During the most recent Perishable Press redesign, I noticed that several of my WordPress admin pages had been assigned significant levels of PageRank. Not good. After some investigation, I realized that my ancient robots.txt rules were insufficient in preventing Google from indexing various WordPress admin pages. Specifically, the following pages have been indexed and subsequently assigned PageRank:

• WP Admin Login Page
• WP Lost Password Page
• WP Registration Page
• WP Admin Dashboard

Needless to say, it is important to stop WordPress from leaking PageRank to admin pages. Instead of wasting our hard-earned link-equity on non-ranking pages, let’s redirect it to more important pages and posts. In order to accomplish this, we will attack the problem on three different fronts: admin links, robots.txt rules, and meta tags. Let’s take a look at each of these methods..

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In the Beginning..

Over a year ago, I posted an article recommending over fifty “essential Firefox extensions.” Excited to have discovered the miraculous joys of extending Firefox with such amazing functionality, I loaded my primary copy of Firefox with just about every potentially useful extension that I could find. Several weeks were spent playing with new features, customizing preferences, and configuring options to gel together in an orchestrated chorus of blissful browser harmony. After experiencing the functional firepower of my newly equipped technological terror, I was completely convinced that I had assembled the ultimate collection of Firefox extensions. And, as the power went straight to my head, I was determined to enlighten the masses by publishing a complete, unedited list of 51 “essential” Firefox extensions.

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Recently, I discussed the suspicious behavior recently observed by the Yahoo! Slurp crawler. As revealed by the site’s closely watched 404-error logs, Yahoo! had been requesting a series of nonexistent resources. Although a majority of the 404 errors were exclusive to the Slurp crawler, there were several instances of requests that were also coming from Google, Live, and even Ask. Initially, these distinct errors were misdiagnosed as existing URLs appended with various JavaScript functions. Here are a few typical examples of these frequently observed log entries:

http://perishablepress.com/press/category/websites/feed/function.opendir
http://perishablepress.com/press/category/websites/feed/function.array-rand
http://perishablepress.com/press/category/websites/feed/function.mkdir
http://perishablepress.com/press/category/websites/feed/ref.outcontrol

Fortunately, an insightful reader named Bas pointed out that the errors were actually PHP functions. Bas explains:

The two functions (array_rand and opendir) you define as javascript functions are PHP functions. Some servers generate clickable links to the php manual (which uses function.NAMEOFFUNCTION in their URL’s) in php scripting error messages. Maybe that’s also the cause of these problems.

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The über-trendy “Web-2.0” paradigm seems to be floating quite comfortably throughout the blogosphere these days. In fact, with it’s current mainstream popularity, the Web-2.0 mentality enjoys de facto status as the dominating influence behind modern website development and design. Not too long ago, however, Web-2.0 hovered quietly amidst the thinking of cutting-edge entrepreneurs and developers, as they strove toward freshness, simplicity, and usability.

Before it’s rise to media fame, Web 2.0 was merely a loosely defined set of concepts and ideals. As the concept materialized, representative sites emerged, and the Web-2.0 design aesthetic evolved into an easily recognizable collection of stylistic elements, minimalistic interfaces, and dynamically interactive functionality. Indeed, now that Web 2.0 has hit it’s stride, its characteristics are well defined and apparent to even the most casual observations.

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In this post I have assembled a concise collection of conforming, bare-bones document templates for the following doctypes:

Document Templates

XHTML 1.0

• XHTML 1.0 Strict
• XHTML 1.0 Transitional
• XHTML 1.0 Frameset
• XHTML Basic 1.0

XHTML 1.1

• XHTML 1.1
• XHTML Basic 1.1

HTML 4.01

• HTML 4.01 Strict
• HTML 4.01 Transitional
• HTML 4.01 Frameset

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HTML 5, also known as Web Applications 1.0, provides new markup elements that will change the way you design your web pages. The new elements replace commonly used divisions in web documents, facilitating an even greater degree of separation between structure (HTML) and presentation (CSS). Indeed, in many documents, the new elements will structure the document while providing enough hooks to render obsolete previously required divisions, classes, and identifiers. Let’s take a look..

New Structural and Semantic Elements in HTML 5

Structural Elements

The new structural elements in HTML 5 consist of the following:

• header
• section
• article
• nav
• footer

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Some friends and I recently gathered in Portland, Oregon for the 2007 PDX Zine Symposium. Held on the lush campus of Portland State University, this was the seventh annual zine convention, featuring an abundance of tablers, zinesters, and visitors. Although we did not purchase a display table this year, we did represent our graphic zine collective, Dead Letter Art (DLa) by making the rounds, checking out new zines, and sharing issues of DLa. Since the annual Zine Symposium began in 2000, DLa has attended almost every year, learning, networking, and exploring ideas with fellow zinesters. Thus, with a hefty stack of DLa issues in hand, the DLa posse traded zines, collected chunks, and consumed as much information as possible from an endless river of zine literature and DIY propaganda.

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Time is running out! Soon, it will be time for the next Google PageRank (PR) update. While it is difficult to predict how your site will perform overall, it seems likely that your highest ranking pages will continue to rank well. The idea behind this article is to improve your site’s overall pagerank by totally beefing up your most popular pages.

Of course, every page on your site is important. Ideally, you would want to employ these techniques to every article on your site. But time is short, and Google is coming soon! The next PageRank update is slated for any day now, probably before I manage to post this article. ;) Thus, our strategy is to focus on pages that already have some Google juice flowing to them. Your most popular articles. Your best-ranked pages. Your top ten posts.

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Most of the time, when I catch scumbags attempting to spam, scrape, leech, or otherwise hack my site, I stitch up a new voodoo doll and let the cursing begin. No, seriously, I just blacklist the idiots. I don’t need their traffic, and so I don’t even blink while slamming the doors in their faces.

Of course, this policy presents a bit of a dilemma when the culprit is one of the four major search engines. Slamming the door on Yahoo! would be unwise, but if their Slurp crawler continues behaving suspiciously, I may have no choice. Check out the following records, pulled directly from one of my error logs, where Yahoo! exhibits some extremely questionable behavior.

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Perishable Press switched to A Small Orange [ASO] in March of 2007. At the time, I was looking for highly recommended shared hosting with several key features:

Update 2011/02/05: ASO is no longer my host. As this article explains, ASO service was great at the start, but after three years quality of service has declined considerably. There are some great people at ASO, but I can no longer recommend them for serious web hosting. For more information, check out my post on switching to Media Temple.</update>

• Solid customer service and extremely reliable server uptime
• Unlimited domains with plenty of disk space and bandwidth
• Unlimited Email accounts, MySQL databases and everything else

A Small Orange delivers all of the above in every shared hosting plan. ASO provides hosting plans perfect for any size operation:

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Front-page story attacks city

Central Washington — The Columbia Basin Herald continues to describe Quincy as “stampeded by gang members, teeming with teenage pregnancies, constant shootings, stabbings, drugs and excessive consumption of booze.”

They printed the story — believe it or not — on the front page.

“Quincy is also known as ‘Q-town,’” the Columbia Basin Herald, a regional newspaper, claims. “It is overpopulated by gang members and individuals of hispanic decent who often believe they are of african background. Smoking marijuana is very popular and is often practiced by all age groups in the area.”

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Readers occasionally ask for help with their WordPress loops. Usually, these requests involve modifying the loop with some customized functionality. Frequently, such customization involves one of these popular behaviors:

• Exclude a specific category
• Exclude multiple categories
• Display only one post or excerpt
• Display some fixed number of posts
• Play nice with additional loops on the same page

In this article, I present the swiss-army knife of WordPress loops. This highly versatile, “super” loop is standard WordPress code, easily implemented, and fully equipped to handle all of the custom behaviors mentioned above. Further, the PHP employed is self-contained, making it ultra-easy to pimp it up tough with your own (X)HTML markup. This tight little loop is perfect for “latest-post” excerpts, “aside” posts, news/headlines, site updates, urgent messages, and so much more. And since it plays well with multiple loops, the configurational possibilities are simply endless. Ready? Let’s get on with it..

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In our article Stupid htaccess Tricks, we present the htaccess code required for redirecting visitors temporarily during periods of site maintenance. Although the article provides everything needed to implement the temporary redirect, I think readers would benefit from a more thorough examination of the process — nothing too serious, just enough to get it right. After discussing temporary redirects via htaccess, I’ll also explain how to accomplish the same thing using only PHP.

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