Successful Blog

Janice Myint at Technorati Is in Customer Support

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Technorati logo

You might not be aware that Technorati has a Weblog, but yes indeedy, it sure does.

On January 30th the Post from Janice Myint said

In its commitment to continually improve its service, Technorati has recently brought me on board as a full time Customer Support Specialist. We are dedicated to addressing the current support issues in a timely manner, reducing the present support backlog, and improving online Troubleshooting and Help documentation to aid users utilize Technorati to its fullest.

The first thing that Ms. Myint is working on will be helping folks who are having trouble claiming a blog, because they are getting the notice “Checking for Technorati Goodness.”
Want to know more? Here’s a link to Ms.Myint’s post.

Good luck, Janice Myint in Customer Service at Technorati. You’ve got your work cut out for you. I guess you could think of it as job security. Sure would be nice of all of the Technorati messy stuff went away.

I’m dying to say something about sending in a woman to do the job . . . , but I’m the nice one, so I won’t. 🙂

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related articles:
Dear Niall Kennedy and David Sifry at Technorati
Janice Myint, It didn’t Work Right
Thanks Janice. Keep Going! We’re with You!

Dear Niall Kennedy and David Sifry at Technorati

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Dear Niall and David,

You’re both great guys and have only been polite and kind to me. I appreciate the help you’ve given me in the past, and hope you’ll read with the good faith that’s wrapped around it.

I started writing Technorati in August of 2005. It is now almost the end of January of 2006. The original issue has never been resolved. It involved the fact that Technorati wasn’t accurately tracking links to my account and that the count kept getting stuck and links kept getting missed.

Support answered with the usual form emails. Did you know they never get back like they say they will?

Both of you answered with personal emails. They were nice. They also made some movement forward. Nice gestures. Partial fixes. Band-aids as they say.

When I said, “Hey wait! Don’t run away, are you . . .” You were already gone.

I was polite. I was patient. I only wrote every 2-3. It’s my nature to figure people are busy that they have other things to attend to. I know I often do.

Finally, I just asked for an email saying you weren’t going to do anything. I got no answer.

Here’s a screen shot. Please note I post everyday. I also hand ping you.

Technorati ping form

Here’s another screen shot. Please note that Successful Blog had over 180 links and Letting me be had over 175 twice in the past. Then they got put back for no apparent reason. New valid links came. They went up again.

Technorati Account

Would you please give Letting me be . . . the link from problogger from last September and the new one from skippy the bush kangaroo from two weeks ago? I know other bloggers have had this problem.

I blogged twice today about Newsweek in Successful Blog. That was hours ago–trackbacked Newsweek and pinged you. It doesn’t show.

Isn’t 5 Months Patience Enough?

There it is out in the open. Obviously, there must be something I don’t get. Somewhere, somehow, this little kid from the small town has broken some unstated rule. Just what is it that I’m doing wrong? How do I get the superglue off my account once and for all?

Sometimes to be successful, you have to stand up and say something out loud.

Sincerely,
ME “Liz” Strauss

PS. Everyone says I’m the nice one.

Related articles:
Janice Myint at Technorati Is in Customer Support
Janice Myint, It didn’t Work Right
Thanks Janice. Keep Going! We’re with You!

Daily Kos Tech Update

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This Just In:

For all the techies . . . the Daily Kos says

Quick update on some furious development going on behind the scenes.

The comment boards have been completely rewritten and are absolutely amazing (using Ajax, for those who know and care about those sorts of things). They will be, without a doubt, the most technologically advanced anywhere. Now, while the code is complete, the hackers are working to integrate it into Scoop. This will be tricky and should take another week or two. Hopefully on the lower end of that estimate. But man, these new comments will blow your minds.

Here’s the link:

daily kos logo

Introducing Brianshih.com

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SOB Directory Entry:
BrianShih.com by Brian Shih

Type: Technology and Usability

brianshih logo

Brian Shih is a junior studying Electrical and Computer Engineering at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. This blog is focused on usability, new technology, and making the world better for humans, not robots.

Notes from Liz: You might recall that Brian was the first of our guest writers. His article on using sidebars prompted a lively discussion that caused us to visit sites and discuss design questions regarding how sidebars can serve both readers and writers. Brian also recently introduced us to “Cropper,” the shareware program that cuts time in making screen shots down to seconds. I’ve been using it constantly since the moment he turned me on to it. Take a minute and check out Brian’s blog.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Has your SOB Blog Been Introduced to US?
Blog Promotion: May I Introduce You?

No More NoFollow

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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

How to Code Accessible Links–Part 3

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How to Code an Accessible Embedded Hyperlink
by Cas of Brightmeadow

An embedded hyperlink is when the image is the hyperlink. An example of this is the feed button found in the ‘Subscribe’ section of Successful Blog’s sidebar.

These types of links can be problematic if you can’t view the images for whatever reason and you haven’t included ALT and TITLE attributes. To all intents and purposes, these links simply cease to exist. (Both screenshots that follow were trimmed at the top and side for fit).

View this screenshot of Successful Blog’s front page with images turned off,

CAS 3 without

and compare it to this one with images back on.
Cas 3 with images

The first thing you notice is that in the top image there is no banner, and then that there is no way to subscribe.

Ooops.

Basic code

An embedded hyperlink consists of a hyperlink tag and an image tag:

<a href=”http://www.foo.com/”> <img src=”image.jpg” /> <a href=”http://www.foo.com” title=”description of link destination”> <img src=”image.jpg” alt=”description text” />
Note how the TITLE is attached to the hyperlink, whilst the ALT is attached to the image.

When to use a full ALT description

Use a full ALT description when the image forms the entirety of the hyperlink, i.e., the image is the only anchor text.

When to use a null ALT description

Once again, think carefully about using the null ALT description (<alt=””>) when the hyperlink has a text component. For example:

<a href=”contactus.html” title=”contact page”> <img src=”contact.gif” alt=”contact us” /> Contact us </a></code> will render without images as <contact us contact us>
(The first from the alt attribute, the second from the anchor text).

In this case the image was purely decorative, and would have been better coded as <a href=”contactus.html” title=”contact page”> <img src=”contact.gif” alt=”” /> Contact us </a>.

A few notes

  • In this case, the ALT description should reflect the link destination as well as the image description. For example, in the case of a feed button, ALT text such as “feed for Successful Blog” might be be appropriate
  • It is also worth bearing in mind that, if you use external hosting for your images (like Flickr and Photobucket), you are at the mercy of their servers. If they go down and you haven’t thought to use ALT or TITLE, you are stuck. If you have made your links and images accessible, then you can keep going that much better till things return to normal,

And that is it. If you are already manually coding your hyperlinks, then making them accessible will just take a few seconds longer. If you aren’t yet manually coding your hypertext links, now is a good time to start. Those extra few moments pay huge dividends in terms of usability, SEO, and the general happiness of your readers. Whilst most of them won’t consciously notice a difference, the few that do will thank you for it, and we as bloggers are nothing without our readers.

If you are interested in learning more about this subject, the W3C has Web Accessibility Guidelines, and Webcredible have some very good white papers describing all aspects of accessibility and usability in more depth.

Sources for this article: The W3C, Webcredible, general common sense, and diverse other sources.

Thanks to Cas for the obvious work this took, and apologies in advance for any errors I might have introduced. We leave you now the links to the series. –ME “Liz” Strauss

The Complete Series
How to Code Accessible Links
This one: How to Code Accessible Links–Part 1
How to Code Accessible Links–Part 2
This one: How to Code Accessible Links–Part 3