Steve @ Service: How to

Robots text

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 09:29:55 GMT

Just a quickie to help out some dude on the Manila mailing list.

Though he asks about Google's image crawler, we don't store any images at all on out frontier box, they are all FTP'd to the static server. I use meta=noindex in page headers for message views too (and some other types of pages). Though, as Googlebot's banned from those I'm still seeing old messages in Google's index (when I search, I want to find just story versions of pages, or just news item versions, not the message type too.) I guess it'll get better over time.

Occasionally, I add bad robots to this robots text, even though they may ignore the robots.txt. (I ban them elsewhere, too—in fact I have a list of nearly 400 bad robots).

Adding sitemaps has dramatically decreased Google's crawler, though it took several weeks to have a great effect, and occasionally I see Googlebot coming in to a site an indexing everything, even though it need not—it's supposed to work that way.

My robots text script

A list of checked against user agents of bad bots

How to YouTube

Tue, 06 Mar 2007 08:30:22 GMT

If you and yours are grown ups, YouTube will be fine. Here's how you can add a YouTube video to your site.

First you need to sign up at YouTube.

Then upload a video. There's quite a few forms to fill in, and it can take several minutes to upload a video, if the server is busy.

Once you have, you'll be given am <object bunch of code that you need to copy and paste into your blog. Now, be careful, you need to ensure that you paste when you're in source mode, otherwise you'll just see a bunch of code, which has been munged.

That's it. If you have any problems, email me.

Trackback spams

Sun, 17 Dec 2006 11:56:31 GMT

We're getting a few more of these these days. If you've got a more modern news items site, you maybe getting emails telling you of a TB. In that email is a link for you to delete it straight away. You may safely ignore them.

They're mass deleted by my overnight scripts. I add the domain name to the list of spam keys and poof, they're gone.

Spammers make a website at one of these new blog services, add their spammy stuff to the site to make a splog, then search engine optimise, so they come higher in search engine results. Part of that SEO is to send trackback spams to all and sundry.

It's not good for these services, as I and many other responsible service providers immediately add their domain as a known splog host.

So, if you follow the link to delete the TB spams in your email notification and find there's nothing there to delete... You'll know that my overnight scripts have been and done the job for you.

How to YouTube

Mon, 11 Dec 2006 08:03:38 GMT

YouTube! TubeYou! All you need to do to add a youTube video to your blog is to add the <object... thing to your post. Make sure you add it when you're not in WYSIWYG, that is 'source mode' in MSIE or 'View HTML Source' in Firefox.

Nothing to it really.

See the top 20 at the Viral Video Chart for top picks, pop pickers.

Thread analyser

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 17:26:54 GMT

I see Dave Winer asking for help analysing threads and other performance issues. After he produced his thread analyser I took it and reworked it into something I needed.

In my everyMinute.tenThousandHits in the scheduler which looks every minute for too many hits, I added this script to look for too many threads. When there are too many, the workspace.threadAnalyzer is called and writes an outline of all the threads into the scratchpad. Frontier then gracefully quits and sends me an email. I go look at the outline and can figure out why there are too many threads.

My limit on too many threads is currently 26.

The script is workspace.threadAnalyzer:

I hope this of help to somebody, and if they can make it better...

I find it invaluable to see when and why there are too many threads running.

Currently I'm watching wp.newTextObject and trying to figure out why many of the threads stop here. I guess this script is very inefficient and just takes too long to complete.

Bookmarks updated

Tue, 11 Apr 2006 22:34:44 GMT

I'm sure you know the drill. Go to your /bookmarks page, download the bits you need, follow the instructions. And have a nice time with your thumbs, aggregator, news items etc, and everyother part of your site, you can even flip your home page, for you BF oldies. Yes it's compatible with MSIE.

I needed it updated... Enjoy :-)

A bit deeper with RSS

Mon, 27 Jun 2005 23:37:29 GMT

Computerworld: Explaining RSS to IT departments This, isn't meant for meathead football bloggers :-) "RSS opens up a whole new world for maintaining a dialogue with your customers. At the end of the day, that's what it's all about."

Mark asked some incisive questions.

As a blogger here, yes, all your bloggings are auto added to your RSS feed, and you have no need to worry, nor notice. As I said we have been doing this for five years, and none of you knew.

This means, keep on doing as your doing. If someone wants to subscribe to you, they can, and you'll see a hit in your hourly hits, as you would if they access your normal front page. Only they'll 'hit' less as they'll be notified if you up-date rather than manually hitting your front page to see if you've updated. For them it is more efficient. For me as a server dude, less bandwidth so I'm happy too. (This isn't true in the real world, in fact there's more bandwidth as most aggregators don't wait to be notified as per the RSS spec, or look to see if the file has changed, and grab once an hour the whole bloody RSS feed.)

For your reader, who you care about, you're happy still as they're reading your posts. But, there's more. Each post (or a changed post of 50 changed/new words) pings several RSS feed engines, to tell them that you've added something new. They'll come along and get that new news item from your feed. (In 'olde flip page Manila' each double returned paragraph is a new news item.)

These new search services are good for you as a writer as they'll bring your new traffic. It's kind of like your normal pages being in Google. Only where Google comes once a month or more these new services are near real time (or about an hour). There's more to these feed aggregators, go there and look around, as you would Google, but expect to find conversations in blogs, rather than static pages in Google.

The blog radar, merely tells you that a site has updated. You've still to visit the site to read the new postings. Where, if you have sub'd to ALL blogfootball sites, you'd only need to read your one aggregator page. Every new posting from a blogfootball site will be there, ordered by time. So, if I post a bit of poetry in the morning, later that night a RSS exposé but Lions posts a bunch of Villa musings in the afternoon, my poetry will be at the foot, middle will be Villa, top RSS. Depending on when you come and how much Villa from Lions, and RSS postings from me, the poetry may have scrolled off. (I'll address this shortcoming one day by emailing every 100 items to you, for an archive.)

Also, in the aggregator page is a direct 'post' button (this willl only be of use to us 'new fangled news item Manila' sites.) Quickly you can whack the text and indeed the whole item into your own blog, add some editing... This is neat for said conversations both Villa gossip and corporate workflows.

Subing to a feed is copying a URL of the feed and pasting into your aggregator. Not granny friendly. However, all our sites have the feed in the top part of the HTML, for auto discovery. There are methods available, depending on your aggregator, to 'one click sub.' (See the orange coffee cup icon at the foot of my pages.) You should be aware that there are many stand alone aggregators which are more extensive than the aggregator page in sites here--though, I find this page good enough for me, especially as it is one single page rather than the three pane, MS Outlook metaphor of many of the apps. It is a river of news with painless scrolling rather than, diving into a feed reading their updates, diving in again... Too much clicking!

RSS came along with blogging. But you don't need a blog to read feeds. Though mere mortals will only create feeds by blogging, or contributing to a discussion group (each of our discussion groups also has a feed! Worthy of another posting.) Firefox, Safari, these newer gen browsers allow you to sub to a feed. MSIE 7, when it comes, will also allow grannies to sub to a feed. Indeed, this is the big recent news.

Big companies are getting on to the RSS bandwagon, producing feeds with special timely offers, bargins, podcasts and so on. News companies were first to the trough, and all produce feeds for departments/sections.

Bittorrent

Fri, 17 Jun 2005 07:23:04 GMT

Guardian: Coming to a hard disk near you: "The FBI doesn't like it. The Department of Homeland Security is so concerned that it has closed down websites related to it. The Moving Picture Association of America is waging a war against it. And every day millions of people around the world use it to share music, TV programmes and movies. The "it" is BitTorrent - a computer program that's the brainchild of the softly-spoken Bram Cohen. It is a super-smart way to share huge files over the internet."

The Guardian says that you need to be a bit techie to do it. Nope, merely download the latest version and install it. Then click the link, a torrent file link. The application should open it, if it doesn't you can set up your browser to open it next time. It's that easy. On my 4Mb link, I think an album took 5 minutes, about that anyway.
>

How to post from flikr

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 09:48:58 GMT

It's very simple. You'll need to become a member of flikr, then tell it where your blog is, it's password/user stuff, and you'll see a button on th top of all images.

Hitting that and your presented with a box which asks for some text to go alongside the image and bingo, it goes straight into your news item Manila site.

Yes, another reason to be the more modern news item type site.

Podcasting for you

Wed, 30 Mar 2005 12:03:57 GMT

A few weeks ago I found the only podcaster in Shropshire. I wrote and asked how he did it, since there was a lot in his podcast, pub interviews, phone interviews etc. My meagre attempts to create a decent sound file have been useless, still most of his reply went clean over this little brain, so I asked if I could publish it here in the hope that it will be of use to others. In the meantime you can think of me re-reading this over and over slowly, mouthing some of the words.

Over to Tim:

When I'm out and about doing interviews or sound scene tours (see next show, coming out on Thursday evening), I use a Sony minidisc recorder. For face to face interviews I use a Yoga em8 mic; for telephone interviews I have an adapter that goes between phone and handset, which I plug into the minidisc; when I'm out and about I use a Trust headset mic (looks like a mobile phone bluetooth headset).

When I get home I plug the headphone socket of the minidisc into the pc line-in and get Audacity to record while the minidisc plays back. I then chop the audio up and export individual files as wavs.

I then start up Cakewalk pro 9. I drop all the wavs and MP3s in and record my self using is a Labtec mono USB headset mic - £12 from ebay. This is permenantly plugged into the desktop machine. I then do a final mix down in Cakewalk and export it to wav. Then I open the wav in Audacity and export it as 64k mp3.

The biggest problem I have is getting the levels right, particularly when I'm out using the minidisc. I chose the minidisc 'cos I could get it off ebay for £30, but some people record into an iRiver, which is straight into mp3. I use Cakewalk for the main mix down 'cos it allows me to do retakes of my speaking part and it is easy to construct the show - Audacity just doesn't do that kind of thing. Some podcasters use Mixcast Live but that is a DJ type tool, which I'm no good at (but I think it's ideal for blogging), and it doesn't give me the flexibility that I need to put the show together.