SOB BusinessCafe 01-20-2006

SB Cafe

Welcome to the SOB Cafe

At the SOB Business Cafe, we offer the best in thinking–articles written by the
Successful and Outstanding Bloggers of Successful Blog. Click on the screenshot to enjoy each selection.

The Specials this Week are

Javier Cabrera offers a clear discussion of the pros and cons of working at home versus getting an office for your self-owned business.

emaginacion.com.ar Home Office Article

Brian Shih comes through with a fabulous tool that cuts time making screenshots to almost nothing.

Brian Shih Cropper Article

Angie Pedersen writes the most compelling article on why blogging is good for your business and why businessess should hire bloggers.

Angie Pedersen typepad.com

Related ala carte selections are
S)B Directory
Be a Contributor!

Sit back. Enjoy your read. Nachos and drinks will be right over. Stay as long as you like.
No tips required. Comments appreciated.

Have a great weekend!

–ME “Liz” Strauss

SOB Buttons and Directory Update 2

No Worries The SOB Directory Page

The Directory is coming along and looking fine. Go on it. Check it out! But it would be looking grand, if I got more of your bios in. So start sending them . . . . hint, hint, grin, grin. 🙂

Surely you must have 1-2 sentences description of your blog from some directory listing on your computer. Dust it off and send it along. It will get featured as others did last week. Think of it as free advertising to a substantial future readership. grin grin, hint, hint,.

By the way, if you’d have a better version of your logo feel free to send that too. Only one restriction–60 pixels high and not more than 200 pixels wide is what fits.

In case you don’t know where to send them . . .e-mail them to me at lizsun2@gmail.com.

The SOB Button Still Exists

If you are an official SOB and need a new one. Here you go.

SOB Button

By the way, please feel free to slightly adjust the size to fit your blog design. We want SOBs to have Successful and Outstanding Blog Designs too. (And Rob at Jamdo, it would look great in your sidebar below your ad space–hint, hint, grin, grin)

Want to become an SOB?

If you’re an SO-Wanna-B, you can see the whole list of SOBs and learn how to be one by visiting the SOB Directory. Click the link or visit from the sidebar.

More New Features Are Coming–Even Today!

So hang in there. The fun is just starting. Some really strong articles are coming too.
We’re making Success the new Style around here.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

No More NoFollow

I asked Sumeet Jain if I could republish this post of his here, because though I had heard of the issue, I didn’t fully understand it. He was more than happy to agree. I thought it best to include all parts of his article including comments. I encourage you to check out the links along the way for more information and an additional tutorial should you decide remove nofollow yourself. –ME “Liz” Strauss

no more nofollow
by Sumeet Jain

Monday, December 19th

If you’re a blog owner, please pay attention. Early this year, Google announced the nofollow value for the rel attribute. This made it possible for blog owners to stop Google from crediting sites comments link to. This was mostly received positively and most blogging platforms picked it up. WordPress, the most popular blogging platform, includes nofollow by default. The logic behind the move is to shut out comment spammers by not rewarding them. Whether or not that’s an effective way to shut them out is not what I care to discuss. I dislike nofollow because it’s antithetical to the web.

So I’ve removed it from my installation of WordPress, and I encourage you to do the same.

Removing nofollow yourself:

Open wp-includes/comment-functions.php.

Find “function get_comment_author_link”
Replace “return = “$author
with “return = “$author“.
Save and close.

Removing nofollow via plugin:
I haven’t tested any of these, but they’re available nonetheless.

DoFollow

Follow URL

For an detailed explanation of why nofollow is bad, check out NoNoFollow.

COMMENTS

a little birdie named Jem told me,
There’s more to getting rid of nofollow that editing wp-includes/comment-functions.php – I wrote a tutorial on it AGES ago. 🙂 You can find it here: nofollow removal tutorial

i thought about it and responded,
Hi Jem, thanks for the link to the tutorial – nofollow certainly has been around long enough that many tutorials were written. I wanted to wait a bit and see what kind of reception it got and impact it had on the community. It’s sad that the way it was used was simply to stick it in all the comments – like a blanket solution to a very intricate problem.

It might have been nicer if platforms like WordPress were strategic in their use of nofollow. For example, if a blog has moderation enabled, then all comments can at least be shown initially but have nofollow included. I can definitely see a couple uses for it, but it really is unfortunate that the only prolific use of nofollow was to kill linking.

As a side note to others reading this, Jem’s tutorial will remove nofollow for links within the comment as well. For example, the link to her tutorial in her comment above would not have the nofollow value. Some of you may like to maintain that value while others may not.

a little birdie named Jem told me,
“like a blanket solution to a very intricate problemâ€? – I couldn’t have put it better myself.

I don’t have anything against those who choose to use nofollow, although I don’t believe in it myself.. my major problem with it when I used WordPress was that it was forced upon people. Why not have it as an optional feature? Of course, it’s not a problem for me since I coded my own weblog, heh.

i thought about it and responded,
I do have something against those who choose to use nofollow. It’s likely my own ignorance, because I can’t think of why they would use it.

a little birdie named Tauquil told me,
I’m all with you on this one.

i thought about it and responded,
Glad to have your support, Tauquil. I noticed that your blog is one of the few that does follow links. Props to you.

You’ll find this post and the follow-up post here:

This article: no more nofollow

The follow-up post: nofollow advocacy

–Sumeet and Liz

Related articles:
How to Code Accessible Links–Part 1
Blogger/ Firefox–Editing Trap
Blog Construction–What’s Your Function?
Use Bloglines OPML to Find Interesting Blogs