Category Archives: Search

Upgrade or else!

By Dougal | Published: April 8, 2008

UPDATE 2008-04-16: Well crud. I was just re-reading the WP 2.5 announcement post for something else, and spotted a bit about security updates between 2.3.3 and 2.5. So my previous advice about 2.3.3 being okay was incorrect. This is one of the areas where I disagree with the core developement team — if it was up to me, there would be a 2.3.4 security release for those who have good reasons why they can’t upgrade to 2.5 right now.

Okay, people, if you are running any version of WordPress older than ~~2.3.3~~ 2.5*, you need to upgrade now. [...]

Also posted in Blogs, Security, WordPress | Tagged payattention, Plugins, Search, Security, Spam, Technorati, Themes, upgrade, Upgrades, WordPress | 91 Comments

Tags and Categories in WordPress 2.3

By Dougal | Published: September 22, 2007

Since the upcoming WordPress 2.3 release will debut the new tagging system, I thought I’d take some time to address what it means to use “tags” versus using “categories”. These things mean different things to different people, as it’s really just a matter of how you want to use them. But let’s examine what tags and categories are, how they are similar, how they are different, and why you might choose to use one system over the other, or use them together.

Also posted in Blogging, Microformats, Semantics, Tech, WordPress | Tagged API, delicious, Folksonomies, Metadata, plugin, Plugins, Politics, Tags, taxonomy, Technorati, Web, WordPress | 50 Comments

Follow you, follow me

By Dougal | Published: February 15, 2007

Two years ago today, we released WordPress version 1.5. This was a pretty major release that introduced several new features that are still major staples of the current 2.1 branch: the Dashboard, Themes, and Pages. It also added a minor new change which was mildly controversial to some: comments were automatically flagged with the ‘nofollow’ attribute.

The rel="nofollow" idea had good intentions: to give content producers a way to link to another site without implying that they approve of it. [...]

Also posted in Blogging, Microformats, Plugins, Spam, WordPress | Tagged Akismet, commentspam, Google, Metadata, nofollow, PageRank, plugin, Spam, WordPress, yahoo | 89 Comments

Google Blog Search

By Dougal | Published: September 14, 2005

I may be a little late coming to this party, but Google has introduced Google Blog Search, which limits searches to just blogs (well, in theory, anyhow). The most interesting thing about this, to me, is that GBS provides the search results for your terms as Atom and RSS feeds.

It seems that Google is leveraging blog feeds to get structured data, and monitoring ping sites for timely updates. This is something that lots of people speculated about way back before Google bought Blogger. [...]

Also posted in Atom, Blogs, Syndication | Tagged Atom, Feeds, Google, pingomatic, RSS, Web | 1 Comment

Googlebomb: Popup Blockers

By Dougal | Published: July 15, 2005

Has your blog been spammed with ads for a Popup Blocker for Internet Explorer?

If you are getting here through a search on Popup Blockers or for Pop-Up Blocker or Pop Up Blocker Internet Explorer, please do not buy from pop-upblocker dot org They are spammers and unethical. [...]

Also posted in Blogs, SEO, Spam | Tagged commentspam, Google, SEO, Spam | 14 Comments

Yahoo! My Web 2.0

By Dougal | Published: June 29, 2005

Somehow, I must find time to play with Yahoo! My Web 2.0… I don’t have time to read up on it and comment intelligently right now. . [...]

Posted in Search | Tagged API, Folksonomies, PHP, Service, Social, Tags, yahoo | 3 Comments

More on microformats

By Dougal | Published: June 21, 2005

There is now a dedicated site for information about microformats: microformats.org

I’m working on a movie review using the hReview format. I’m hoping that we’ll see one of the big search engines start correlating microformat data soon. . [...]

Also posted in Microformats, Semantics, Tech | Tagged Google, Technorati, Web, yahoo | 4 Comments

Find cheap gas

By Dougal | Published: May 17, 2005

What do you get if you combine Google Maps and GasBuddy?

CheapGas.

(via: Make)

Also posted in Geolocation, Maps, Tech | Tagged Gas, Geography, Google, Web | 21 Comments

GeoURL.org Returns

By Dougal | Published: March 1, 2005

After months (and months, and months) on hiatus, GeoURL.org has returned. The service is now run by Ask BjÃ¸rn Hansen. It appears that it’s been back up for about a week, and they’re still kicking out some kinks. Once the dust settles, we’ll add it back to Ping-O-Matic.