18
Aug 08

WordPress sending premature pings for scheduled posts?

Thanks to RememberTheMilk, I’ve been maintaining a pretty steady blogging schedule. Now when if tee up 2-3 posts, I’ll just schedule them for later in case I get behind again and miss a day.

One thing I noticed is that if you edit the timestamp to schedule a post publishing at a later date, WordPress still appears to send out a ping when you actually hit “Publish” rather than when the post is scheduled for publishing. I noticed this because Google was trying to hit posts that had not yet been published, but that had been scheduled, which was generating 404 errors. 404 errors are not search engine friendly, so I would consider this a fairly egregious bug. Since you are sending out pings, which include URL’s containing the words included in your post stub this could be something of a security hole in the sense that you might divulge time-sensitive information before it’s intended for release.

I tried reporting the bug to WordPress, but could not log in with my WordPress.org credentials. Curses.


05
Aug 08

Weird Blogger content flagging

One of my friends and favorite writers, Hollis Baker, blogs over at Blogger’s Blogspot. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way his site content was flagged as offensive, which makes no sense at all as his writing is strictly apple pie. In fact, he publishes many of the same stories in his hometown newspaper. I’m sure this mistake is fixable, however we decided to move his blog to his own domain, www.hollisbaker.com to avoid any future issues. So, we set it up in WordPress, imported the entries from Blogger, and now he’s good to go. I look forward to more enjoyable reading. Check it out for yourself by reading one of his best entries.


29
Jul 08

How to royally screw up your Google PageRank

A week or two ago, I fiddled around a bit with the inner workings of this blog, as I do from time to time. In trying to improve the search-engine-friendliness of the site, I made a few changes to the permalink structure in WordPress, but after a couple minutes I changed it back and forgot all about it.

Turns out Google had a big PageRank refresh over the weekend and I went from PageRank 4 down to PageRank 3. In trying to find an explanation for the drop, I realized that a large part of the site content was unreachable and generating 404 Not Found errors. Between upgrading WordPress and messing with the permalinks, the URL rewriting got hosed, which made nearly every post unreachable.

After much lamentation and gnashing of teeth, I did some research and found a nice solution in the form of the WordPress Permalink Redirect Plugin, which would resolve the issue and also help redirect some even older broken permalinks.

Now, all I need to do is keep blogging every day until I get back into Google’s good graces.

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