12 Witnesses

Be on the lookout for a massive Link Load coming today and if you like these fotos, you can see more on my Photoblog.

Today I am combining several things into one mighty Phriday foto: My tech series on blogging and Wordpress, my pictures, my trip to Vietnam and a tribute to Joe Kennedy, whose photography I love - especially the pictures of food. No. Not because its food and I’m fat. Because of the texture, perspectives and colors.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

So, I am uploading these pictures, after compressing them with Faststone freeware image viewer as mentioned in Better Blogging: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), with Wordpress 2.5 media uploader. The media uploader was giving me some problems, but David Phillips helped me to to install the Flexible Upload plugin and that has settled it down. It only works on pictures though, but if I were uploading video or audio (the other options) I would use Podpress, so I don’t need it for anything else. *Note to David, who is very busy - I’m not tinkering. I promise.

One of the options of the Media Uploader is that you can insert several images and it will create thumbnails and an intermediate picture. The other option, on display here today, is the insert gallery function, which will create a gallery of thumbnails through which you can navigate, like a mini-photoblog on your post.

Rather than give you the rundown myself on how to do it, I’ll link to Matt Mullenweg, a fellow Houstonian living elsewhere in the world (California, where there is no decent BBQ), telling you all about Wordpress 2.5 media upload at WordPress.org. PS - Matt is one of the first ever bloggers and is (one of) the creator(s) of Wordpress, which is to say, he’s had some help, but he is the primary cause of its existence. He might know what he’s talking about.

So here it is a picture gallery of food from Vietnam, created in Wordpress 2.5: (click on a thumbnail for the full size picture)

[Show as slideshow]

This article is aimed at those who are already blogging from novice to blogging regular.

Be sure to check out previous posts in this series: Better Blogging: The Beginning, and Better Blogging: Tweaking Firefox.

How do you get found? Search Engines and references. Though links help you, even in Search Engines they give you greater credibility as others link to you, most of the people who link to you are part of a general group of people who are already aware of your presence on the web. Beyond that, you can’t control who links to you.

I’ve been using these tips over the last week and my Search Engine references have shot through the roof. My post on tweaking Firefox was #70 on Google’s main site (not blogsearch) for the term “Tweaking Firefox” within 7 hours of it going up. It was not yet cached by Google. That may not sound that impressive to you, but considering the number of articles on the web about Firefox, it is really pretty good.

A day later, it was #21 on Google’s main site. 48 Hours, and it is #20. BTW, I am not counting sublinks that are indented under parent links.

So let me tell you what I did up front to get it there, and then let me tell you what can happen to improve it even more.

Layering Keywords: slug, tags, categories, names and excerpts

Search Engines look for keywords. The more they appear on a certain page, the higher they get ranked, so putting keywords in the page is essential, but you don’t want simply repeat a word incessantly, because it makes reading your article irritating. If higher readership is your goal, this is unwise.

There is the trick of labeling pictures or links with terms that are searched often (e.g. “NOT Miley Cyrus” if you were trying to get American Tweens to hit your site), which will get you an early boon of hits, but they are going to leave when they arrive to find you don’t have what they were promised, so other than hitting your site for a 3 second stay, you’ve gained nothing. This is not to mention that you will lose credibility with them and likely it will create a backlash effect.

Also, Google will punish you for doing this when they discover it. Obviously, it’s counterproductive.

There are five legitimate ways to insert keywords into your content that catch search engines, but not the ire of the reader or those that run the search engine.

The first way of doing this is the post slug. The post slug is the set of keywords in your article’s web address. The post slug for the Tweaking Firefox post is seen in the picture of the address bar:

The slug part is “better-blogging-tweaking-firefox” as you might have guessed. What you may not know is that you can rewrite the post slug to anything you want, using keywords you think matter and not just as a repeat of the post’s title. You can do that in your Wordpress write post page in the place that looks like this:

In the line that reads “Permalink,” click the “Edit” link and you can change the post slug to whatever you want it to be.

You have to have your permalinks set for this style, rather than “basic” permalinks that just calls your post a number. This is what they call a “pretty” permalink. Awww. Isn’t it sweeeet?

Wordpress now takes tags. If you want your post to be picked up, tag it, tag your pictures, tag anything and everything you can tag. Alot of people never tag (I used to be one of them) and this is very effective in keeping yourself from being found on the internet, and if not being found is your goal, then you should not tag. You should also probably not put your thoughts (or pictures, videos and other information) on the internet, but keep your thoughts in a nice leatherbound journal beside your bed.

Here’s the tag set I used for Tweaking Firefox.

Categories were the first way to separate posts from each other and one way to send the message to the search engine that your post has something specific in it. In Wordpress, you can post to multiple categories:

Excerpts are new in the write post page of Wordpress 2.5 and at the bottom of the page you can find a box in which you can put an excerpt of your post that would provide a synopsis of the post. You should put an introductory paragraph that is full of keywords:

The best keyword layering option that you have, though, is naming things. You need to name your pictures and you need to name your links. You also need to write out your links. Do this: go back to Tweaking Firefox and find the number of times I wrote the word Firefox. Then start hovering your mouse over the links and read the name that pops up. When you get done, feel free to write the count you get in the comments. I don’t know the number, but I know it is so many, that I don’t want to spend the time counting them. I think this is the most likely reason that my post shot so high so quickly - and it hasn’t been linked to by any sites, either. You should feel free to do so. I’d appreciate it.

[UPDATE!!! - Apparently Google didn't like that I had it layered that much and has de-linked the post. I have know idea what the tipping point is for them, as all the layers were legitimate, but apparently, quantity, though legitimate, can be overdone. Everyone take a lesson.]

SEO Plugin

Wordpress has several plugins available to optimize for Search Engines. I use All in One SEO Pack and it looks like this:

This plugin re-layers all of this information and feeds it directly to the Search Engines.

Also, you should install Google Sitemaps as a plugin. It creates a sitemap for Google’s “bot” as it crawls your site and it makes it easier to understand the structure of your site and give results that reflect it.

Content: Quality, Diversification

Obviously, good quality content is a must. You need to write well and it needs to be helpful to people. This will create traffic and links, and that will cause the Search Engines to sit up and take notice.

Also, you need to diversify your content. If you make your content specific, then only a small range of people will be looking for what you are writing about. I love what John P. has in his sub-title of One Man’s Blog: Specialization is for insects.

Media Hosting: Your Server, Compression, WP Super Cache

Finally, let me tell you about hosting the media you use on your own server. When you host images or movies on your own server rather than on Flickr or Youtube, when they are found by the search engine, you get the credit and the link. When you host them elsewhere, flickr or Youtube gets credit.

But, did you know that Search Engines evaluate your server’s ability to handle the load? If you have a cheap server, heavy traffic, high load media or any combination of those things, it will cause you to drop in the rankings.

First thing is get a good server and plenty of bandwidth. If you have a cheap package, you are hurting yourself. Look into a server that is fast and will give you all the load you are shooting for.

Next, reduce the load to the best of your ability. Two things that you can do to reduce the load on your server is to compress your pictures and to install the WP Super Cache plugin on your blog. The plugin saves images of your pages for ready pick up and speeds you up considerably.

The other thing you can do is compress your pictures with a freeware program called Faststone. This program is quick and really good. It is also a shell program that will launch a program of your choosing to edit the photograph in a different way, if you want. Well that’s a rabbit we need not chase here.

Anyway, when you save a picture, you can open it in Faststone, click on it, then drop the File menu. Click “save as” and at the bottom right is a button called options. Click it and find a window like this:

Notice the original file size and the new file size. Also, realize that the compressed size on the right has been compressed twice - once for the original compression for this screen grab and then I compressed the screen grab to host it here.

Adjust the file size to what you can live with and save it in place of the original or as a duplicate.

This keeps the picture the same size, but keeps it from being a big load, which search engines like. It also gives you a lot of graphics quick so your page loads fast for regular viewing.

Let me give out a few links for this. Mostly, this information came from John Pozadzides’ presentation at Wordcamp this year.

Also, though I have yet to review it, there is another video specifically for SEO by Chris Smith. If I get a chance soon, I may provide a follow up post for this from this video.

Right now, though, I am tired of the late nights, so it may be next week.

For my regular readers, I will try to introduce non-tech things through the middle of the week as well. I may drop a few posts a day for a while to keep certain church members from complaining about the boring tech stuff.

Still, it is my highest hit posting in a loooooong time. And a lot of it from Search Engines.

Pardon the interruption of the Better Blogging series, but I need some discussion here.

My wife got into a spiritual conversation with some co-workers and one asked this question: “Why didn’t Jesus write the New Testament?” Her co-worker said that it would have been easier for him to trust the Bible’s accuracy and weight if he knew that Christ had written the New Testament, rather than having it left to people to remember what He said and record it.

Bonnie’s response, off the top of her head, was that the people didn’t understand Jesus and His mission until after the resurrection, which gave validity to the claim of Godhood. Before that, His writings might not have had the weight that even the Apostle’s writings had after the the resurrection.

I thought that was not bad.

Another co-worker speculated that He might not have been able to write, as the son of a carpenter.

I told Bonnie when she related the story to me that I thought that the Bible would lead us to believe that He was educated, unlike the delineation for Peter and John in Acts 4.

My simple answer is that we don’t know “why” God does anything, but that answer doesn’t always satisfy the curiosity of those seeking. In fact, we can never fully satisfy a seeker, but the Holy Spirit must convict and draw them to the conclusion.

Still, I think this is a great discussion. So how would you answer this question from an earnest seeker of truth?

Firefox is the best internet browser around, but did you know you can tweak it? You can make this browser more efficient and adapt it to your own interests. There are two ways of doing this: Add-ons and Scripts. An add-on is an additional program that gets, wait for it, “added on” to the basic Firefox code. Scripts work within Firefox to cause it to act differently and are more susceptible to malware (malicious software) written by hackers and act like viruses. Avoid these by checking the downloads of the scripts on the download page to make sure plenty of others have gone safely before you.

You can cruise the add on section at Firefox for some that you might enjoy.

Here is a list of the ones that I have installed. Feel free to share with the class some of your favorites.

Adblock Plus :: Firefox Add-ons - Blocks Advertisements in articles and on websites. I never see the dancing mortgage ads at Yahoo anymore. Huzzah!

Auto Copy :: Firefox Add-ons - Automatically copies to the clipboard anything I highlight, saving me extra clips. This plugin is essential to efficiently putting together a “Link Load” post with tons of links to interesting things. It saves 2-3 extra clicks per link, and is used in combination with a couple of other programs for great speediness. Just call me Speedy Gonzalez. Andele!

Better Gmail 2 :: Firefox Add-ons - This add on kicks into gear when you log on to your gmail account. I don’t use gmail that much, but if you do, go to the home page and review the features to see if it’s for you.

CoLT :: Firefox Add-ons - This add on is a power blogging must: Copy Link/Text. When clicking on a link, this add on adds a couple of items to your right click pop up menu: 1) Copy Link Text and 2) Copy Link Text and Location as… The second option has an arrow and gives you several choices. The first choice is “as HTML” which, when selected, will produce a fully formed html coded link in the clipboard and it saves you TONS of time and energy. This is the primary way I was able to produce all of the links that you see in this post in just over five minutes. The typing next to the links, a little longer.

del.icio.us buttons :: Firefox Add-ons - Inserts a button in the toolbar of Firefox that will let you bookmark a page in del.icio.us. If you don’t know what that is, it is a place to store your bookmarks online, so that you can access them anywhere without having to be at YOUR computer.

Digg This! :: Firefox Add-ons - Adds a “Digg This” item to the right click menu so that you can easier submit things to Digg. By the way, if you want to be read, you want to be dug. If you and your friends will start digging each others interesting posts, they will start reaching a much wider audience.

Download Statusbar :: Firefox Add-ons - Replaces the download window with a status bar at the bottom of the page. Easier to keep up with and not as much hassle with a pop up window.

DownThemAll ! :: Firefox Add-ons - Allows you to download multiple files instead of one at a time. Very useful.

Fasterfox :: Firefox Add-ons - Makes Firefox more efficient and helps it to load pages faster. it can do nothing about slow connections, so if you have one, a slow internet is what you will have. If, however, you have a highspeed connection, this plugin makes Firefox seem even faster than you would have guessed.

Forecastfox :: Firefox Add-ons - Puts a radar screen and weather alerts in the toolbar at the bottom of the screen, as well as current temps and the forecast for the next two days. Also alerts you to dangerous weather when watches or warnings are released.

Greasemonkey :: Firefox Add-ons - More on this one in the next section, but this plugin allows you to insert scripts.

MinimizeToTray :: Firefox Add-ons - Minimizes Firefox windows to the system tray.

Skype Sidebar :: Firefox Add-ons - If you use Skype to webchat, this gives you some tools in Firefox.

Web Developer :: Firefox Add-ons - Tools for Web Developers.

Now, to the Scripts that you can add.

Greasemonkey refers to the shade tree mechanic who used to lift the hood and tinker with his car to make it just a little faster, just a little better. These scripts are computer programming’s version of folks lifting the hood of Firefox and tinkering with some great help in efficiency and some just fun applications.

First, you have to install the greasemonkey addon, then you can install the scripts. Here are a few that I’ll recommend.

Akismet Auntie Spam for Wordpress … If you’ve ever gotten much spam caught in the anti-spam plugin, Akismet for Wordpress, you probably have been frustrated while looking for legitimate comments among the pages of spam. This is especially tedious when the spam is several thousand words long with a hundred some odd links to sites hosting medicines without prescription, porn and investments. This script recognizes that you are in Akismet and collapses all the comments into one line entries. You can expand the entry with a click if you think it is legitimate and verify. It collapses pages of spam to 1/10th the size.

WordPress Comment Ninja This script does two things. The first thing it does is allow you to reply to comments from the notification email you get when someone comments on your blog, providing you are reading the comment in Firefox. The second thing it does is to create links to do the same thing from the comment section of wordpress. Although I use Outlook to receive my email for 12 Witnesses, I have used this script to answer comments from within the Wordpress.

Amazon - Denver Lookup 1.2.6 When looking at a book on Amazon, this script will form a link under the title that will take you to Denver Library’s information about the book - usually more than what Amazon has to offer.

Google Image Relinker This script will allow you to click on an image from Google Image Search and it will go straight to the image, rather than to the framed version of the original website. This is if you don’t like Greased Lightbox below.

Download YouTube Video III Allows you to do just as it says, download videos from YouTube.

Greased Lightbox (v0.16) Now here’s a great script. When you search for images on Google Image Search and click on one, it will launch the large picture against a black background. You can then navigate VERY QUICKLY through the page with the arrow keys on your keyboard.

Flickr Photo Magnifier Creates bigger pictures from smaller ones on flickr.

Google Doc Download GM Script Allows you to download documents stored on Google Docs, and when combined with “downthemall” allows you to get all your Google Docs quickly, which is handy if others have been editing them.

GZoom Allows you zoom in on Google Maps beyond what you normally could.

Google 100 Instead of 10 results from Google, you get 100 results on a page.

Facebook Auto - Colorizer Colors Facebook pages to blend with the main picture on the page. Somewhat fun.

Facebook Fixer A collection of enhancements for various aspects of Facebook eg. showing bigger profile pictures, making it easier to view albums, showing people’s age and sign, auto-reloading error pages, changing redirecting links to direct links.

Pearl Crescent Page Saver is a free FireFox extension that you can use to capture images of web pages as PNG or JPEG files. You can capture an entire web page or just a portion of it.

Here are a few pages full of other scripts that you can explore for yourself.

25 useful Greasemonkey scripts you should take a look at

This list is in no particular order from best to worse, it’s written just as I’m going through my plugins!

Best of: Greasemonkey Scripts

This post is a compilation of the best and most popular Greasemonkey scripts available to its users, broken down into category for easier reference.

Top 10 Greasemonkey scripts to improve your productivity

“Greasemonkey extension (with the help of Stylish) can do wonders for your productivity”

I got the basic gist of this from the video of Lorelle Van Fossen’s address at Wordcamp 2008, a convention of bloggers who use Wordpress listening to the pros talk about specific aspects of blogging and Wordpress. If you check out the video (at just about an hour long) you will hear a couple of other things that I will reference in later posts in the Better Blogging series.

I’ve recently found a ton of information from the pro-bloggers, those that design a lot of the blogging software, about how to blog better. I am sifting through that load of information and then will pass on to those who may read what I learn. Of course, I’ll be linking to the originators of these ideas, so you can go straight to the source, if you want.

I talked with a fellow pastor last week and he was on his way on a Mission Trip. I asked if he would be blogging the trip the way I did Vietnam. He said that he wasn’t set up for it, but really thought it was an effective tool for communicating. I promised to help him set up when he got back from his trip.

My friend was right. Blogging is a powerful form of communication and also is highly effective to those who read. The questions are, “Who is reading?” “Can we reach those that don’t know us?” If we can do it well, then we stand a better chance of getting the message out.

With that in mind, no matter who you are, I am embarking on another tech series to help you blog better and more efficiently. Hopefully, it will save you time and you can reach others. I can say that my feed subscriptions have doubled this week since I’ve been doing a few things differently. I haven’t even really gotten started.

This series will have a little something for everyone. If you are a lurker (someone who just reads and doesn’t even comment) there will even be stuff for you. Nevertheless, I will be aiming mostly toward those who already blog.

In this series, I plan to address:

• where to blog (service and software)
• content choice
• how to blog for better search engine results
• all kinds of software to help you do cool stuff - for free
• what to do WHEN your rss feed gets scraped and used by a splog (spam blog)
• how to get it done quickly and efficiently
• more…

While I am gearing up for this, I want to offer you a chance to ask questions now that might form an answer post. Now’s your chance. Just ask away in the comment section.

If you haven’t switched to Firefox yet, give it a whirl now. A lot of what I will be writing about will have to do with it. For those who don’t understand what and why, I’ll explain:

Firefox is a browser, like Internet Explorer from Microsoft. The primary difference is that Firefox is what is called “Open Source,” which means that people other than those who own and run Firefox are free to develop “add-ons” and “scripts” that can be installed in the browser to customize it to your liking. It works for Apple or PC, so whatever your native operating system, you can use this browser.

The up side of open source is that you have MANY people working to make things better for you. The down side is that some people will write intentionally malicious software to mess others up and you might be a victim. However, this is usually avoided easily. Choose add-ons from Firefox’s site and Scripts that have been downloaded significantly by others (if others use it and it is malware - malicious software - then they will report it and it will be taken down). I’ve never had a problem with anything I’ve used in over two years of using Firefox.

The main reason I switched is that almost all the pros use it. I figured they knew something worth knowing. Astoundingly, I was right. They did.

After I switched, I found that Firefox is the standard in “compliance” - which is to say, it is the best browser for interpreting the computer language in which web sites are written. In Firefox, everything seems to appear as it was intended.

For instance, my site, when viewed in Internet Explorer, has the “footer” at the top of the site between the sidebar and the content columns. In Firefox, it is at the bottom of the page, where it was designed to be. If you use Internet Explorer all the time, try Firefox for a week. You will be absolutely amazed at how different the websites you visit look. Some change drastically. Next in the series, I will give you a huge list of all kinds of tweaks you can do for Firefox to customize it.

Some of these updates will help you blog better and some will help you read better, so whatever you do in the blogosphere, there will something for you there.

In this issue: canned fast food, street shoot outs in the (suburban) hood, killer dolls (does Chuckie live?), interesting vids, spyglasses, you have to keep your junk mail, how to dial a phone, 3D Google Earth, High Tech ahead of its time, Wal-Mart exposed and a nice but not too bright dog.

Just in case of nuclear war, and you need a fast food fix: The Canned Cheeseburger

Apparently, Orange County Florida is the Wild West. (extra gooey: it happened as a guy dropped his kids off at school)

Could Elmo be possessed? Kid’s doll is making death threats…

You just gotta see what Adie Russell does with historical recordings.

Think Geek has some sunglasses that are also a 1.3 mega pixel camera. (extra gooey: they also have built in ear buds so you can still catch your tunes - could be used with the laderhosen. hmmm.)

If UMG sends you a promotional cd that you didn’t want or ask to receive and you throw it away, they claim you are breaking Federal Copyright Laws.

If you think my tech talks are rudimentary, wait until you see the ones your parents got.

Did you know you can “Flickrize” Google Earth?

Check out the working “Difference Engine” - a design for a massive mechanical calculator that was WAAAAAAAAYYYYYY before its time and never built by it’s designer. (A bit of a modern day DaVinci, it would seem.)

Mad at Wal-Mart for ruining the small town economy? Get your pennies together and share with your neighbors to buy their candid closed door meeting videos at about $250/hour plus fees for research and copies of pertinent video. (extra gooey: one vid has Sam Walton telling the Board of Directors that there were not enough women in management, circa 1988) [No wonder the IMBOT doesn't want their meetings recorded - Art]

Finally, if you’ve had a long week, take solace in the fact that you are smarter than this dog:

A really big Link Load of interesting and eclectic stuff. Check back.

Oh, and very little of it standard Baptist Blogosphere kind of fair.

See you in a bit.

Since I gave you a Phriday foto a day early and it wasn’t even really my pic, I’ll give you one that is.

This is a Hmong Girl tending the fire at a restaurant in Sapa, Lao Cai, Vietnam. I took it on our last night in Sapa when we dined with another church who was there working with the Red Dao People at Ta Phin.

You can find more of my pictures at my photoblog.

Over the weekend, I’ll post a huge “Link Load” with tons of interesting stuff I’ve gleaned from the internet.

I may post another picture tomorrow, since I lost track of time and posted my Phriday foto for this week today (Thursday).  I even dated for today, Thursday.  You should have known I had lost track when I posted the story about Tim Keller and the NCAA Tournament and set them both to drop at the same time:  12:01 am on Wednesday, the 9th.

Also, next week I’ll start an advanced tech/blogging series based on a bunch of stuff I’ve learned over the last couple of weeks.  I’m just posting this under the “blogging” category, and not the “pastoral blogging” category.  I think pastors should be blogging and I am going to try to help them do it better, but this will be good for anyone who is blogging and wants to get better.

It will probably be a bit beyond someone trying to start a blog for the first time, but I will be glad to answer questions in the comment section if you have them, no matter how efficient you are.

The series will include tips for all bloggers, but will also specifically help users of Firefox and WordPress.  Frankly, if you are using Internet Explorer as a browser or another blogging platform, you need to switch.  At least to Firefox.

Switch.

I’ll make it worth your while during the series.

I look forward to this, but I am not going to do all tech, all the time.  I will also be working on a few other posts that have a more diverse range of topics.

More later.

This isn’t my pic, but I thought it was hilarious. Apparently, technology has caught up with certain makers of Laderhosen, where they have installed iPod controls in the pants leg. Fun.

Check out the full story here:

IFA2007: Fingers-On with the MP3 Lederhosen and Hunting Jacket

Or you can catch a few of my pictures on my photoblog.