Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings » Search

Upgrade or else!

Dougal — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:48:22 +0000

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. Seriously. WordPress 2.3.3 and older have security holes that are being actively exploited by hackers to inject spam links into blogs which are not maintained. And search engines like Technorati are de-listing hacked blogs. Are you listening now? Do I have your attention? Upgrade your web apps before you get hacked and your site drops off the search-engine radar.

While the Technorati article specifically talks about WordPress sites, this goes for any web application. You need to pay attention to updates which are released, and upgrade whenever a security probem is fixed. WordPress gets particular attention due to its popularity and the sheer number of installed sites out in the wild. But it is no more or less secure than any other similar web application. So whatever you’re running, keep it up-to-date.

And the same goes for any add-ons — if you install third-part plugins or themes, make sure you keep up with updates. WordPress 2.5 makes updating plugins easier than ever. Review your Plugins page from time to time, and pay attention when it tells you that a newer version of a plugin is available.

I see comments from people all the time saying that they don’t want to upgrade because it might break this theme or that plugin that they have installed. To those people, I say, GET OVER IT. The security of your site is important. If some theme or plugin is not compatible with a newer version of WordPress, ask the author politely to update it. Or find a replacement. Or live without it. I have in excess of 25 plugins active here. But there’s not one of them that I would hesitate to deactivate when it comes to security of my site.

There are several ways to keep up with new WordPress releases. The Dashboard shows you all sorts of news from the WP community, including announcements from the Development Blog. There are several mailing lists. If those lists are too noisy for you, you can get just release announcements by signing up on Freshmeat.net and subscribing to the WordPress Project. I normally submit the Freshmeat update within 24 hours of an official release.

* One exception is WordPress version 2.0.11 (or the 2.0 svn branch, more generally), which is maintained with security updates for the Debian package.

Tags and Categories in WordPress 2.3

Dougal — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 15:15:52 +0000

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.

What are categories?

A dictionary definition of category is, “A specifically defined division in a system of classification.” If you break that down, and consider what is meant by “a system of classification”, you’ll come to the conclusion that this refers to a highly structured, possibly hierarchical system. For example, to borrow from the classification system for living things, you might have a tree like “Animals -> Vertebrates -> Mammals -> Horses”. Any of those terms could be considered to be a category, and they fall into a strict structure.

What are tags?

In their most common usage, tags are keywords that you attach to a piece of content. Tags are “free-form”, which is to say that there is no formal restriction on what tags you attach. So, the basic difference between categories and tags is that categories are structured and tags are unstructured. For examples of popular web services that make good use of tags, see Flickr, Technorati, and Delicious, among others.

On the other hand, the help pages at Technorati define tags thusly: “Think of a tag as a simple category name. People can categorize their posts, photos and videos with any tag that makes sense.” They’re saying that tags are categories — so, are categories and tags different, or not?

How are categories and tags different?

If a tag can be thought of as a category, then how are they different? It really just comes down to how you use them. Typically, as we mentioned above, category systems are structured. In a given system, the categories are usually chosen with as little overlap as possible. Look at your typical mainstream news site — you’ll probably see categories like Politics, Business, Entertainment, Sports, Technology, and Lifestyle. The breadth of these categories covers just about any imaginable news story.

The problem arises when a story does overlap multiple thematic categories. What if you have a story about iRobot’s newest model of Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner — do you file it under Business, Tech, or Lifestyle? In many systems, you can assign multiple categories. But even in that case, there are often reasons to specify a primary category. Slashdot is a good example — if you look at their main page, each story has a single icon which represents the primary category. This is a quick visual indicator which helps you identify stories that might interest you. Then, if you click into a specific article, you’ll see the icons of other categories that the story fits into.

And in a strict category system, visitors using your search feature might use terms that don’t appear in the content or category names. What if Alice was trying to find the Roomba story, but couldn’t remember the name of the device or its manufacturer? She might try a search for “gadget”, or “carpet”, but maybe those terms were never in the story. This is where tags can help refine searches by giving additional keywords. If our story had tags like “business, technology, tech, lifestyle, gadget, floor, carpet, vacuum, cleaning, household, home, robot, robotics” and other relevant terms, then there are lots of extra hooks for searches to latch onto.

Which should I use?

There are some people who have discarded the hard structure of categories in favor of the free-form nature of tags. There are a few folks who prefer the clean thematic separation of a category system, and avoid the messiness of inconsistent tags. But most folks should feel free to get the best of both worlds. A while back, I started using my categories as tags. I create new categories on the fly, as seems fit. But I’ve gradually started to regret that decision. What I really wanted was to have both a category to specify the overall main theme for each post, and a set of tags to aid in searching.

In WordPress prior to version 2.3, the “category” system could be used as a “tag” system simply by the nature of how the user chose to express them. The difference was simply a matter of semantics. The same holds true with the new tagging system in WP 2.3, really — it’s all a matter of how you choose to use the underlying system. But the availability of a flexible taxonomy system now provides a way to clearly delineate a separation between “categories” and “tags”, and even user-created tertiary categorization systems. Previously, this type of flexibility was only possible through third-party plugins.

Whether you choose to stick with distinct categories, tags, or a combination of both, is really a matter of your personal preferences. But whichever path you choose, WordPress will be able to give you the tools you need to organize your content the way that you like.

Follow you, follow me

Dougal — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 17:42:04 +0000

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. The way it works is that if Google, or Yahoo!, or any other service that uses this standard sees a rel="nofollow" attribute on a link, they will ignore it. They don’t follow the link, and they don’t count the link in the destination site’s ranking calculations. One of the main use cases (as in WordPress’ case), was to reduce the effectiveness of comment spam, because the spammers would not get any “Google Juice” out of the links. Hurray for our side! We just stuck our finger in the spammer’s eye!

Unfortunately, we also tweaked the eyes of our regular readers, most of whom could probably use a little of that Juice. “Oh well,” we said. “That’s just the price we have to pay for a little peace of mind.” Well, most of us said that. Some were adamantly opposed to the nofollow idea. Many of us knew that it was just a bandaid, and that it wouldn’t really deter spammers from trying, it would just reduce their ability to get high rankings in search engines.

At the time, comment spam was a pretty major problem on many blogs, and there weren’t many effective remedies. It seemed like all of us spent the beginning of each day going through our comment queue, manually deleting the garbage that made it through the gauntlet of whatever defenses we did have in place. So, nofollow was the last-ditch attempt to deny satisfaction to the spammers when our other measures failed. But it did not discriminate. It had no way to know whether it was de-juicing a good guy or a bad guy. (Eric Meyer had some good thoughts on this subject, BTW.)

These days, many sites have better anti-spam measure in place. Akismet has been very effective, and many WordPress users swear by Spam Karma 2. With measures like these in place, hardly any spams ever make it through to be displayed on your blog. And if they do, hopefully you delete them pretty quickly after they appear. So, that’s even better than just telling search engines not to index their links. They can’t index something that they never see in the first place, right?

With that in mind, I’ve installed Kimmo Suominen‘s dofollow plugin here, and configured it to remove the rel=”nofollow” attribute from comment links after two days. The two day limitation is to account for the occasional hiccup where spam might make it through over a weekend, and I don’t get to delete it immediately. The important thing is that I’ll be giving back the Juice to the comments that get to stay here. If you’ve got a WordPress blog, and you feel like comment spam is under control on your site, I encourage you to do the same.

Google Blog Search

Dougal — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 21:31:24 +0000

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. RSS/Atom feeds from blogs are such a rich source of structured information, it only makes sense that a “mainstream” search engine should take advantage of it. I can only wonder what took them so long?

The next feature I’m looking for: “Search within X miles of location Y”, using geotagged blogs. This would be great for searching for information written by other bloggers in your vicinity.

Googlebomb: Popup Blockers

Dougal — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 17:06:21 +0000

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. ADB Popup Blocker and ANB Pop Up Blocker are from the same company and you should not buy their product. Any SEO people want to help me get this post up on top on the SEs?

If you link about this, make sure that you also include links like I have above. This will help to bump up the Spam Payback article as a result when people search for Popup Blockers.

Yahoo! My Web 2.0

Dougal — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 13:19:30 +0000

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. For more details, see:

More on microformats

Dougal — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 18:43:24 +0000

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. I’d guess that Technorati might be the first, but I’m sure that Google and Yahoo! are looking at it, as well.

via: Eric Meyer

Find cheap gas

Dougal — Tue, 17 May 2005 16:53:38 +0000

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

CheapGas.

(via: Make)

GeoURL.org Returns

Dougal — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 22:09:24 +0000

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.

Google Maps Lat/Long Bookmarklet

Dougal — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 19:50:31 +0000

I still haven’t had time to dig into Google Maps enough to make my dynamic GPS coordinate thingy. But here’s a quick bookmarklet that can report the coordinates of the center point of the map currently displayed:

GMap Coords

Just drag the bookmarklet to your toolbar, then click it when you’re viewing a map.