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!
blogging tips
Yes WWW! No WWW!
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.
How to summarise posts in serendipity rss feeds (part 2)
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.
Animated RSS Feed Icon WordPress Plugin
I found the animated RSS feed icon you see on the right on this blog here. The idea is that the animation will attract a visitor’s attention to your blog feed but I think it is distracting and annoying. So I came up with my own superior animated RSS feed picture.
How to summarise posts in serendipity rss feeds
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!