On Jan 20, 2008 2:12 AM, Raymond Camden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <stuff about blogging>
Heya peeps, I've only just signed up to CFAUSSIE again after a while away - so hi again guys! Seeing as this thread is about blogs I thought I'd mention a couple of resources: There's a Google Group specifically for ColdFusion bloggers: http://groups.google.com/group/cfbloggers There's also a new forum that has been set up specifically for Australian bloggers. It has a very, very general focus - most of the people on there are not technical people at all - but there are topics covering a lot of the basics, and current issues around spam management, promotion, finding and keeping traffic, etc: http://www.aussiebloggers.com.au/ Again, they're NOT geeks over there, but they are passionate about blogging and very helpful. With the WordPress vs anything topic, like others have said there's no magic thing that WordPress does that gets posts into Google quicker. I am a huge fan of WordPress (all my blogs run off it, and many of my client sites are powered or partially powered by WordPress) but any blog engine can get results if it formats things in a search engine friendly manner. Google Sitemaps are designed for exposing content that is not crawlable by Google. Your blog posts should NOT fall into that category, so Google Sitemaps are unnecessary for blogs (and a bit dangerous, because if you have one and something goes wrong with it, or you don't monitor it or whatever, it can damage your Google rankings). I have used sitemaps on sites that have useful content hidden in Flex and Flash apps. The sitemap links to a html version of that content, but every link on that HTML page points real visitors back to the Flex or Flash version. That's what they're designed for. Having a Google sitemap guarantees the links in it get crawled - it does NOT guarantee they get indexed. To get your posts picked up quickly by search engines, you should use ping services. I don't know what services Blog CFC pings by default but I ping about 60 on each of my WordPress blogs. I've just realised my list is quite old so I'll be updating it soon. Having good semantic HTML structure is also helpful - and making sure your posts titles are well formatted (title first, not your blog name) is important. Search engine friendly url structure also matter - keywords in urls instead of id numbers or worse still, UUIDs. I use the following format (the index.php is unfortunate, but a side-effect of running php on iis on the same account as CF): http://kay.smoljak.com/index.php/awia-presents-ideas-4-with-lisa-herrod-and-rachel-cook/ As for WordPress plugins, there are thousands, but I use the following: add meta tags - to allow me to add custom or automated unique meta descriptions to posts (good for seo) akismet - awesome spam protection code markup - for posting source code with formatting comment timeout - to automatically close comments on posts after a certain period of time (this cut down almost ALL the blog spam that got through Askismet) email immunizer - encodes email addresses to protect mailto links from spam harvesters maintenance mode - shows a custom splash screen during site maintenance optimal title - for title element formatting (for seo) related posts - automatically generates a list of related posts based on keywords in the article subscribe to comments - allow people to get an email when new comments come in on a post they're following rss footer - puts the full link back to your blog post in the rss feed so if it gets scraped or used elsewhere you still benefit database backup - emails me a mysql db backup at specified intervals wp-polls - like it says, polls theme test drive - lets you try out new themes that are only applied for the logged in admin user Like Scott said, it would be great to see more CFAussie peeps contributing to the blog mass! Cheers, K. -- Kay Smoljak business: www.cleverstarfish.com standards: kay.zombiecoder.com coldfusion: kay.smoljak.com personal: goatlady.wordpress.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "cfaussie" group. To post to this group, send email to cfaussie@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cfaussie?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
