogger to WordPress. While doing this, I noticed that the site had suddenly dropped about 300 places in Google’s rating for basic search terms, such as “Voynich” and “cipher” (though it has since recovered to about 180): at one stage, it wasn’t even #1 for “cipher mysteries” (Bah!) Even though I’m still getting lots of new visitors (mainly from mailing list recommendations, I think), not a lot of “love” (as SEO people like to describe PageRank, usually to sex up their dull presentations) is flowing my way from Google. Perhaps that will change soon…

Anyway, I found an excellent free tool that revealed a whole load of site problems I wasn’t previously aware of: http://www.dead-links.com/ Much as you’d expect, this is a free robot crawler that trundles happily through your website finding all your dead links, both internal and external. Links to commercial sites (such as Amazon / IMDB etc) often get reported as “405” (which basically means, “no robots allowed in here, so go away“): you’ll also get the occasional “403” (“Forbidden“, where you’ve accidentally linked to a page you had to log in to access), and perhaps a “500” (“Internal Server Error“), where Bad Stuff Is Going On But You Don’t Actually Know What It Is.

In the main, though, the bulk of the errors are likely to be “404” pages: this can encompass just about anything from miscopied or dead URLs, to “the-page-was-loading-too-slowly-so-the-robot-decided-to-give-up” (normally a false positive). Helpfully, dead-links.com lists all the errors a second time at the end of the output page, so you don’t need to cut and paste them from the huge list yourself (errrm… like I happened to do the first time).

And so, I’m going to try to sort out all my dead and malformed links over the next few days: if only 50% of the Voynich sites on the web would do the same…