Steve Hooker: Blogfootball Service

Curing Float Drops and Wraps

Tue, 01 Feb 2005 20:53:58 GMT

Cascading stylesheets: "Unfortunately, however, you'll occasionally run into a situation where one block drops down below the other one instead of sitting side-by-side as you anticipated. This is commonly referred to as a float drop."

Shudder! Yip, I've suffered from f-f-float drop. It's a bastard. Where it comes from, how to get rid of it? It can make an afternoon disappear into the late, late nights. I hope, if I print this article and say all the magic words I'll save myself weeks, and bloody weeks.

Nofollow May Be a Rank Solution

Sun, 23 Jan 2005 12:13:19 GMT

Rogers Cadenhead: "The most far-reaching impact could be from publishers who adopt nofollow on external links to boost the effect of their internal links, taking a bajillion rank suggestions right out of Google's algorithm."

Actually, I don't really care about Google. But I do care that when reading many of the nationals or internationals like The Guardian or The Register that they articles they speak of are not linked to.

Usually, I have to do a search in Google to find the articles that they should be directly linking to. These professional newspapers don't link because the don't want to send traffic off their site. Though I never considered that they were more Machiavellian and they didn't want to lower their Google Juice—perhaps that is another reason they don't link.

Perhaps now with the advent of rel=noFollow these newspapers WILL link. I doubt it. I think the "less off site linking as possible" rule will still apply. No, it'll still be blogs who trade links freely.

Browser stats

Fri, 21 Jan 2005 11:26:56 GMT

This in from December 2004, the rest of the 4 years this site has been monitoring are here. I spy many more MSIE 6 than I think should be there.

There is some evidence that some browsers mask their identity but not that many to really influence this chart, and if I remember from wayback, it was usually MSIE pretending to be Netscape.

Sad that Mozilla is still so low.

1. MSIE 6.x	39945828	(80%)
2. MSIE 5.x	4569062	(9%)
3. Mozilla	1662809	(3%)
4. Netscape 5.x	1101858	(2%)
5. Unknown	893435	(2%)
6. Safari	405196	(1%)
7. Netscape 7.x	389338	(1%)
8. Opera x.x	351607	(1%)

Pubsub: Over 8 Million Blogs Served...

Fri, 21 Jan 2005 10:24:27 GMT

"That would put the minimum blog census at 16 million while there are probably more than 24 million blogs. Personally, I would bet on the higher number."

In all the blogs in all the world...

Hate linking

Fri, 21 Jan 2005 09:25:30 GMT

"Most Google-conscious bloggers avoid linking to spam sites but it's also common to hear about various de-linking nonsense because someone was offended by words on a page. Now you can have a decision when you make a link: do I want my viewers to see it but not promote it in Google, or do I not mind promoting it in Google because I want other people to see it as well."

All you need to do is include the rel=noFollow in a link, and Google will ignore it, though others can click through. Like the below example
<a href = "http://astonVilla.blogFootball.com/" rel="nofollow">blogfootball.com</a>

Big List of Blog Search Engines

Thu, 20 Jan 2005 11:07:15 GMT

Of all the blogs in all the world, you had to submit to all these blog lists. It would be nice to build a central submission page to submit to all these sites. If I had the time.

Comment spam and Google

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 12:44:02 GMT

Not that we get attacked by comment spam here, but I've implemented the rel=noFollow idea from Google on comments, trackbacks and referers. (However, I've not added the rel=noFollow to the actual links to [comments 0] and [trackbacks 0], this is to allow the indexing of comments, but no Google Juice from any links inside comments and trackbacks.) Knowing spammers as I do, I think this will be part one of the war of attrition. Chuq Von Rospach thinks that the comment spammers will still spam even if there is less return, so long as there are some vulnerable weblogs.

How British people don't say what they mean

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 12:19:04 GMT

"If a British person says 'very interesting', they mean in fact the opposite. For a Dutch person this is very confusing as we are not used to playing with language in such a manner."

Some examples:

What the Brits say	What they mean	What the Dutch understand
Oh, by the way… or, Incidentally…	The primary purpose of our discussion is…	This is not very important.
I hear what you say.	l disagree and do not want to discuss it any further.	He accepts my point of view.
With the greatest respect…	I think you are wrong (or a fool).	He is listening to me.

Converting Manila to Movable Type

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 12:07:52 GMT

"This is a script, written in UserTalk (the language of Userland Frontier), which will export a Manila (or Weblogs.com, or Buzzword.com, or Weblogger, etc.) weblog to a file suitable for importing into Movable Type or TypePad. It will also write all of the images contained within the Manila site out to files, convert Manila discussion group threads into MT/TypePad comment threads, and convert any Manila News Item departments into post categories."

Most excellent! I hate lock-in. This just goes to prove that if you have a Manila blog, you needn't fear that you're stuck. I'd like to include this script as a page within all myManila blogs. Thus, not only is there an existing download your site page (/downloadMySite/MySite.root), but there will be an export your site to these formats page.

Using SOAP to post to Manila from Word

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 11:52:05 GMT

"This was a Word macro I wrote that uses PocketSOAP to create a new story in Manila"

Amazing the stuff I miss. This is from 3 years ago. I found it via Steve Kirks who found something similar for Radio. When I have a bit of time I'll play with this a little, I can see a few of my customers using it, perhaps.