Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

There seems to be a bit of confusion from some commenters. This is not my programmning blog, although in the past I have posted technical content. This is my "everything" blog - I write about politics, science, psychology and other subjects here. If you want my programming blog, it is at peterbromberg.net  - there is only technical content there. Thanks!

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music." -- Aldous Huxley This is an argument that comes up frequently among those who author content of any kind and publish RSS feeds of same - which is better - to publish the full content in the description field, or just a summary with say, a "read more" link that forces interested readers to go directly to the site to read all of it? I've done some research on the subject, as well as having some actual data of my own with which to make comparisons, and I am of the opinion that publishing the full content is the best way to go. There are basically two concerns that webmasters have that target this subject: 1. Since with a full feed RSS Subscribers will get to read the full blog content inside their newsreader, they would not visit the actual site - meaning lower pageviews would impact advertising revenue negatively. 2. A more ominous threat is from blog plagiarists and "Made F...

Google now "sees" underscores in URLS as word-separators(delimiters). Previously, in a URL like http://www.mysite.com/iphone_review.html Googlebot couldn't "see" the words iphone or review. Instead it read iphone_review as one word. Now, it will see iphone and review. Google treats URLs with a query string the same as static URLs. Caveat: as long as there are no more than two or three parameters in the URL, that is! To explain in another way, you won't take a hit in your Google rankings if you have a question mark in your URL; just don't have more than two or three equals signs in the URL. So, if you've been tormented about whether you should implement URLrewriting in your site or blog, don't fret. The number of slashes in your URL (i.e. the number of directories deep your page is) isn't a factor in your Google rankings. Although it doesn't matter for Google, it is rumored to matter for Yahoo and MSN (Live Search). The file extension in ...

One of the primary concerns you will have as a blogger or developer of content sites is filtering porn and spam. The approach I've taken with ittyurl.net is basically to have a database table, "BADWORDS". This gets loaded into a string array at startup, and any time somebody wants to add a link, since the application spiders the page anyway to collect tags and metadata, I run it through my IsBadWord method. The process is very fast and it has worked extremely well. Since about January 2007 when I put up the first beta of the site, I've only had to manually remove three or four links out of the several thousand that users have added on the site. Sometimes the sneaky little scumbags have a redirect to their porn / spam sites from a "nice" page and that of course is something you cannot foresee (unless of course, you want to have your WebRequest follow redirects -- it just goes to show you they will stop at nothing in the dirty tricks department!). Other times...

Over the last couple of years I've learned a few "tricks" that help to promote blogs and WebSites. Most of the time, the techniques work for both a blog and a WebSite, especially if the site has at least one RSS feed. Blog and site promotion is an ongoing process, it takes time. There is no "Magic Bullet". Use the following steps to start promoting your blog or website: Submit your blog's URL to each major search engine Google, MSN (live.com), AOL, and Yahoo. Also go to http://www.1stopsubmit.com/ http://www.submitexpress.com/ http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ and submit your URL. The first one will automatically submit your blog URL to over 50 search engines for free. They ask for a reciprocal link, but it is not required. Open http://www.blogmetafinder.com/ (our site) and submit your blog to as many of these blog and RSS feed directories as possible. Use your key phrase in the title and at least once in the description if you are able to enter one. Th...