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Definitive guide to rel=”author” and rel=”me” on WordPress?

Joost de Valk of Yoast fame, has written the definitive guide to rel=”author” and rel=”me” integration into WordPress. Or should I say it almost is the definitive guide.

There are few things here that need to be considered:

  • If you are running his WordPress SEO plugin, you need to be sure that under Indexation | Archive section that you have unselected the “Disable the Author Archives” page (which is on by default to the best of my knowledge).
  • Ensure that you have SOMETHING in your author bio box. If not, nothing (image, bio and the all-important link to the Google Profile page) will show on the author’s archive page. It doesn’t have to be much but the default behavior if the Biographical Information in your profile on the WordPress site.

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SQL Files Grown Out of Control?

For merchants running AspDotNetStorefront who aren’t regularly running the Monthly Maintenance routines, you might find yourself in a situation similar to one of our clients where the size of the transaction log for their SQL database had grown large enough that their site was shut down because it couldn’t grow any more.

In this case, since we couldn’t access the admin section of the site to run the monthly maintenance, I was able to run the following commands in order to clear the transaction log to the point of the last backup AND then shrink the physical size of the SQL database files. Please note that before running these commands GET A FULL BACKUP OF THE DATABASE. If you can’t do this directly from SQL Management Studio (or similar tool) you should be able to initiate an ad-hoc backup from your hosting company’s control panel.

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Turning on Google+ for Google Apps, Finally!

Google has finally allowed Google Apps customers to take advantage of Google+

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They claimed that if you’ve got Enable New Apps by default turned on that Google+ would be turned on but that didn’t appear to be the case for the first Apps domains I tried this on. In both cases, they are set up to enable new apps by default but I still had to go in and turn it on. I’m guessing it is so they can get positive assent to the following screen (and to avoid a Buzz-type corporate privacy problem):

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Quickly Map Manufacturers to Store in ASPDNSF Multi-Store solution

image I’m sure you’ve been there before. You (or your customer) have gone in and added all your products and defined which products go with which stores but then decided after the fact that you want to have a manufacturer’s page (or menu) that shows all the manufacturers of products that  exist in a give store on your Multi-Store solution.

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Stop YouTube Videos from Hiding Your Menus – Two Methods

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Has putting YouTube videos on your website embarrassed you by being so bold as to insist on being in front of other elements on your website? This is a common problem seen across the Internet daily. However, just ‘cause main people suffer from this ailment doesn’t mean that you have to. The resolution to this problem doesn’t rely on setting Z-Index or anything fancy, just making some small changes to the original code provided by YouTube to embed the video.

The preferred method these days for embedding a video appears to be to <iframe> in the video. This is clean, simple, and more importantly, won’t get stripped out like the embed code or javascript embeds by most WYSIWYG editors that people use online to edit their content. A normal IFrame call would look like this:

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Google Doc Discussions: Google Wave lite?

Discussions in Google Docs puts the comments functionality to shameI among many others, mourned the loss of Wave. While it had many fantastic features, I think it was exactly this broad feature-set that caused it’s early demise. One of the features in Wave that I thought was a killer app was the ability to easily hold group discussions while collaborating on documents.

Well today, Google Docs announced their new Discussion feature that will go a long way towards resolving this issue. Watch the video for more details and see me after the break…

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Time Killing with Chrome

imageThis Katamari game is a javascript implementation (interpretation?) of the Japanese video game Katamari Damacy which roughly translates to “clump spirit”.

The point of the game, if there is a point, is to roll a sticky ball around and the more objects you pick up , the bigger the ball becomes and the bigger the objects it can pick up. This version will load in your browser and you hold the control key and roll the ball around the screen picking up words and images off of the screen. I suppose the goal is to get the ball big enough that it goes super-nova.

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Using Webmaster Tools to Optimize Your Site for Google

This is a GREAT video that shows you how to use Webmaster Tools to do Search Engine Optimization on your own website. Watching this is probably the best 10 minutes that a website owner can spend. Learn about:

  • Signing up for message forwarding to get real-time emails from Google about your site
  • Check out Search Queries to see items that are already ranking
  • Use Keywords to understand how to better target content
  • Reduce duplicates through HTML suggestions and URL paramter handling
  • Diagnose crawl errors to capture 404 traffic and reduce visitor frustration
  • Prioritize content by comparing internal links
  • Verify access through Fetch as Googlebot
  • Use Site Performance to improve speed of the website.

 

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Google Apps is Changing

Google announced today the timing for what we consider to be a HUGE change for Google Apps customers (that we talked about on October 1st):  The consolidation of Google Apps accounts into the overall Google Accounts structure that control non-apps services (like Analytics, AdSense, Alerts, Reader, Earth, FeedBurner, Custom Search Engine, Checkout, Blogger). See the top integrated Google services by following link.

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