It has been bothering me for months that visitors arriving at my sites without the www (for example, discover-doug.com rather than www.discover-doug.com) end up at two different places (as far as Google is concerned).

I just stumbled across the solution in the Drupal Issues page which explains how to fix this.

Actually, I was lucky, because Drupal 5.x has a bug in the.htaccess file. There is provision for this - an explanation and some lines to be un-commented, but I had not bothered to read the .htaccess file.

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There is nothing more annoying than getting trashy sites in your Google results! This used to happen a lot more, but over time, Google has greatly improved its search engine results. Almost always, the first few results are relevant to your search, even if they are not quite what you are looking for.

Still, junk websites can slip through.

I just discovered a way of reporting search results spam to Google. This looks like a great way of keeping search results clean!

I’ve been having an “interesting” time optimizing my main business website Douglas Samuel (www.DouglasSamuel.com).

It started off well. For the first time ever, Googling Douglas Samuel brought my website to the top of the list (as it should be). Before I knew anything about SEO, none of my websites came up, period. Also, I was able to get decent ranking for Ottawa Technical Writer and Technical Writer Ottawa. What really surprised me though, was that Ottawa Writer and Writer Ottawa also placed quite high. Not as high as I would like, but I have been contacted for some writing assignments, so already the website has been worth the effort.

Now comes the interesting part. Firstly, my page rank shot up from zero to 4. Great! Meanwhile, Ottawa Writer slipped to coming up at 97 - not very useful. Unfortunately, it is a useful term for me. Writer Ottawa on the other hand, sometimes comes up considerably higher, like 19th or so. Just now though, it has slipped to 84. Again, not very useful.

Technical Writer Ottawa is better at 22. This turn seems to bounce around between 25 and 14. Ottawa Technical Writer is considerably better, at 13. Still not first page ranking though, I’m afraid.

The slap on the face though, is Douglas Samuel. I’ve been displaced by some author with a book on Amazon. I now come third, after Amazon, and then Amazon again. Doug Samuel brings up my site in the third spot. Not the home page, but the contact page. At least I’m not invisible.

The remedy I believe, is to build a bigger website. As I’ve noticed, especially with my allergy website, the bigger it gets, the better it pulls.

The next challenge is getting my website to rank well for Search Engine Optimization Ottawa or Ottawa Search Engine Optimization!

If you have Drupal installed in your main directory (i.e. public_html), and you want to use subdomains for webpages or websites that have nothing to do with Drupal, you may have noticed that they don’t work!

The problem is that the .htaccess file in the public_html folder is set up to assume that the default index file is index.php. What you probably want is to have index.htm and index.html recognized as the default file when your visitors browse to sub.domain.com

The solution is simple:

1. Create an .htaccess file in the subdomain folder (e.g. public_html/sub)
2. Add the following line to the .htaccess file: “DirectoryIndex index.php index.htm index.html ” Add “index.php” as well if you think you might ever use php in the subdomain as part of your index file.
3. And you are done!

Now, when you go to sub.domain.com, your index.html or index.htm should get served up.

Thanks to CogRusty for his solution on the Drupal Support Forum for the solution.

I just about destroyed my Drupal-powered allergy website today. I made one small change to the HTML in a block, and the whole website came up blank. With a blank website, I did not have admin access to the menu that changes the blocks!

Rather than panicking, I reasoned that I had made a fundamental typo in the HTML in the block I had just changed, and that must be in the database somewhere.

It was.

Using phpMyAdmin from the account back-end, I looked through various likely tables. The most obviously named, “blocks” was not the right table. It lists all blocks, along with their display status, display location etc.

Boxes is the correct table. It contains the content and title of all blocks that simply contain HTML.

Sure enough, I’d failed to close a quote in the HTML in the block I had just edited. Other things to look for: unmatched tags (especially the <DIV> tag, and unmatched angle brackets. I fixed it in phpMyAdmin and now the allergy website works again.

I recently set up an ecommerce website using WordPress and Instinct Software’s ecommerce plugin. I have already written briefly about customizing WP Shopping Cart for WordPress. I explained how I had to hack the system to get the look that I wanted.

I a simple suggestion for improving how WP Shopping Cart outputs its HTML so that the process of customizing the look becomes much easier.

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I recently wrote a post about setting up an ecommerce system for digital downloads, specificaly my frustrations with finding an ideal platform, and my choice of wp shopping cart for WordPress as the closest fit, even if it really is not ideal.

The good news is that Dan at Instinct Software is monitoring comments about the software that he and his company have created, and are willing to do something about it (see comment on related article about ecommerce).

This post is for the benefit of anyone developing an ecommerce platform, especially Instinct Software who which to improve their existing system. Feel free to add comments if you are either a developer of ecommerce software for digital downloads, or if you want a better platform for selling digital download products.

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I recently ran across another article about whether to use rel=nofollow in links from your visitors comments. Jonathan, the author, advocates installing the Dofollow Plugin For WordPress, which removes the rel-nofollow attribute in comments.

Is this a good idea?

In a previous article on this blog, I commented that using rel-nofollow may improve the quality of comments. While this may be true, it may also discourage commenting in general, certainly among the link-savvy. At the same time, it may discourage comments for the sake of a link to the commenter’s blog.

I think I have a solution to this for anyone who wants to develop a plugin to make the following idea happen.

Extending the publish/delete comment function in a blog, how about being able to publish with or without rel=nofollow? This way you can reward on-topic comments with links to a related blog, but still publish comments that are a bit off-topic, or do not link to a related blog. Such a plugin would flag which comments are which, and publish your rel=nofollow policy next to the comment form.

I have not yet installed the dofollow plugin, but I am considering it.

What is your opinion about rel=nofollow? Would you like to be able to rate the comments left on your blog and reward the most relevant ones? Are you more likely to leave quality comments on a blog which does follow links back to your blog? Your comments please!

More articles about rel=nofollow:

Burry rel-nofollow - clearly against it.

I started looking into ecommerce solutions a while back, and wrote about my initial research in an earlier article about ecommerce systems for digital downloads, in which I discussed a few systems I have run across.

So far, I have not found the ideal system. All of them have something that is not quite right, often very not right.

Zen cart, OScommerce and the like could work pretty well, but they are designed for a complicated store with physical products, and this sort of system is not really ideal for digital downloads in my opinion. I felt that it would take a tremendous amount of work to learn the system well enough to get the template and buying process to work the way I want it to. I already know a fair bit about WordPress and Drupal, and want to build on that.

Drupal has two options, and a third on the way. Neither e-commerce, nor Quickfile really have a properly thought-through buying process that is ideal for the buyer. E-commerce really would be good with some streamlining, and probably I will roll up my sleeves and do just that eventually. Mean while, it has a very long list of unresolved bugs which makes me leery about investing time and energy into adopting and deploying it. Ubercart looks very promising. Handling digital downloads is on their to-do list, but it does not sound like a priority for the development team, unfortunately. I suspect it will be pretty good though, when it does become available.

The best (least worst) I have found so far is wp shopping cart for WordPress. It has some problems too, as I will explain, but it 1) works and 2) is possible to provide a pretty good buying process for visitors (with a fair bit of work). It did not work the last time I tried it, but they have fixed a few things since then.

My plan is to start with wp shopping cart for WordPress , then determine if my digital download store concept works, or more to the point, how it works and how to optimize everything from the product selection to marketing to make the on line store really successful. At some point, I will deploy a new platform, probably Drupal-based. At that point it will be worth putting in considerable effort to rework the software to provide an excellent buying experience to visitors.

Customizing WP Shopping Cart

WP Shopping Cart is functional, but fairly ugly out of the box. The trick is to do extensive work on the CSS for both the WordPress theme, and for the shopping cart system. For example, rather than just having links for various functions such as visiting the store or proceeding to the check-out, why not make them look more prominent and more like buttons? I gave various buttons a height, width, background colour and border to suit the prominence I wished to bestow upon them.

Some elements are very hard to specify with CSS, necessitating some code hacks to add classes to some elements. I was able to circumvent much of this by applying additional class tags within the language files.

In the end, I got a system that looks pretty good. (It’s not completely ready, so I am not linking to it from here, not yet anyhow). I have discovered some major technical stumbling blocks with WP Shopping Cart however.

The biggest problem is that the system does not fully automate the buying process. Even though it is a digital download, it will still require my intervention in some cases. When this becomes too time consuming and troublesome, I will certainly switch to another system, but it will be good enough to get started.

Another shortcoming is that if the user has any trouble with the download, there is no way to give them access to the download page.

I have discovered that by looking up the session id in the database, I can provide a link to the buyer’s download page in a very manual, back-end sort of way. If I get many questions about this, I will provide further details on how to go about this.

They system I am setting up is close to ready. More posts to come on this subject.