BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

As I have just figured out after some of the upgrades the external link in the title hack was, indeed, broken. In fact, I am somewhat puzzled, as it worked on some of my installations and didn’t work on others.

It turns out that the method of obtaining the permalink for the post is returning the canonical URI no matter what permalink system has been set up (I use custom on this blog). For example, even if you have something SEO-friendly, the code

$perm  = $post_id->guid;

would still return http://www.istudioweb.com/?p=427 as a link to this post. The right way of doing it now (before WP 2.7 arrives) is change the above line to:

$perm  = get_permalink($post_id);

That’s it. Should work.

P.S. Updated the downloadable txt file. Click here to view.

Popularity: 10%

You might also be interested in reading this:

• Hacking WordPress theme - External URL in title still works (September 3, 2008): At least once a week I get an e-mail about the WP theme hack I posted in January. Most of the people ask how to make the hack work in WP 2.5 and 2.6. Here's the simple answer - if you didn't touch your theme (I didn't) and if you have just upgraded the WordPress installation [...]
• Hacking WordPress theme - external URL for post title (January 12, 2008): Sometimes something weird happens - I demand something that isn't available. With software it's easy (that's how I got into computers), you dig in the code and you tweak and hack around until it does what you want. When I just started this blog on Blogger quite a while ago, there was this feature that allowed [...]
• Zoundry Blog Editor (January 15, 2008): While contemplating on my ideas of blogging editor I stumbled upon various reviews of existing blogging clients. One of them caught my eye, so I ventured ahead and downloaded Zoundry - free blogging client. I am attempting to write this post in Zoundry, version 1.0.40. Generally, I am not looking for features I came up with [...]
• WordPress 2.3 upgrade (October 30, 2007): Apparently upgrade to WP 2.3 is much more problematic then I thought. Even though I updated the test blog first (didn't see any signs of trouble), the upgrade of this one left me without much liked plugin Ultimate Tag Warrior. Hopefully the developer will release an update soon...

After Halloween long gone and other holidays coming on, I went through Google Trends to see what the trends say. Turns out - Halloween is the most important costume and party holiday. As you can see from the picture above, there is a very strong spike on each Halloween for all three words: “halloween” (blue), “costume” (orange) and “party” (red). There’s no spike on Christmas, no spike on 4th of July, no other spikes as far as I can see.

Note to entrepreneurs - it’s a good idea to set up an emergency costume delivery, or even mobile costume stores. Shouldn’t be a big problem and the higher markup is well justified. Either deliver something ordered online or set up a mobile store so that the whole block could shop.

Popularity: 13%

You might also be interested in reading this:

• More fun with Alexa and stats (January 10, 2008): As any blogger I can't help but look at the stats now and then. At certain moment I realized that I don't see Alexa in list of visiting search engines. I also realized it's wrong. So I ventured in depths of my memory and just before hopelessly sinking there I remembered someone posting about Alexa [...]
• Yahoo clicks aren`t clicking (March 12, 2007): Today I got a call from one of my clients asking me to check stats with him as he is seeing certain discrepancies in Overture reports. We went in and figured that the number of clicks reported by Overture roughly 3 times larger then what is being reported by AWstats. Upon contact, Yahoo/Overture issued a [...]
• Stats, damn stats and lies. (November 8, 2007): While looking at this web site stats (and I can see many web sites stats) I can't help but notice - the top search keyword turns out to have absolutely nothing to do with this blog. The search term is - SITCOMTV.COM. Apparently, the first result leads to the post on this very blog describing [...]
• Blog year-end stats recap (December 26, 2007): The blog is, of course, much older. It's just that I a) start taking it seriously and b) moved it to the WordPress on a separate domain from Blogger around May. And, obviously, started blogging more often. I dropped Hits from the chart because it doesn't really give an idea of how traffic is flowing [...]

Just three hours after I posted my rant on Citysearch spam I got a new message from the Angie Eckford. You might think there was an apology or at least a word “sorry”…

So did I. Boy, were we both wrong!

Through 157 words of the reply (not counting signature and subject) there was not a single use of words “sorry”, “apology” or “regret”. What was there, though, are explanation on what went wrong (okay, I don’t know how to use Mail Merge too, but I don’t use it as an excuse), what that person was trying to do (send out a promotion to as many people as possible) and accusations that my previous post made “the entire company tuned into your message you placed online and negative comment about me“.

At least someone listened this time.

Since the first post went public I feel the need to reply here, on this blog as well. I do hope this won’t happen again - neither to me, nor to other people who might have been interested in Citysearch services. After all, CItysearch service seem to be popular and someone somewhere is probably very happy using it.

We have learned our lessons here - mine are “think twice before doing business with Citysearch” and “don’t use your main e-mail even with companies that look big”.

Popularity: 30%

You might also be interested in reading this:

• Spam From CitySearch (October 17, 2008): It's quite interesting how some people take their jobs as a carte blanche to do pretty much anything they want. Some time ago while doing a marketing research for our clients for web development, I got in touch with Citysearch. Client and I were thinking of trying some of their services but it turned out [...]
• Twitter, twitter, little star… (August 21, 2007): Last week I have discovered a new and innovative way people will produce doorways for their black hat SEO techniques. It's called Twitter and it's some sort of a guestbook, where posting is available via number of widgets, including direct post from IM. Create a bunch of twitter pages (the only manual part of the [...]
• Spam… in apologetic way (August 17, 2007): I received this message (sent from some galinagirll at tesrghft8077@inbox.ru)e-mail through the contact form on one of our sites. It's hilarious: Subject: nice site Message: hello , you have a very nice site, but Im hired to leave advertising comments on sites, sorry i hate to do it but i have to . If you dont like advertising [...]
• Spam… a LOT! (March 8, 2006): One of my current clients - russian-speaking radio station GenerationNX.com are preparing to move to a newer, faster server. One of the problems they are facing is e-mail migration. For certain obvious reasons I want them to have a copy of all archived e-mails that they have stored on the server. They're using plain old [...]