Hi there,
This post will be probably not read by anyone else but me, anyway...
I released my new website, which is something like a social network, something like a blog, and something like a poll site. You can use it in many flavours.
The URL is: http://pointdebate.net/
You can check out my profile there: http://pointdebate.net/debater/Steliyan_Petkov_Georgiev to see my latest activities.
The site was reviewed on KillerStartUps, although they were hard on me, because they reviewed it the last day of the month and this way it really didn't have a chance in the Top 10 (of the month) standing. Life sucks.
Here is the KillerStartUps review: http://www.killerstartups.com/Web20/pointdebate-net-for-people-partial-to-debating
I will be happy if anyone drops a comment.
Till next time.. may be in two years,
Cheers
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Monday, August 10, 2009
Favicon issue with 2 website on one IP address
Firefox (I'm using 3.5.2) is apparently having problems with the favicons which reside on the same IP. It seems that FF keeps the favicons mapped to an IP address, instead to a domain name. When I open my new site I see the favicon of my older one. They both share a single VPS with one IP only.
I have also experienced strange issues with the FF Bookmarks bar - the icon which leads to my FB profile is the favicon of my friend's blog.
I have also experienced strange issues with the FF Bookmarks bar - the icon which leads to my FB profile is the favicon of my friend's blog.
CSS dropdown menu behind a flash video
If you have a CSS drop-down menu, which when expanded goes behind a flash object on your page, for example a youtube video, using the z-index CSS property is not going to help you. What you need to do is to set the wmode attribute of the embed element to "opaque". Here is an example:
<embed wmode="opaque" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/OM_soUJ9In0&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344">
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Too much time with my computer
I spent almost the whole weekend with my laptop on my lap. Except for yesterday evening when I drank 5 beers ... and I remember arguing with people on twitter over some stupid things, so actually I was in front of the computer again.
I think I need to spend more time outdoors. The vacation next week should have a positive effect.
I think I need to spend more time outdoors. The vacation next week should have a positive effect.
Saturday, August 8, 2009
Work goes on
The work on footll.com continues...
What I was doing today is to trying to find good feeds for the aggregator. I found a couple of good websites, publishing news for the majority of the most popular European leagues - England, Spain, Italy. To go further and find feeds for less popular leagues like for example the the Bulgarian first league you need to do lots of manual work. Currently I am using the google search in coordination with a specialized RSS search enigne. I must say that for the Bulgarian league, although less popular, it is still possible to find some quality feeds around the internet, but this is not the case for lots of the Asian or African leagues.
Another think you should look after is the quality of your feed links. Some sites on the Internet don't provide original content, but rather republish or syndicate content from foreign forces (Yes, exactly as I do) so my goal is to find the ones with original content and include only them in my aggregation.
More update on this later....
In the meantime I was trying to help some pligg users in the pligg forum for some minor issues. Well, it was not easy. Some of the forums' users ask questions that need just elementary knowledge of programming or at least CSS and javascript. Some require features what will just kill their website, like the guy who as seeking for modification to make his site require that the user votes for at least three links, before the site allows him/her to submit a new story. Incredible...
I don't know if my efforts in the forum are worthy. In the end of the day not all sites out there can be a success. If every high school student was able to build a site what makes millions (or at least hundreds) then money are going to lose their value...
See you soon
What I was doing today is to trying to find good feeds for the aggregator. I found a couple of good websites, publishing news for the majority of the most popular European leagues - England, Spain, Italy. To go further and find feeds for less popular leagues like for example the the Bulgarian first league you need to do lots of manual work. Currently I am using the google search in coordination with a specialized RSS search enigne. I must say that for the Bulgarian league, although less popular, it is still possible to find some quality feeds around the internet, but this is not the case for lots of the Asian or African leagues.
Another think you should look after is the quality of your feed links. Some sites on the Internet don't provide original content, but rather republish or syndicate content from foreign forces (Yes, exactly as I do) so my goal is to find the ones with original content and include only them in my aggregation.
More update on this later....
In the meantime I was trying to help some pligg users in the pligg forum for some minor issues. Well, it was not easy. Some of the forums' users ask questions that need just elementary knowledge of programming or at least CSS and javascript. Some require features what will just kill their website, like the guy who as seeking for modification to make his site require that the user votes for at least three links, before the site allows him/her to submit a new story. Incredible...
I don't know if my efforts in the forum are worthy. In the end of the day not all sites out there can be a success. If every high school student was able to build a site what makes millions (or at least hundreds) then money are going to lose their value...
See you soon
Friday, August 7, 2009
RSS feeds as sitemaps
One good way to optimize your blog or news site for Google is to submit a sitemap. This could be done though Google webmaster tools.
There are several different types of sitemap formats, as described in the sitemap protocol. Probably the most natural and easiest to submit is the RSS sitemap format. Since your site probably already publishes your content as RSS to which your users can subscribe, you will not have to put much additional effort into this by using the same feed for the search engines.
If your site publishes several different RSS feeds, probably one for each category that your site covers, you could of course submit all of them to Google. In my case I have over 3000 different RSS URLs, so decided to first give it a try with a single feed - the one that publishes all my new articles regardless of their category.
Before submitting the RSS sitemap to a search engine I recommend that you first check the validity of the feed you would like to submit through the W3C RSS validator. This could save you some problems wondering for what reason Google rejects your sitemap. For example one thing that lots of CMSs mess up when generating a geed is the pubDate format. The W3C validator kept insisting that my BST (British Summer Time) pubDate is implausible, i.e it is in the future. I managed to go around this through changing the format from TimeZone to time difference from GMT. Namely I switched from
Fri, 07 Aug 2009 20:44:19 BST
to
Fri, 07 Aug 2009 20:44:19 +0100
Another peculiarity is that the W3C validator recommends that you should insert a element there. Well, Google didn't mark my feed sitemap as containing errors, but rather notified me with a warnings with the not very meaningful message: "Invalid XML: too many tags" which misleadingly suggests that I have duplicate tags inside my feed, which was not the case. Removing the element fixed the issue in Google's eyes and my sitemap turned green in the Google webmaster tools. So it is up to you to decide whether to satisfy W3C or Google entirely. I personally chose the search engine.
To finish this post - don't expect that right after googlebot reads you sitemap(s), it will start crawling and indexing your pages immediately. This will likely take some time, don't push it.
There are several different types of sitemap formats, as described in the sitemap protocol. Probably the most natural and easiest to submit is the RSS sitemap format. Since your site probably already publishes your content as RSS to which your users can subscribe, you will not have to put much additional effort into this by using the same feed for the search engines.
If your site publishes several different RSS feeds, probably one for each category that your site covers, you could of course submit all of them to Google. In my case I have over 3000 different RSS URLs, so decided to first give it a try with a single feed - the one that publishes all my new articles regardless of their category.
Before submitting the RSS sitemap to a search engine I recommend that you first check the validity of the feed you would like to submit through the W3C RSS validator. This could save you some problems wondering for what reason Google rejects your sitemap. For example one thing that lots of CMSs mess up when generating a geed is the pubDate format. The W3C validator kept insisting that my BST (British Summer Time) pubDate is implausible, i.e it is in the future. I managed to go around this through changing the format from TimeZone to time difference from GMT. Namely I switched from
to
Another peculiarity is that the W3C validator recommends that you should insert a
To finish this post - don't expect that right after googlebot reads you sitemap(s), it will start crawling and indexing your pages immediately. This will likely take some time, don't push it.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
No luck
Hard times at work. A lot of work, little will to work :)
Levski Sofia won yesterday, time to see what Black Sea, the city Rival of Spartak Varna, will do against PSV tonight.
5 working days to my vacation.
Levski Sofia won yesterday, time to see what Black Sea, the city Rival of Spartak Varna, will do against PSV tonight.
5 working days to my vacation.
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