Abdussamad's blogspace

Yesterday I was looking through my website's cpanel when I noticed that my mySQL database was taking 40+ MB of space. This was way too much for a my little old blog so I fired up phpmyadmin to take a closer look. It turned out that the serendipity spam block table was occupying almost all the space with over 22,000 rows in it!

Most websites on the Internet can be accessed using both just their domain name and the www subdomain and domain name. For ex: www.example.com and example.com may lead to the same website. Some search engines consider the www version and the non-www version to be seperate websites and assign different Search Engine Results Page (SERP) positions and or page rank to them. This often results in a split page rank where the non-www and www versions of a site have different page rank. To prevent something like this from happening it helps to canonicalize your website URL. This means that you should select one version as a standard and redirect from the other to it.

Readers may wish to refer to part one of my summary posts in serendipity blog feeds guide.

After reading a blog post about the need to specify meaningful summaries of posts for rss and atom feeds I decided to take another look at post summarising in serendipity feeds.

Here are a few ideas on how bloggers can mess with their readers :

Somebody else's animated feed icon.

My superior animated feed icon

Make sure your comment form asks users for their website address. Also make sure that that website address is never displayed in user's comments . Users eager for backlinks will place comments on your blog only to find that they have been duped and their comments don't include links to their sites . A similar tactic is widely used on wordpress blogs where links in comments do not pass page rank because the blog software automatically inserts no-follow attributes.

Write a post supporting censorship and make sure that you enable moderated comments. Enthusiastic users will write lengthy comments only to find that their comments disappear once they press the submit button . Some of them will even protest that their comments are not showing up without realising the bloody irony of the whole business .

By default serendipity places the entire entry body in your rss feeds but not the extended body. If you're like me you rarely use the extended body when making entries so your feed subscribers can read your entire posts without having to visit your site. This defeats the entire purpose of RSS feeds that are supposed to increase traffic to your site. Furthermore there are a lot of scraper sites out there that use your rss feeds to duplicate your site's content. A lot of these rightly link back to your site but they still put your site in danger of Google's so called duplicate content penalty. Supposedly google can't tell which site was the originator of the content and may penalise the wrong site. So what is an s9y blogger to do? Well hack serendipity of course!