Everything In Between

What’s a CMS?

Much of the Web these days is organized within Content Management Systems (CMS’s) which help site owners and authors easily produce new content while managing the old. A good example of a CMS is blogging software such as Moveable Type or, my personal favorite, WordPress. Other examples include PHP-Nuke, PostNuke, Drupal, and Mambo. CMS’s are so widely used that you’ve probably interacted with one whether or not you run a web site of your own.

SEO and CMS

So with all this content being generated, site owners and CMS developers and users need to know: What can I do to better my search engine ranking through my CMS? Here are a few tips:

1. Reduce code-bloat.

   Both end-users and developers can and should look over their page templates and cut out any unnecessary or extraneous (X)HTML that’s only adding to page weight. PostNuke and PHP-Nuke, for instance, are notorious for generating old-school nested tables through their various modules. Do everything you can to eliminate this tag soup.

   Also, take a look at the head section of your template. If you see a lot of JavaScript or CSS in there, you should cut it out and attach it to your page via an external document link or <script src="..." /> tag.

   Ensuring that your content is near the top of your document will help keep the spiders from getting annoyed. Plus, the reduction in bandwidth is often surprisingly impressive.

2. Dovetailing off the previous tip, use semantic markup.

   It shouldn’t come as any surprise that a p tag tells the browser that the its content is a paragraph. Despite the obvious importance of this fact, all too often this paragraph tag is replaced by a semantically meaningless div or td element. When considering headers, this is especially important because search engines weigh the text between h# tags heavier than they do other elements of your page. So make sure your templates are using the proper element for your content!

3. Use your meta tags to your advantage.

   In lots of cases there doesn’t seem to make a difference whether or not meta tags are accurate, or even exist. This is the result of search technologies getting better and of search engines distrusting authors (thanks mostly to spammers and porn mongers) from providing accurate information in their meta tags.

   Still, if you can use them, do so. Most of the well-ranked pages are well-ranked not because of their tags but because of their content and their referers, that is, because people linking to them. However, even they were once not-so-well-ranked, and meta tags do seem to make a difference when gauging smaller sites’ pages.

   As for how specific one’s keywords need to get, I think that’s a judgement call based on how specific the majority of your content for said page is. If you have a web site about cars with some general pages about how cars work and why you love them, then using “cars, Ferrari, Porsche” is fine as long as there’s at least a passing reference to Ferraris and Porsches. Then on your child, more-specific page, do the same, but omit “Ferrari” on the Porsche page and vice-verca.

4. Create friendly URLs to encourage spiders to index dynamically generated pages.

   This one is aimed at developers of CMS’s, though sometimes a saavy end-user can accomplish this as well. I’m not sure how prevalent it is anymore, but I know that at least in the past some spiders wouldn’t index page content if it were generated by a query-string. That is, if your page’s addres ended with something like ?n=v&n1=v1 then the resulting page may not be indexed by search engines at all. Furthmore, that’s not the easiest page name to remember. All that extra stuff from the question mark on is called URL cruft.

   The Apache Webserver has an insanely powerful tool called mod_rewrite (documentation) which many sites (including this one) use to clean up that URL cruft and transform it into a clean address string for search engines and visitors alike.

   This tool is also exceptionally helpful because it means you can embed a page’s keywords directly into its URL, providing an exceptionally helpful hint for search engines.

There’s much more you can do, and certainly more developers can do to help CMS’s better integrate with search engines. Hot Banana is one such recent CMS endeavor that has generated some buzz lately.

I was going to put up a Firefox click-through page to help spread Firefox and celebrate the first production release of Firefox (version 1.0 baby!) but I took a look at my Webalyzer stats before I did to try to gauge which browsers visitors are using to view my site. As of right now, for November, and omitting all the search engines and indexing services who crawl me, we have IE 6/Win with 7% of the hits, Apple’s Safari with 4%, and Mozilla (not FireFox) with 3%.

Now, I rather like Safari and Mozilla, so I don’t want to dissuade people from using them. I hate Internet Explorer, but I figure I’ve written enough about that and why it’s such a crappy Web browser that those visitors are probably stuck with it for one reason or another.

Long story short, no need for a click-through page. You folks already use superior browsers than IE most of the time.

Wow. Danica and I just spent 5+ hours playing a game intended for six year olds. Although it should be noted that we made the game a little more adult by tweaking the rules and adding our own PG13 and higher “Event Cards.” ;) Actually, Danica took on that creative task.

I’ve just noticed a rather strange problem on my computer. It seems that when I try to start iChat (version 2.1), the program exits quietly and instantly upon starting up.

What I mean is that when I click on the iChat icon in my dock (or in any other user’s dock on my machine), the program launches (the icon bounces and the little black triangle appears underneath it) but then a moment later the program exits (the triangle disappears and there’s no trace of the program left).

I’ve checked every pertinent log I can think of with the Console application including system.log, console.log, ichat.crash.log, but there’s no mention of anything unusual. I’ve tried killing the iChat Agent process, restarting the computer, even using Disk Utility to repair disk permissions. I’ve tried googling the topic, but have come up empty as well. I also tried deleting my iChat preference files (~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.ichat*.plist) but that didn’t help at all.

The only change I’ve made to my system recently was upgrading to OS X 10.3.6.

Has anyone encountered something like this? I’ve never seen an OS X program behave this way before. Know what’s wrong? Know how to fix it? I want my iChat back.

Thanks in advance.

Update (November 15, 1:09 AM): It’s fixed! Apparently, restoring the original preferences files fixed the problem, although I can’t understand why that would do it. I’m not used to things on the Mac being a “just shake your head and move on” situation like Windows, but this seems likes one. Anyone have an explanation?

I have a visceral dislike of Prozac when employed to treat bipolar disorder.

Not once can I recall a single time when I corresponded with someone who has said that it has worked for them. The only situations where it did not cause extraneous problems is when it was used as part of a massive drug cocktail in order to nullify or soften the side effects of another drug in that cocktail.

My (non-professional) medical advice: if you need to take drug B to counteract the effect of drug A, then drug A is not for you.

Before I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I was diagnosed as “clinically depressed” and prescribed prozac. In the one week I took it, I did not sleep a wink and was literally running into walls due to a huge manic episode it spun me into. My mother pulled me off the medication after trying to reach the doctor who prescribed it to me for 4 days without an answer. Bastard. Sometime later, I bought a pin with a smiley face on it and the words “I took my prozac today.”

But hey, I’m no Ph.D. Has anyone else ever had positive experiences with Prozac when used to treat bipolar disorder?

So just the other day I was asked about my experiences with litium. Lithium is a mood stabilizer.

That’s precisely what my experience has been. For me, it was frighteningly effective. “Numb” was a mild word to use what I felt after taking a high dose. More luke, “dead,” imho.

That’s one reason why I worked so hard at reducing my dose. For me, lithium didn’t just cut out the highs and lows, but effectively killed any ambition and motivation to do anything. Turned me into a living zombie for a while.

But that’s before the dose was really worked out well enough. So while that sounds horrific, it’s really just a sign that I was taking too much of it. Lowering the dose did help, and the effect of that action was a lot more turbulent moods. Which, in my case, was “normal.”

So the key is really using lithium, and other medications, as tools to help you control your reactions to your moods on your own.

I’ve started the first Rubik’s Cube Meetup.

I’ve been meaning to become a part of the New York City Bipolar Disorder Meetup Group but have been missing meetings lately.

Bad Mei.

In a recent entry, Alli asked:

Hi, I am a college student reading your bipolar blog. I am doing a psychology project on this disorder. Is there anyway that you could give me an example of a high and low in your life? This is so interesting.

I’ve been trying to come up with a good example to share. It’s not that I lack the experiences to talk about. No, there have been plenty of Ups and Downs that I could cite. Honestly then, I think I’ve been unable to answer because I’ve been unable to focus on writing a response. Which, in turn, has caused a “low point” and ironically offers the perfect example to share with you.

I get so easily frustrated with myself that it ends up being an impedement to getting anything done. I’m sure that’s not unique among the confines of those with bipolar. So, while this is probably not all that you were hoping for, it does make for an interesting subject for your paper. :)

Another piece my father sent me through email. This one, I wrote this one in 1994 as well.

 Mr. Hot sat in a pot
drinking a cup of tea
when did he drop
his cup of tea
it sailed out to sea

His cup of tea
sailed out to sea
only to find an island
which belonged to Thyland

Now this island
(which belonged to Thyland)
turned into a star
which then turned into tar

Then the cup of tea
tripped over his knee
and fell into the tar
so then an eagle
(which was related to a seagull)
swooped down and tugged at
Mr. Hot’s cup of tea

Now this eagle
(which was related to a seagull)
pulled from the tar
Mr. Hot’s cup of tea
and this eagle
took the cup of tea
to his bee

So said the bee: I like tea!
so as the bee announced his decree
the cup of tea
was frightened

And the cup of tea
was so terrified
that he turned pale

As he turned pale
he was suddenly so relieved
to see
that the bee had turned away

Although he didn’t know how
he got back to Mr. Hot
looked in the mirror
and was shocked

Mr. Hot’s cup of tea
was no longer what he appeared to be....

HE WAS MILK!!!!!

My father sent me some old pieces of my writing archived on his computer. Here are some of them.

On March 22nd, 1994, when I was 8 years old, I wrote this.

A long long time ago, there were these unknown life forms. These life forms were builders and they could only build something together. But this time they did not cooperate. Two wanted to build this, some wanted to build that, this, that, this, that… and they fought a big battle. The battle nearly destroyed them all. It destroyed all of them, besides two. Now, these two wanted to build the same thing - the Universe. ( That is my theory on how the Universe was made). So these two built the universe, stars, planets, and entire solar systems. Time passed…

Now they got very old. At this time the universe wasn’t going very well. The stars began to crush, and star clusters began to move out of place. Some stars burst and created shapes. The life forms liked some shapes and hated others. The shapes that they liked , they made them Gods. When the life forms (The original builders) grew very old, they put galaxies in their form to be remembered by.

The life forms died, because they were very old. Before they died they created more Gods that were made from the crushing stars.They also assigned different Gods to different planets and Solar Systems.

This is my belief about how planet Earth got Gods. I believe that the Jewish God is a God, but of a different solar system and he was never meant to be the God of earth. - He was assigned to a different planet. The Jews pray to their God on Earth even though he was never here. But the Jews don’t know this - now when they read this they will know.

—Meitar S. Moscovitz