The Wardman Wire

Hints and Tips

One of the interesting ways that Google seems to work is that new websites (or new articles for that matter) have a “period in the sun” to see if they will become heavily linked; they then vanish and may come back to prominence later.

One corollary of that, and of the way the internet works, is that most traffic to blogs usually comes through two routes:

a) Brand new articles.
b) Old archived articles.

In the case of the Wardman Wire, perhaps 75-80% of our traffic comes via the archives, rather than via either the Magazine Front Page or the Traditional Blog version.

I note that Iain Dale has introduced Guest Bloggers at the rate of one per day for the summer, is broadening the offering on his political blog with a wide-range of Guest Posts over the last few days.

• Robin Tilbrook, Leader of the English Democrats: For an English Parliament
• Matthew Dear: Politics is a Derby, Not a Kick-About
• Austen Sanders: Why Young People Don’t Join Political Parties
• James Clark: Death of the Record Industry
• Andrew Mitchell MP: Obama or McCain? Who gets the Vote of the Poor?

And he’s after more:

Note from Iain: I will be running a series of guest blogs throughout the Summer. If you would like to write an article to appear on the blog (max 750 words) please do email me. I can’t guarantee it will be used though!

Yesterday I asked:

Reader question of the evening:

Why was “Twat-o-Thon” the top search term for sending people to Liberal Conspiracy in June?

And I hinted that the reason was not to do with Liberal Conspiracy itself. This article supplies the answer.

Here’s some food for thought first. The top search words on the same basis for some of the politics blogs on Wikio that I can test. I can only look at individual blogs that have their own second level domain, since that is the granularity of the compete.com figures.

An excellent heads-up from Patrick Altoft at Blog Storm:

Every month thousands of websites get hacked into and have hidden links inserted into the pages by people wanting their spam sites to rank highly in the search engines.

And a suggestion that Google alerts can be used as an early warning system to notify you by email when there is a problem.

Has your website been hacked or defaced over the weekend?

I have already come across one website this morning that was apparently hacked (by having all its page titles changed) last Friday.

Just give your websites a quick check - just in case.

If it has, and it’s a blog - do 4 things:

• Post on your blog that you have been affected.
• Make sure it goes to your RSS feed.
• Take it down and leave a status message on the web address. Possibly create a backup blog (perhaps on Blogspot or Wordpress). Preferably do this NOW, but certainly today.
• Get the site back up ASAP.

If you spot another blogger or somebody else with a serious problem, phone or Instant Message them if you can - or at least send an email.

I have had a reader question today: How can I convert a pdf file into something that anyone can download from my blog? Here are my comments.

There are two issues here:

• Converting the PDF File.
• Making the result accessible from a blog website.