From the category archives:

Advanced Stuff

I don’t like Google anymore

I have blogged before how I don’t like Google’s growing monopoly on the web, and how they increasingly block non-Chrome browsers when you use their own web applications. It looks like Google is now moving into more unsound web practices, using their web crawling power and abilities to unfair, unethical and illegal purposes.

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How to secure WordPress timthumb.php

If you have a selfhosted WordPress blog (WordPress.org), take urgent measures to secure your site from a recently discovered vulnerability. Many WordPress themes and plug-ins use a script called “timthumb” (timthumb.php). This is the most common code used to create thumbnails from pictures. End July, a vulnerability surfaced showing external users could dump malicious code [...]

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Yahoo Pipes upgrades to V2

Yahoo Pipes is a powerful and free tool, which allows you to combine and manipulate RSS feeds. I use it extensively for many of my news aggregation blogs. In the past, Yahoo Pipes has been suffering from regular downtime, and just over one year ago, Yahoo decided it was time to overhaul the Pipes’ core [...]

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Shared hosting: Comparing GoDaddy with DreamHost

After my debacle with GoDaddy, I moved most of my high volume blogs to a HostGator Virtual Private Server. I still had some test blogs on GoDaddy’s shared servers, but as the speed and uptime of GoDaddy went from bad to worse, I recently moved several of these blogs to a DreamHost shared server. Here [...]

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How to make search engines discover more posts on your blog

As I explained in my tutorial “How to analyse your visitors’ traffic figures”, the search engine traffic is important to have people discover your blog. So we have to do everything we can to make search engines discover our blog’s content, through SEO or Search Engine Optimization. While there is much written about SEO, any [...]

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BlogTips Tutorial:
How to select your blog platform

Alright! You recognized your organisation can benefit from a blog and you know what you will blog about. But… which “software” should you use to blog? From the many different blogplatforms on the market, which suits your needs? In this tutorial, I explain the questions you need to ask yourself, the basic choices you will [...]

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BlogTips Tutorial:
How to analyse your blog’s visitors statistics

A serious blog is geared towards its audience. As a serious blogger, it is important you understand your audience, your readers. Simple and free tools like Google Analytics, will give you heaps of figures, but how do you make sense out of all that? What do these figures mean and what can I do with [...]

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Should you upgrade to WordPress 3.1?

Recently WordPress 3.1 came out. While the (major) upgrade from WordPress 2.9 to 3.0 was in general seen as a success, 3.1 seems to be different. There are a number of known problems with the WordPress 3.1 upgrade. Most of them have to do with incompatibilities with certain plugins and themes. There are also issues [...]

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How I moved 350,000 blogposts from Tumblr to WordPress

I had seven blogs on Tumblr which aggregate news. Using a technique I described earlier, they take RSS feeds from over 1,000 carefully selected websites and blogs, filter them, clean them up, and feed them into the different Tumblr blogs. I used the unique feature built into Tumblr to convert RSS feeds into posts. All [...]

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How to combine RSS feeds with Yahoo Pipes

Many bloggers use RSS feeds to check on the latest posts from different websites and blogs. Bloggers often use widgets to display RSS feeds from related blogs, or their Twitter and Delicious updates. Or they might simply pull RSS feeds into an RSS reader like Google Reader. Comes a time where it might be useful [...]

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How to block indexing of Blogger archive pages

Here is a quiz question for you: What is the difference between the top and the bottom Google search result of the one and the same Blogger hosted blog? Answer: The top is the actual post, while the bottom is the monthly archive page. It seems by default, Blogger will allow the Google crawler index [...]

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