Monday, October 13, 2008

Trackbacks Enabled, Thanks Haloscan

that wasn't so bad

I was having some trouble with Blogger's trackback system. The problem, from what I understand is that Blogger takes an entirley different approach to trackbacks than the rest of the blogging world. I'm not going to get into it all right now. Google "blogger trackback", or something simuliar. Have fun.

Anyway, I signed up for Haloscan. Trackbacks are working now. I used Basil's blog as my guinee pig. Heh. Sorry about that Basil! The soreness will go away soon.

Also, comments are now run through Haloscan. As a result all of my previous comments are gone. There is probably a way to get them back, but, to be honest with you, I'm over it already. Sorry Justin. That soreness will go away as well, but it might sting for a bit.

Haloscan also provided the new star ratings. Yay.

Posted by Gasgwar at 1:28 PM |  

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Saturday, October 11, 2008

New Site Layout

I wish I was this tidy in real life

I went with a three column template. Much better. I grabbed the template from Webtalks. Very easy to setup, and I only had to do some very minor modifications to get it looking the way I want. What a relief, because I didn't get into blogging to mess around with style sheets.

The only thing I am not completely satisfied with is the title banner. Eventually I'll have to get around to making a graphic for it. It can wait.

Oh, one other thing, the hulu videos I had embedded in old posts were too wide for the new layout. No biggie. I just went back and provided links for the videos instead of embeds. I'm already over it.

Posted by Gasgwar at 1:58 PM |  

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Monday, October 6, 2008

Adding Meta Description to Each Post on Blogger

because I care

Here is some code that will add the title of the post as it's meta tag description.

Add this to your template right under the <HEAD> tag.

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<meta expr:content='data:blog.pageName' name='Description'/>
</b:if>

Before you mess with your template, you should always save a copy of it first ... just in case.

** I'm thinking if there is an element named pageName there is probably one named body or something similar. From there, it shouldn't be too hard to write some code to feed say, the first 10 - 20 words of your post to the description tag.

If I get around to it, I work on it. I'm not promising anything though. If anyone comes up with it, post it in the comments!

Hat tip: Commenter Dave from this post.

Posted by Gasgwar at 8:31 PM |  

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Wilford Brimley Is Closing In On Me

better check my blood sugar, and quick

I was checking out my sitemeter stats today and noticed repeat visits from a single domain. The ISP lists Wausau Insurance Companies. I googled them and clicked on the similar pages button. Check out the first link.

Next, someone from this company hit the blog. They viewed six pages. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the traffic, but I can't help but feel the Brim breathing down my neck.

If they ask, I will change the posts. I'm thinking Liberty Muzzle. All they have to do is ask and I will honor the request, 'cause it will be the right thing to do.

Update: Doh! Brimley spoke for Liberty Medical, not Liberty Mutual. My bad ... where were you guys on that one? Huh?

Posted by Gasgwar at 4:42 PM |  

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Sunday, September 21, 2008

Another Problem Solved

bring on the next one

I added a bookmark button to the bottom of every post. It's a cool little tool that will hopefully help get me some exposure around the 'nets. I recommend it. It's free and you can get it here.

I did have some problems with it at first. For one, it threw one of those annoying little javascript errors that you often see at the bottom left-hand corner of your browser. You know the one. It looks like a yield sign with an exclamation point in it? No? Oh well, maybe I'm just anal like that. Just take my word for it. It was there. Let's move on.

The error wasn't a problem in and of itself, until I started noticing some strange behavior with the button itself. On one post, clicking the button would reference the post above it, instead of the post I was actually clicking the button on. Confused? You're going to have to take my work for it again. It happened.

On another post the button didn't show up at all. The really frustrating part was that on most posts it worked exactly as intended! Fortunately, my incredible intellect and amazing computer skills allowed me to figure out where the problem lay. The button code didn't like me using apostrophes in post titles.

What happens is the post titles are turned into HTML links tags. The browser sees the apostrophe and, confusing it with a double quote mark, decides to end the tag early. Or, I could be talking out of my ass. It's been known to happen from time to time. I do have some experience writing SQL queries for dynamic web pages. This sort of thing used to trip me up all the time. I should have recognized it sooner and avoided some painful thinking time.

At any rate, the solution was to not use apostrophes in post titles. Instead, I use the ASCII code for an apostrophe instead, &#146 .

Hopefully you'll find this site if you are having the same problem. I'm cool like that.

Posted by Gasgwar at 3:37 PM |  

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Friday, September 19, 2008

The search for traffic continues - UPDATED!

mistakes were made

I decided to take the e-referral gadget off the site ... for now.

1. it took a second or two to load. That bugs me.
2. I tried to filter out my IP from registering on it to no avail.

Number 2 could have been resolved by adding a cookie to my computer, but I'm pretty lazy and since number 1 was nagging me I decided to scrap it. Besides, I can get by manually adding top referrers while this place is still in its infancy.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, don't bother registering a site for Googles index until you have plenty of prominent sites linking to it. It appears that the Google-bots will turn their noses up if you are unpopular. I bet they feed on arugula. Needless to say, my blog is not yet in the Google index. Not to worry though because ...

I started a link seeking campaign. Basically, I made a form letter begging other blogs to add me to their blogrolls. You can see the ones I've solicited in my blogroll on the left. So far only American Digest has added a link to this site. That brings the total number of sites linking this blog to a whopping 2. That is, when you count coolerthanyou. But that is my brothers site so I'm not sure if it counts. I wonder if my mom has a blog? Hmmm.

Anyway, I wasn't expecting everyone to read my email and add a link right out of the gate. It's late, and it's the weekend. I'll be patient. Plus I plan to send many, many more in the next couple of days.

Update: Make that three links to this blog. Thanks Basil! I'll take back some of the things I said about you.

Update 2: Rachel Lucas added me to her 'roll. Luckily I managed to get a giggle worthy post up before she had the chance to visit. Cha-ching! She liked the 'delicious bass' line from the post above. I should send her something nice. Delicious bass are hard to come by in Pittsburgh. A smelly river carp should do fine ...

Posted by Gasgwar at 9:22 PM |  

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Wednesday, September 17, 2008

The Doctor is [IN]

Day four. I haven't eaten since before the crash. At night I can hear the drums. I think they are getting closer. Tomorrow I will try to swim for it.

As you can see, I'm getting pretty bored talking to myself. Today I took some measures to increase my traffic.

First, I signed up to Technorati. I'm not 100% sure what this does, but someday it may generate hits. You will notice a button on the top right-hand side of this page asking you to add this blog to your Technorati favorites? I'm fairly certain that is where the magic happens. I could be wrong.

Second, I added the nifty little e-referrer widget underneath the blogroll. Now, everytime someone visits me from a link on another site, the referrers link will automatically be added to that list. Aha! My lazyness knows no bounds! Thank you magic internet widgets for making it happen. Hmm, I am starting to see a pattern here. Each one of these latest additions seem to rely on people visiting my site. Oh well, I can't get hung up on that now.

Third, I googled "link exchange blogger", or something simular and found this page. Now we are getting somewhere! Maybe. I promptly added them to my blogroll and shot off an email asking for them to return the favor. Actually, the All American Blogger site looks top notch. It'll probably end up being one of my daily stops. You should check it out sometime. Who am I kidding? If you are reading this, you probably came from there in the first place.

Finally, I submitted a sitemap file to Google Webmaster Tools. This will make it easier for the Google spiders to crawl around my site (eek!). It takes awhile to kick in, but any day now when someone googles "Wilford Brimley Swallowed a Frog", mine should be one of the top links found. I'm guessing that should be good for at least 5,000 hits a day? Easily.

Now I'll sit back and let my plan unfold. Step one is just about complete.

Plan
Step 1. Collect underpants Create blog
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Profit

Posted by Gasgwar at 7:26 PM |  

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