40Tech » Blogging

Google Demotes Itself (Chrome) in Search Rankings

Evan Kline — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 02:00:54 +0000

Do a Google search for “browser,” and Google Chrome no longer appears on the first page of results. In fact, as of the time of this writing, I’m seeing a hit for Chrome appear on the seventh page of results. Has Chrome suddenly become less relevant? Nope. Instead, Google has penalized Google Chrome for a violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines involving paid links. Google requires all paid links to use the nofollow attribute, so that the link doesn’t pass “Google juice” via Google’s search ranking algorithm. A sponsored post for Chrome appeared on a blog, and did not use the nofollow attribute. The demotion followed.

The interesting fact about this demotion is that, according to Google, Google didn’t authorize the campaign. I’m not sure what to make of this. On one hand, should we applaud Google for its statement that “Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site.” Or should we be worried that innocent sites could get nailed for something over which they have no control?

For me, the bigger concern is a simple one – how is a simple blogger supposed to know all this stuff? How many of you even knew what the nofollow attribute was? Back when 40Tech was started, I sure didn’t (to be fair, we did learn about Google’s “nofollow” requirements a while back, before this story broke, and started enforcing it, but it took a couple of years). Back then, I thought that being very transparent about what was a sponsored post or paid link (and marking such content explicitly, as we still do) would be enough. Evidently, though, Google’s bots, while seemingly capable of reading our minds, don’t understand that sort of explicit language, and require some HTML code.

I’d love to hear your take. Is this an admirable step on Google’s part, or does this really not matter much, and Google is just trying to save face? What are your thoughts as to how this applies to the average blogger?

Google’s Chrome Page No Longer Ranks For “Browser” After Sponsored Post Penalty [Search Engine Land]

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How to Sync MarsEdit Local Drafts Between Machines With Dropbox [Mac]

Evan Kline — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 01:00:54 +0000

MarsEdit is now my Mac blogging platform of choice. Until recently, when I wanted to work on MarsEdit drafts on multiple machines, my workflow consisted of uploading a draft of my post to my blog, and then downloading it to my other machine. With a little bit of tinkering, you can do away with such a workaround, and use Dropbox to automate your workflow.

Over in the MarsEdit forums, user “a.jaffe” spells it out. His steps involve setting up symbolic links that point to a folder on Dropbox. Here’s how you do it, broken down into step-by-step instructions. Kudos to a.jaffe for these steps.

1. Make sure you have access to both machines that you want to be able to sync.

2. Quit MarsEdit on each of these machines.

3. Go to the machine that has drafts that you want to save, and decide where you want to store the local drafts on your dropbox. Like the forum user, I used ~/Dropbox/Library/MarsEdit_LocalDrafts. I created that directory at this step to be safe, although I think the terminal steps below take care of it.

4. Open the Terminal app, and type each of the following pieces of text, one line at a time, hitting return after each line (don’t type the “>” symbol; that just signifies the start of a new line):

> mkdir ~/Dropbox/Library

> cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/MarsEdit

> mv LocalDrafts ~/Dropbox/Library/MarsEdit_LocalDrafts

> ln -s ~/Dropbox/Library/MarsEdit_LocalDrafts ./LocalDrafts

5. Go to your other machine, open Terminal, and type this:

> cd Library/Application\ Support/MarsEdit

6. If you want to save drafts from the machine that you’re on now, type this:

> mv -i LocalDrafts/* ~/Dropbox/Library/MarsEdit_LocalDrafts/

As forum user a.jaffe points out, “[t]his moves the individual draft files into the Dropbox LocalDrafts folder. You may find that there are some duplicate names. Depending on which you want to keep, you can say ‘y’ or ‘n’ to the resulting prompt – or go back and rename the file before attempting to move it, if you want to keep both.”

7. Now, still on the second machine, type this:

> rm -fr LocalDrafts

Please note that this deletes the old drafts folder. If you prefer, just copy it somewhere else as a backup.

8. Still on the second machine, type this:

> ln -s ~/Dropbox/Library/MarsEdit_LocalDrafts ./LocalDrafts

That’s it. I set this up, and am happily moving between machines, without having to even give the syncing a second thought.

If you have any MarsEdit tricks, let us know in the comments.

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Yep, Geeks Love Markdown, But Why Should You Bother?

Evan Kline — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 01:00:02 +0000

If you’re a geek, you may have heard about Markdown, a markup language that makes it easy to output HTML, without actually having to know even a lick of HTML. We joined the love fest ourselves recently, covering the basics, as well as looking at a Windows app and a Mac app that support Markdown. With the proliferation of what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editors today, though, why should you even bother with Markdown?

I’ll admit – I wondered the same thing. We covered some reasons for using Markdown in our initial post, but we didn’t dive into the reasons too deeply. I initially used Markdown because I had a case of the “new and shinies,” and thought it was, well, cool. But there are more compelling reasons, too. The developer of Marked, a Mac app that brings Markdown support to most text editors, has written a great overview of why Markdown might be worth checking out.

One of the more important benefits of Markdown is that it is portable. Have an iPad? You can draft some text using Markdown syntax, and use it pretty much anywhere else. It’s also fast. The Marked developer points out that it’s fast to actually write the Markdown syntax, but it’s also fast from a hardware perspective- if you have a low-powered machine, there isn’t anything less hardware-intensive than a basic text editor.

For the full list, hop over and check out the post. Have you tried Markdown? If not, do you plan to?

Why Markdown? A two-minute explanation

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App of the Week: MarsEdit – My Mea Culpa [Mac]

Evan Kline — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 01:00:27 +0000

This week’s app of the week post is a mea culpa of sorts, instead of a full review. Several months ago, we compared MarsEdit, ecto, and Blogo, which are all Mac blogging apps. Head on over to that review for a more detailed look at MarsEdit, and the other two apps. At the time, I favored ecto, largely because of the way that it handled images. Since then, I’ve seen the light. I’ve purchased a MarsEdit license, and haven’t looked back.

The reason I looked away from ecto in the first place is that it almost seems to be abandonware. The last update to ecto occurred in May 2010. Obviously, OS X has seen some significant updates since then, including a little update called Lion. I started to experience some strange anomalies with ecto, including graphical smearing in parts of the app. To be fair to ecto, I didn’t submit a support request. The lack of updates, though, didn’t instill confidence that I wouldn’t run into other problems.

MarsEdit, on the other hand, gets updated frequently. I’ll gladly spend money on a reasonably priced app, that I’ll use often, that has a committed developer behind it. MarsEdit fits the bill.

What about my prior gripes? In the earlier review, I complained about how MarsEdit handles tags. I said that the app doesn’t present you with a list of tags from which you can choose. That’s still the case, but MarsEdit does autofill tags for you as you type them, letting you see a list of tags that match the letters that you’ve typed. Given the lack of screen real estate on my Air, I now actually prefer this to a pre-populated list. My only gripe is that tags are case sensitive, so, for example, if you start typing a tag with an uppercase letter, you’ll only see a choice of tags that start with uppercase letters.

I also preferred ecto’s image handling. MarsEdit’s options here are still basic, so not much has changed on that front. If I need to really tweak the position of an image, such as modifying the padding, then I do it by hand. My only other gripe is that once I started adding images to a post, the app can feel slightly sluggish on my Air, with a lack of immediate response after entering text. That only seems to happen sporadically, though.

The feature that I’ve really grown to love with MarsEdit is its preview feature. While not as easy to use or as helpful as the wysiwyg editing on Windows Live Writer, the preview feature lets you input some of your blog’s code, and then see, in real time as you edit, what your post will look like on your site. If you have even rudimentary coding experience, you can probably figure out how to visit your blog in your browser, view and copy the source code into settings in MarsEdit, and then remove portions of the code and insert placeholders. All that sounds harder than it was, at least for me. I’m very limited in what I can do with code, and had the preview of 40Tech set up after a few minutes of trial and error.

Because MarsEdit is regularly updated, it has been updated to take advantage of Lion. On my Air in particular, I enjoy the built-in support for Lion’s full screen mode. When I’m researching for a blog post, I enjoy the ability to swipe between MarsEdit and my browser, while enjoying the full size of my screen.

MarsEdit allows you to set up custom fields in the editor. If your blog theme supports custom fields, gone are the days of waiting until you upload your post to finalize it. You can also input your excerpt (the part of the post that is shown on the front page of a blog with many themes) right from the editor.

All in all, I find that I can pretty much compose posts now entirely in MarsEdit, and I enjoy using it. I wandered in the wilderness a while with the wrong choice, but I’ve been happy ever since making the switch. MarsEdit has that intangible “it” that certain Mac apps have, that make them fun to use. I’ll be updating the prior review to point over to this one.

MarsEdit is currently costs $39.95, either on the developer’s website or in the Mac App Store, so it isn’t cheap. If you’re a light blogger, perhaps you can do without it. But for anyone who blogs on a Mac on a regular basis, and isn’t running Windows Live Writer via a virtual machine, it is almost a necessity.

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How to Be Notified If Somebody Hacks Your WordPress Site

Evan Kline — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 01:00:51 +0000

Last week, we covered two tools to help you scan your website for malware. Another method to determine if your site has been hacked is to look at changes in your server files themselves. That, though, can be time consuming if you do it manually. If you use WordPress (the self-hosted variety), and you want to use an automated tool that detects changes to files, take File Monitor Plus for a spin.

File Monitor Plus is a WordPress plugin that scans the files on your server on a schedule set by you, and notifies you of any modifications, additions, or deletions to those files. That should give you prompt warning of any trouble. The check can be as simple as comparing file size or date modified, or as involved as looking at the file hash. The latter will consume more server resources. You can tell the plugin to notify you in your WordPress dashboard, by email, or both. You can set the scan to occur hourly, twice daily, daily, or manually. You can also whitelist files and directories, such as those that receive frequent changes, to exempt them from the scan.

Changing files isn’t the only way a hacker can attack your site, but File Monitor Plus is simple enough to set up that you should give serious consideration to it if you’re worried about security.

What tools do you use to protect your site?

File Monitor Plus

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Two Free Tools to Scan Your Website for Vulnerabilities

Evan Kline — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 01:00:17 +0000

Yesterday we compared Squarespace and WordPress, and I indicated that as slick as Squarespace was, 40Tech was going to remain on a self-hosted WordPress installation. Bloggers using a self-hosted instance of WordPress, though, need to make sure that their blogs are secure. That includes making sure that your blog isn’t already compromised. How do you do that? The easiest way to do that is to use external tools to scan your site. There are two that we use here at 40Tech, and recommend.

Sucuri SiteCheck

The first is Sucuri SiteCheck, which is the more streamlined of the two. Simply type an address in the Scan box, and the service will scan your site.

It appears to scan the page that you enter, and the pages linked off of that page. The results indicate whether the site has been blacklisted by Google Safe Browsing, Norton Safe Web, or Phish tank. It also lets you know whether malware, malicious javascript, or malicious iFrames were detected. Finally, it tests for drive-by-downloads (downloads that happen without your knowledge or intent), anomalies, Internet Explorer-only attacks, suspicious redirections, and spam. The service is free.

HackerTarget.com

The second tool is actually a suite of scans from HackerTarget.com. From the front page of that site, you’ll find links to 12 different scans that can be performed.The scans range from a port scan, to an SQL injection test, to scans for different types of platforms (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla).

I’ve tried the WordPress scan. According to the site, the scan not an in depth audit, but instead a “passive analysis” that uses web requests to download a handful of pages from the site, and then perform some analysis on the resulting HTML.

The security checks listed include the following:

WordPress Version Check
Site Reputation from Google, Norton and MyWot
Default admin account enabled
Directory Indexing on plugins
htaccess readable
robots.txt present
Sites Externally linked from main page (reputation checks)
WordPress Plugins that are detected passively and versions against latest versions.
Javascript linked
iframes present
internal site links
Hosting Reputation and Geolocation information
IP address sharing and reputation of sites sharing the IP address

When the scan is done, you’ll be emailed a PDF file with the results. My only gripe with the service is that I found that after I went through the process of selecting a scan to run, I had to go to my email account, click on a verification link in an email, and then go back to the site and reenter the info that I’d already entered. It appears to only require this once per day in order to prevent spam perhaps, but it was still a hassle to have repeat the process. I guess for a free service, we can’t complain.

I did find one error in my hackertarget.com results. The results include a list of other sites that share your IP address. There were three sites in the list that I didn’t recognize, so I became concerned that a rogue site was running off of my account. When I did an IP address search using other sources, I found that the hackertarget.com report was off by one digit, and those sites were not sharing the same IP address. I also had 40Tech’s host dig into this to be safe, and my suspicions were confirmed.

HackerTarget.com is also free, for up to 4 scans per day.

Do they work?

Since you can’t see how these tests operate, there is no way to know for sure how effective they are. However, HackerTarget did detect two iFrames back when we had our attack last week. After we took the site offline, detected and removed the intrusion, and located and patched the vulnerability, the PDF report came back clean. I didn’t start using Securi SiteCheck until after the attack, so I can’t comment on its effectiveness (and I’m not about to intentionally infect 40Tech, just to test it out).

Next week, we’ll look at a simple WordPress plugin that can help you keep your site secure. In the meantime, how do you protect your site?

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Squarespace vs. WordPress- First Impressions of Squarespace From a Longtime WordPress User

Evan Kline — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 01:00:00 +0000

I first started using WordPress in 2005, several years before the birth of 40Tech. For the uninitiated, when you say “WordPress,” you actually can be referring to two different products. You might be referring to the WordPress blogging platform, that you can download and install on your own web host. That’s what we do here at 40Tech. WordPress can also refer to WordPress.com, a site where you can set up a blog that runs on the WordPress platform. Recently, I wondered if there were a better choice than WordPress, so I gave Squarespace a spin.

I should preface this discussion by stating that this is not really a fair comparison. I’ve been using WordPress for a few years, and Squarespace for a few days. With that understanding in mind, this post includes my first impressions of Squarespace, broken down by looking at why you might choose to use Squarespace, and why it might not be a good choice for you.

Why You Might Choose Squarespace

Here are a few of the reasons why you might choose Squarespace:

Don’t need to worry about the nuts and bolts. If you’re just starting a website, Squarespace could be an awesome solution. You don’t have to worry about learning how a platform works behind the scenes, like you do with a self-hosted WordPress installation if you really want it to shine. You also don’t have to install anything. Squarespace is largely a “what you see is what you get” experience, as I’ll describe below, and the platform is already in place. Sign up, pick a theme from several options, tweak it if you wish, and start writing.
Don’t need to worry about security. If you’re running the self-hosted version of WordPress, you likely are paying a web host to host your site. While the host takes care of server security, this doesn’t absolve you of all security concerns. You still need to make sure that your WordPress installation is secure, and isn’t vulnerable because of a flaw in a plugin, theme, or code that you added. None of that is a concern with Squarespace. Squarespace is both a host and a platform, so you don’t need to worry about something that you installed on the server. Again, Squarespace is a blank slate, already configured and running, and waiting for you to tweak it.
Easy customization. Squarespace does have some nice themes, but you’re not stuck with just the themes as they come out of the box. Squarespace’s hallmark is the ability that it gives you to tweak a theme to your heart’s content. You can change fonts, colors, margins, widths, and more with just a few clicks. This pertains to pretty much every element of your site – a drop down menu lets you choose which part of a page you want to edit, and then you can go in and make changes with ease. No understanding of CSS or HTML is required. If you do know CSS, you can tweak the appearance of your site even more.

Markdown. We’ve talked about Markdown quite a bit here lately, so I’m pleased to report that Squarespace supports it, along with WYSIWYG, raw HTML, and Textile.
Built in features. One aspect of WordPress that is worrisome is that to get some features, you must rely on external plugins. That brings with it both security concerns, and concerns about losing functionality on your site if a developer stops developing his or her plugin. Squarespace supports forums, photo galleries, Amazon items, and more, without the need to rely upon a third party.
Great support. I sent a support inquiry to Squarespace support, and had a response moments later. Having a single “the buck stops here” location to look for support has its benefits, and my experience was outstanding.
Reliable architecture. In my limited experience, I found Squarespace to be fast and stable. It also has built in scaling, to handle larger volumes of traffic. This differs from a self-hosted WordPress install, which often runs on a shared host that can be brought to its knees by a spike in traffic.

Why You Might Stay Away From Squarespace

Nothing in life is perfect, and Squarespace is no exception. Here are a few reasons why you might decide against using Squarespace:

Less customization and control. While it is easy to customize a Squarespace theme, there is a tradeoff. You don’t have access to the guts of the platform, like you do with WordPress. The best way to characterize it is that customizations on Squarespace are easy and can be extensive, but not nearly as unlimited as you might find on WordPress. You’re also limited to working with the tools provided on Squarespace. On a self-hosted WordPress site, you have free reign, within whatever limits your host places on you.
Smaller theme and plugin selection. One of the reasons that Squarespace isn’t as customizable as WordPress is because Squarespace doesn’t have nearly the same size theme and plugin repository that WordPress possesses. The vast number of plugins and themes is a selling point for WordPress. If you can imagine something – a look, or type of functionality – you can probably find a theme or plugin that does it on WordPress. On Squarespace you’re limited to the choices given, although those choices do give you a good bit of flexibility.
Smaller community. One of the aspects of WordPress that I love is the helpful community. I don’t even usually end up getting help directly. Instead, if I have a problem, I perform a Google search, and chances are that multiple people have asked the same question, and received answers. Squarespace lacks that same massive community.
Not free. Squarespace is a paid service., with prices ranging from $12 to $36 per month. WordPress is free to download, although you’ll still need to pay for most types of hosting. For low-traffic sites, this hosting can be cheap. Most hosts also allow you to run multiple sites on one hosting plan, reducing the cost even further.

The biggest problem I see with Squarespace is that it puts starting bloggers in sort of a Catch-22. Squarespace is ideal for starting bloggers, but starting bloggers might not know in the beginning if they’re in it for the long haul (or if they’re going to make any money, if that is the goal). The beginning is when a blogger has to decide whether he or she is shelling out money for a blogging platform. As a result, the people most likely to benefit from a service like Squarespace are the least likely to use it.

At the same time, experienced bloggers with a trove of content in a WordPress site are going to be loath to uproot everything and move to a completely new platform. My biggest concern when evaluating a move of 40Tech was whether I’d lose search ranking, because the link strutter on a new platform would be different. I wrote to Squarespace support to ask if links were preserved when importing a preexisting site, and was told that “our importer *should* be able to redirect your URLs automatically to preserve link structures.” At least with the free account, there’s no way to test this out to be sure, before you make the move.

In the end, the itch to look for another blogging platform subsided, and I decided that 40Tech would remain where it is – on a web host, running a self-hosted WordPress installation. If we had moved 40Tech, I would have missed having complete control over the site like I do now. I also wasn’t completely confidant that the our prior links wouldn’t have evaporated into cyberspace. Instead of moving, we’ve gone ahead and implemented a few hardening features to lock down the site. By keeping the site here, I’ve also been spared the likely wrath of Bobby Travis.

Have any of you tried Squarespace, or another all-in-one solution? If so, hop on down to the comment section, below, and let us know about your experience.

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Markdown: The Basics

Evan Kline — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 01:00:33 +0000

If you’re a geek, you may have heard of Markdown. What is it? Markdown is a format that you use to write text that can then be converted to valid HTML. The hallmark of Markdown is that it is easy to read and to write.

For more on Markdown, check out our look at two apps that support it natively, WriteMonkey for Windows, and nvALT for Mac.

Examples

The best way to understand Markdown is to look at some examples.

What you type in Markdown	HTML output
_italic_	italic
__underline__	underline
[link text](http://example.com)	link text
> This paragraph is indented	(an indented paragraph)

These are some of the more basic examples. For full formatting instructions, check out the syntax guide of John Gruber, Apple fan and creator of Markdown.

Why Use Markdown?

Why should you use Markdown? A few reasons come to mind.

Markdown is clean and easy to read.
Markdown is actually sort of fun, at least compared to writing out HTML.
Valid HTML. I’ll take their word for it, but I’ve heard programmers say that blogging software and other editors can butcher HTML, and leave you with invalid HTML. Markdown gives you valid HTML.
Convenience: You can use it anywhere. While apps such as Live Writer (Windows) or MarsEdit (Mac) are pretty easy to use, and perform HTML formatting behind the scenes, you can use Markdown anywhere that you have a text editor. You can then copy that text over to a Markdown-ready machine or app, and you’ve got valid HTML.

How to Set Up Markdown

There are a few ways you can convert your Markdown text to HTML. One method involves installing a Python converter on your system. Easier yet is to install a text editor with Markdown support. Over the next two days, we’ll cover both a Windows option and a Mac option. If you’d rather not install anything on your system, you can try Gruber’s onlne tool, Dingus.

Any Markdown fans out there?

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See What Your Website Looks Like on Different Devices

Evan Kline — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 01:00:36 +0000

If you run a website, you’ve probably run into issues trying to figure out what your site looks like on various devices. If you want a quick way to figure it out, check out Screenfly, a site that lets you see how your site appears on different devices, including desktop, tablet, mobile, and even television. Within each of those categories, you can choose from a variety of devices. For example, if you choose tablet, you can pick between the iPad and four other tablets, including the Motorolla Xoom. Even the desktop selection allows you to choose between several screen resolutions.

Do you have other methods for seeing how your site looks on different platforms? If so, share your tips in the comments.

Screenfly [via One Thing Well, as shared by Steve Rubel on Google+]

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How to Change Where Windows Live Writer Saves Posts on Your PC [Blogging]

Evan Kline — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 01:00:27 +0000

One piece of software that Microsoft got right was Windows Live Writer. If you’re a blogger, and don’t want to dig around in HTML (and arguably even if you do), Windows Live Writer is the software that we recommend for your drafting needs. One flaw with Live Writer, though, is that it doesn’t offer a setting to change where your blog posts get saved on your machine. By default, your drafts and recent posts get saved to your user folder, in the \Documents\My Weblog Posts\ directory. What if you want to save your posts elsewhere? You can do this, with a registry hack. According to the Live Writer dev team, here’s how you do it:

Open up regedit (in Win7, just type “regedit” into the start menu)
Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Live\Writer
Right click on the “Writer” folder in the left pane and choose New > String Value
Name the value PostsDirectory and then double-click on it to edit
- You can try pointing it to your documents folder, which is normally “C:\Users\\Documents\” in Win7
- Or point it somewhere else. Note that Writer will create two child folders wherever you point it: Drafts and Recent Posts.
If it doesn’t work the first time, try pointing it somewhere that doesn’t need admin privileges, for example “C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Temp”.

If you want to automate the whole process, a blogger, Larry Henry, Jr., has made a tool to do so. It requires you to run a small app, and to fill in the new location. The app then makes the registry change for you. I haven’t tried the automated process myself, so let us know in the comments if it works for you.

How to change the Drafts and Recent Posts folder in Windows Live Writer 2011 [LEHSYS Side Notes]