Performancing.com on WordPress – Goodbye Drupal
Some of you might have noticed the change in design on Performancing.com. This is because we’ve changed software. After many years of wondering how to accomplish this goal, we’ve transitioned from our old Drupal installation to WordPress. This is a great relief to myself, and I think many of the writers on this site.
Changing to WordPress was a difficult ordeal, with many issues. Things still are not perfect with our WordPress installation, and we will require many more hours to perfect our new home on the web.
We transitioned from Drupal to WordPress because many writers found Drupal to be slow to publish on, and with the web moving ever faster, we wanted to make sure this site not only caught up, but surpassed expectations.
Over the next few months, you will see many great changes to this site that will bring it back to what some of the “older” folks in the blogosphere remember: a brand unlike any other.
Changing from Drupal to WordPress was the first step. We have many plans for the future, and we hope you’ll all stick around with us as we complete this journey.
I want to thank Randa Clay, the designer of our WordPress theme for Performancing, who continues to work hard to make everything not only beautiful, but functional under these odd circumstances. I also owe a big thanks to Jon Watson, of the Watsys Technology Consulting Group for writing the importer that allowed us to move from Drupal to WordPress with as few headaches as possible.
At one point, we were thinking of hiring a small piece of Asia to manually move all of our content over. Wouldn’t that have been a sight?
If you notice something broken, feel safe in knowing that we’ve probably realized that and are working on it, but we’d love your feedback and what you think of not only our new design, but the fact that we’ve changed blogging platforms. Leave a comment, and be heard.
50 Websites That Control The Digg Front Page
When I found this story late last night, I had the sneaking suspicion that I wouldn’t be surprised by the sites found on this list to be controlling the Digg front page. I and many others who have commented on these findings are indeed, not surprised by the results. Soshable.com is reporting that 46.6% of the Digg front page is controlled by 50 websites according to data taken from di66.net
I remember a time when I was a Digg fanatic. The site used to be filled with all sorts of content that was hard to find without someone recommending it. Now a days, all I see on Digg.com is political stories, Apple fanaticism, and Microsoft bashing. Those three categories can be used to describe the Digg front page at any time. But every now and then, a stupid picture of a cat with illegible language text written on it makes the front page to offer up diversity.
But you know, even though it’s somewhat the fault of Digg and their spam algorithms as described by Soshable for not allowing diverse content to appear on the front page, much of what makes it to the front page is still user driven. Human beings voting for certain stories to make the front page. So with that in mind, the majority of blame should be shifted to those who actually use and participate on the site. When a website can be described as a bunch of political, Microsoft bashing, Apple fanboys controlling the site, you know that there is no diversity thanks in large part to a majority of people on the site having something to do with one or more of those three topics.
While Digg can still provide webmasters a huge influx of traffic if you’re lucky enough to make the front page, I as an end user no longer use Digg as my source for finding great information online. That has been replaced by those I follow on Twitter. The only time I ever come across a Digg article is if it is linked to by one of my online friends.
My only hope is that in the future, Digg is not looked at as an example to prove the ‘Wisdom of crowds‘ theory because if you take a look at the comments or some of the stories that make the front page, you might think that is the last place on the web where wisdom actually exists.
Help Redesign The Mozilla Website
Happy Cog which is one of the leading design firms online released an update on March 11th regarding their work on redesigning the Mozilla.org website. The update contains three seperate concept designs with the goal of each one to encapsulate what the Mozilla universe is all about. Each concept contains an explanation behind the design. The redesign is still very early in development but Happy Cog is asking that you take a look at each concept and then drop them a line in their comments section to provide feedback on what you think.
Personally, out of the three concepts presented, I don’t like any of them. But if I had to choose just one, it would be concept number one. The other two appear too graphically heavy and I don’t like the content alignment on concept number two. While concept one is simplistic looking, it is the one which was easiest on my eyes.
Icanlocalize Now Offering Localization for Drupal Powered Sites
Reaching across language barriers is one way of increasing your blog or website’s traffic and reach. We have tried this with the Blog Herald before, focusing on human translation into various languages. While it was a worthwhile activity, I must say that the difficulty was in finding able translators who could do the job in a timely manner. Translating current content is easy, but working on archives can be really cumbersome, not to mention confusing, particularly in terms of accounting (since translation is often paid on a per-wordcount basis).
And then there’s the extra workload of having to post translated articles. It can be the translator who does this (at extra cost), or you (at extra confusion, because you mostly don’t understand what the heck the translated article says).
One of our partners in the business, Icanlocalize, has actually been doing WordPress-based localization using a plugin, and this has made localization easier for me, and now they’re doing localization for Drupal powered sites.
It’s quite simple, really. In a project of mine that requires translation, I just uploaded the plugin, keyed in a few details (actually it was Icanlocalize developers that entered my API key and other details), and it’s been smooth sailing from that point on. Translators never have to touch WordPress, but rather they upload the translated posts on their own Icanlocalize interface, and these are automatically uploaded to the WordPress blog whenever ready.
What’s even better is that Icanlocalize does the hiring and management of professional translators for publishers. And rates vary according to expertise, so you can pay top dollar if you want top-notch translation, or you can settle for more casual translations if you’re a bit stingy.
Now Icanlocalize is offering localization for Drupal-powered sites, which allows publishers to run a multilingual Drupal site without spending any time maintaining translations.
The system identifies new and updated contents and these are then translated by professional translators, so that authors can concentrate on writing content in their language. The system is mostly automated–the Icanlocalize module gets contents and all meta information (such as menu text and taxonomy) for translation. Then, when the translation is complete the Drupal page is created automatically.
From my experience with WordPress, the process maintains the page structure, links, formatting and any embedded objects. Only the text is edited by the translators. I’ve been told this goes the same for Drupal, too.
And so while we’re doing a move from Drupal to WP here at Perf, I thought folks who use Drupal might be interested. My kudos goes to Icanlocalize for doing a great job in localization!
SEOMoz Top 500 – Where Do You Rank?
SEOMoz.org recently published their list of the 500 most linked-to domains/pages on the web. The top 10 is as follows:
- Google.com
- Yahoo.com
- Blogspot.com
- Adobe.com
- Wikipedia.org
- W3.org
- Youtube.com
- Myspace.com
- WordPress.org
- Amazon.com
Just for giggles, Microsoft.com comes in at number 11. Are you lucky enough to own or operate a domain in the top 500? If so, let us know what the domain is in the comments.
phpBB.com Goes Down Swinging
phpBB.com, the home of the popular open source bulletin board software phpBB has gone offline today due to a hack. The hack was a result of a 0-day-exploit in their PHPList installation which was responsible for sending out release notices. It is important to note that their have been no vulnerabilities found within the phpBB software itself. However, the hacker has gained access to the user accounts stored in the database for the main phpBB forum.
The attacker gained entry through the PHPList application and was able to dump a complete backup of the emails on file. He then used the same exploit to access the phpBB.com database. Both the email list from PHPlist and a copy of the phpBB.com users table were then posted publicly.
For more information regarding the attack, please see this article on the area51 website. If you think you are affected by this hack, you are highly encouraged to start changing your passwords around if you use the same one on more than just the phpBB.com forum.
Great Example On How To Launch A Site
Jean-Baptiste Jung also known as the guy behind the site CatsWhoCode.com and a great member of the WordPress community has shared his success story on how he launched his relatively new site, WPRecipes.com. I know that Performancing readers are always interested in learning new techniques or ideas when it comes to promotion or marketing so be sure to read his post and jot down some ideas.
One thing in particular worth pointing out is that, Jean proves my point in that asking to exchange links with someone doesn’t work as I’ve explained before. When reading his success story, notice how he wrote a guest post on not one but, two different blogs, each being related or in the case of SmashingMagazine, somewhat related to his site. This enabled his subscription count and his pageviews to increase much more than a simple link that was added silently to the sidebar or the footer.
MakeUseOf.com Victim Of Domain Hijacking
MakeUseOf.com which is a very popular tech blog with over 20,000 RSS subscribers has become a victim of domain hi-jacking. The MakeUseOf domain is hosted through GoDaddy and somehow, the account was hacked where the perpetrator transfered the domain to a web hosting company in Dubai. Aibek who owns the domain recently stated:
We have absolutely no idea how this was achieved but we are currently in full contact with GoDaddy’s fraud department to get our legal property back. Obviously this is deeply embarrassing for us but we will not rest until the domain name is back in our possession. We have all worked too long and too hard to watch it all slip away like this.
MakeUseOf.com is an excellent resource that always makes the rounds of being read within my FeedReader. The speculation going around right now is that, a security hole was used inside of Gmail to retrieve the Gmail password which then gave the hijacker access to some other webmail. I hope Aibek is able to retrieve his domain and then on top of that, share the details on how this hijacking occurred.
What would you do if you were in Aibeks situation? Have you ever gone through a similar situation? Let me know in the comments.
Discovered via – Daily Blog Tips
New Fantastico Update
The latest version of Fantastico (2.10.4 r22) has been released which includes the following updates:
- Drupal: 6.4 -> 6.6
- Gallery: 2.2.6 -> 2.3
- SMF: 1.1.5 -> 1.1.6
- Soholaunch Pro Edition: 4.9.3 r14 -> 4.9.3 r17
- TikiWiki: 2.1 -> 2.2
- WordPress: 2.6.2 -> 2.6.3
These updates may or may not be available on your specific web host. If not, give it a few more days before you check again as web servers update their Fantastico scripts at different times.
The So-Called Sandbox is Page-Level NOT Site-Level
For those of you who do not know, the Google Sandbox is widely thought of as a probationary period for new websites during which time your site has to really struggle to show up in Google’s search results. Many people deny that the Google Sandbox even exists.
I’d like to argue that the Sandbox, defined as a probationary period for new sites, does not exist. However, I do think that there is a buffering algorithm put in place by modern search engines. In my experience, this buffering algorithm is applied on a page-by-page basis, and even old websites, with plenty of backlinks, can suddenly find many of their pages diminished in the search results, simply due to a loss of page-level authority.
What’s my evidence?
I have several websites that have between 20 and 50 total pages. These websites are not under any obvious manual penalty. However, of the 20 to 50 pages, only 1 or 2 of the pages gets search traffic.
You might suggest that this is accidental. But there is a common pattern. The 1 or 2 pages were each promoted as linkbait. They each received numerous natural links (ranging from 3 to 141). And 6-9 months after being promoted as linkbait, they still draw in dozens of searches each day. The other articles on the site receive ZERO searches each day.
Possible counter evidence
On some of my websites, a new article will show up high in the search results within minutes of first publishing the article. This seems to indicate that modern search engines bias towards sites that meet an authority criteria and bias against sites that fail to meet that criteria. In other words, Sandboxing takes place at a domain level.
I think this is wrong. Instead, you should think of strength/authority as being a page level value. The homepage of any website has a certain strength/authority value and it is often the strongest of any page on the site. When a new article is posted on a homepage with high strength/authority, that strength gets transferred to the new article.
If a site has a very weak homepage, then you will not see the transfer of authority from the homepage to the new article. In fact, if you’ve done some linkbait articles, it could turn out that your linkbait articles have more authority than your homepage. Keep in mind that some of the authority from your linkbait articles will leak into your homepage, so the more linkbait you do, the better it is for your homepage. But if you’ve only done a few, it’s still quite possible that your homepage is weak.
More counter evidence
I’ve had websites whose articles showed up high in the serps, and then accidentally the home page lost thousands backlinks. Within a month, almost all search referrals stopped… it was almost like a retro-sandbox … except the search referrals coming into linkbait articles. You see, the linkbait articles had independent authority that wasn’t fully removed when the homepage lost it’s authority.
Conclusion
If you like the Sandboxing metaphor for understanding the way search engines list your articles in their results, the most important thing to remember is that Sandboxing analysis takes place for each page on your site… including your homepage. By building up the natural backlinks to articles on your site, you transfer authority throughout your site, including to your homepage. The more authority coming into your site from a variety of angles (articles, category pages, homepage) the stronger your index pages will be, and the stronger your index pages, the more quickly new articles will show up high in the search results.
