The new theme is pretty light on the graphics, due to increased browser support for and subsequently greater use of CSS3 goodness for box shadows and gradients. I’ve reduced the number of image files to two: a background and a sprites file.

Only half-implemented in the previous theme, the new look, “Joy”, makes much better use of structured data markup, or microdata. Google is absolutely looking for ways to display your pages’ semantic markup in its results, so you may as well get on board.

The frequency of spam comments increased dramatically over the past two months, according to my Akismet stats, so I’ve gone back to the drawing board and developed a better front-line defense against them. The new method should be more opaque to bots that parse JavaScript while still being invisible to human visitors leaving legitimate comments.

In sum, I think Ardamis should be leaner, faster, and smarter (and maybe prettier) in 2012 than ever before.

When it takes off, it goes much faster than I’m ever able to make it go, which leaves me with the impression that I’m invoking a feature. But I can’t purposefully recreate this accidental fast scrolling. The closest I could come was when I lifted my finger at the end of the swipe, and my finger was near the top of the application. But I can’t swear that this is where my finger is each time it happens.

Others before me have wondered whether this is a bug or a feature.

The thing is, I’m not even trying to go fast, I’m actually doing slow, short swipes while trying to scan a screen’s worth of content at a time, so when it starts scrolling quickly, I have to mash my finger down to put on the brakes, then scroll back to wherever I was.

Update 08.27.11: Could the fast scrolling happen when I scroll at the same time extra data is being lazy-loaded by the browser or app? So, I scroll a little bit, and the page starts loading some images, and before it’s done rendering, I scroll again. The page then finishes loading the images and processes the scroll event, but due to some glitch, goes berserk.

This is an increase of 1,200,000 inbound links to the home page alone since July, 2010. I calculate that the home page is gained an average of 150,000 inbound links a month during the last eight months. That’s pretty amazing.

April 2011 Inbound Links

But I continue to be disappointed in the Site Performance area of Webmaster Tools. Try as I might, Google still thinks my site is crushingly slow, with average load times of 2.9 seconds, even though my independent tests suggest that the site consistently returns pages in less than two seconds.

April 2011 Site Performance

I’ll keep at it.

This is what a Google search for ardamis returns:

Ardamis' Google sitelinks

The second result returned, Final Fantasy XIII freezing on Xbox 360, is among my longest posts, has 91 comments, and enjoys some of the best inbound links of any page on the site, including from the forums at Xbox.com, Kotaku and GamesRadar.

The third result is my primary competition for the term ardamis, which briefly held the number one ranking a few months ago. That site has some one-line site links.

The actual mechanics of obtaining sitelinks remains a mystery, but there are plenty of people who are willing to speculate (and a few brave enough to promise they can deliver them for a price).

I’ve been posting more frequently, the site uses the WP-Paginate plugin and according to Google’s Webmaster Tools, the home page alone now has well over one million inbound links, but otherwise it’s been business as usual here.

Over one million inbound links to the home page of Ardamis.com

I’m not going to speculate about how to get sitelinks or whether one or more of the changes in the last year was the catalyst, but Google does say to use descriptive and non-repetitive anchor and alt text in a site’s internal links and to keep important pages within a few clicks of the home page. These are very basic, fundamental things that any site should do, but it bears repeating.

Google has created a compact Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide of best practices that developers can follow to improve their sites’ crawlability and indexing. This guide is available as a PDF.

The SEOmoz Beginner’s Guide to SEO provides comprehensive information you need to get on the road to professional quality SEO. Read it online or download it as a PDF.

SEOmoz’s CEO and co-founder wrote a very nice article on building the perfectly optimized page that explains the most important on-page factors and how they affect rankings in today’s environment.

Sometimes, a client will ask for SEO as though it’s something to be tacked on after the site has been built. Happily, good development practices benefit human visitors as well as SEO, and they go into every site I build, as I build it, from the very first line of code. I’ve written up a list of on-page factors and other considerations within a developer’s direct control that are important not only for SEO, but for good web development in general, at Aleph Studios | SEO Consulting.

One million inbound links!

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time on ardamis.com lately, giving it a new look, working at improving the site’s navigation, cultivating some inbound links, and posting more regularly. It’s rewarding to see that the effort is paying off.

Over the last few days, I’ve been concentrating on reducing page load times by sending the proper headers and compressing files.

I’ll give it some time and see how performance improves.

According to Google’s Webmaster Tools’ performance overview, with Super Cache running, a single minified CSS, a single minified JavaScript, etc. but no compression or header tweaks:
On average, pages in your site take 2.8 seconds to load (updated on Jun 28, 2010). This is faster than 53% of sites.

The chart illustrating page load times is pretty much all over the place, but at no time has the site dipped into the 20th percentile, indicating a ‘fast’ site. I’m trying to change that.

To change all the individual posts’ comments feed links to rel=”nofollow”, open ‘\wp-includes\feed-functions.php’ and add rel=”nofollow” to line 84 (in WordPress version 2.0.6), as so:

echo "<a href=\"$url\" rel=\"nofollow\">$link_text</a>";

One could use the robots.txt file to disallow Googlebot from all /feed/ directories, but this would also restrict it from the general site’s feed and the all-inclusive /comments/feed/, and I’d like the both of these feeds to continue to be spidered. Another, minor consequence of using robots.txt to restrict Googlebot is that Google Sitemaps will warn you of “URLs restricted by robots.txt”.

To deny all spiders from any /feed/ directory, add the following to your robots.txt file:

User-agent:*
Disallow: /feed/

To deny just Googlebot from any /feed/ directory, use:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /feed/

For whatever reason, the whole-site comments feed at http://www.ardamis.com/comments/feed/ does not appear among my indexed pages, while the nearly empty individual post feeds are indexed. Also, the general site feed at http://www.ardamis.com/feed/ is in the Supplemental Index. It’s a mystery to me why.

The first few solutions that I found involved adding a line to each non-WordPress page. This does indeed allow the page to incorporate WordPress tags, theme elements and styles, but there is a serious drawback to this method because of the way WP manages a web site.

When you click on the link to a WP page, or enter it into the address bar, you aren’t actually going to a file that resides at that address. Instead, WP uses that address as an instruction to pull various database entries and form an index.php page that resides in the WP installation directory. For example, while the address for this page appears to be http://www.ardamis.com/2006/07/10/wordpress-googlebot-404-error/ , the actual page is at http://www.ardamis.com/index.php.

WordPress assumes that it is responsible for every page on the site, and that there are no pages on the site that it doesn’t know about. If you try to browse to a page that WP doesn’t know about, it sends you a 404 error page instead. This is what you want it to do, so long as you don’t create any pages outside of WordPress.

But a problem arises when you do want to create a page that WP doesn’t know about. When you visit the page, WP checks the database and finds that it doesn’t exist, so it puts a 404 error in the http header, but the page does exist, so Apache sends the page with the 404 error. This behavior seemed to cause some problems with some versions of IE but none with Firefox. It did, however, result in a 404 header being given to Googlebot, so that non-WordPress pages would incorrectly show up in Google Sitemaps as Not Found.

To get around this problem and send the correct http header code: HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 200 OK, I needed to require a different file, wp-config.php, and then select specific functions for use in the page. results in a page that can use all of the desired tags and theme elements and also sends the correct header code: HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 200 OK

The following code results in a page that can use all of the tags and theme elements (you may need to adjust the path to wp-config.php):

<?php require('./wp-config.php');
$wp->init();
$wp->parse_request();
$wp->query_posts();
$wp->register_globals();
?>

<?php get_header(); ?>

<div id="content">
<div class="post">
<h2>*** Heading Goes Here ***</h2>
<div class="entry">
*** Content in Paragraph Tags Goes Here ***
</div>
</div>
</div>

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

Testing the method

Using wp-blog-header.php as the include, I created a GoogleBot/WordPress 404 Testing Page as the index.php file in the /testing/ folder. I added the url http://www.ardamis.com/testing/ to my Google xml sitemap, and waited for the sitemap to be downloaded. Sure enough, a few days later Google Sitemaps was listing the /testing/ url among the Not Found errors.

The next step was to remove what I suspected was the culprit, the include of the WordPress header, wp-blog-header.php, and see if Googlebot could again access the page. A few days after removing the include, and after the sitemap was downloaded, the Not Found error disappeared. I’m interpreting this as Googlebot once again successfully crawling the page.

The third step was to use the above code, including wp-config.php and then testing the HTTP Request and Response Header. The header looks ok, and Googlebot likes it. It looks like this does the trick.

Google has released a beta version of Google Talk, a text and voice instant messenger application. Still in its infancy, the program is very light on features, offering text and voice messaging and little else. Frankly, I hope it remains this way, rather than adding dozens of non-messaging features ala MSN Messenger.

Google Talk is compatible with any Jabber-based IM, meaning that you can communicate (via text only at this time) with Mac and Linux friends who use Apple’s iChat, GAIM or Psi.

Currently, voice chat is possible only if both parties are using Google Chat. Reportedly, this function works well even on a 56k connection.

Your contact list is populated by your Gmail address book. Google Talk requires a Gmail username and password to login. Inviting a contact from your Gmail address book who does not have a Gmail account will result in that person being offered one of your Gmail invites.

The program is free of any ads, at the moment. Here’s hoping it will stay that way. It does not currently encrypt text or voice messages, but Google claims that the release version will.

You are prompted to uninstall Gmail Notifier during installation, as that functionality is replaced by Google Talk.