Category: Technical Discussions

Perhaps those three were never meant to go together!

digg.com social networking site

Social Networking sites, and Digg.com in particular, aim to give users the chance to read the latest news, to vote on it and to share anything they’ve found.

They rely on group participation to provide content and to provide a reason to keep returning.

There’s a story entitled How much a digg worth? (someone is buying digg!!) where the following comment is made:

it is quite disgusting how people using digg for their own gain

And that in itself is comical. Isn’t Digg about gaining knowledge, gaining experience, gaining entertainment, gaining traffic and gaining exposure? Gain is the underlying motivation of every user who visits Digg.

Perhaps it’s just the taint of money that turned that user off?

Personally I’m unashamed that I use Digg for personal gain – it’s a great tool to keep abreast of the latest tech news – as judged by my peers – and to promote this blog. So for the rest of this entry I’ll make myself a case study.

I’m not a big user of Digg.com but you’ll find my profile at http://www.digg.com/users/sarahk/.

July 4, 2006 / Technical Discussions

I’m a moderator on a few forums, one phpBB and the rest are vBulletin. One was a surprise – I hadn’t realised until I started getting reported posts 😉

Personally I find the vBulletin forums better to moderate than phpBB but it’s a relatively close call – until you start banning people and looking for cheats. Then vBulletin comes into it’s own.

July 4, 2006 / New Zealand

Today’s the day!!! The Web Developers Association of New Zealand is officially launched.

The NZ industry has had informal networking groups such as the PHPUG and Meetup.com organised gatherings but has no national identity. Something which is sorely needed.

Dennis Smith has taken the bull by the horns and started up the WDANZ. There are three levels of membership and it’s primarily aimed as a training and marketing tool for local developers.

I spoke with Dennis last month about

July 1, 2006 / Fun and SEO Games
June 29, 2006 / Directory Management

I was doing a reorganisation of RealState’s Ontario category and wanted to manually check one of the sites and found I was “forbidden”

Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access / on this server.

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

While the rest of us are using Akismet, content filters and the like this site’s webmaster had taken a bolder approach to knocking dead the spammers…

June 25, 2006 / Search Engine Optimisation

A while back I mentioned how a short lived forum demo lasted months in the SERPs. Another effect I’ve found with new sites is that the sites you use for dropping links will kick butt in the SERPs for a couple of weeks until the search engines fully index and propogate the results around the data centers.

A couple of weeks is no biggie and eventually you’ll pop out on top. The thing is, you drop the links from sites you know are indexed well because they’re going to help you and quickly.

So, I was amused to see, on a forum I frequent, that one site owner was requesting link exchanges and a site review for his Nintendo Wii site.

June 23, 2006 / Technical Discussions

Back in the beginning of my web life, before OO and web frameworks and CMS systems and even blogs there were banner exchange programs. Being an honest kind of girl I never cheated the system but those who did used auto surfing programs to boost their hit counts.

The owners caught on and started tracking IP addresses and looking for trends so that they would weed out the cheats and reward the honest webmasters.

Then came paid online advertising,

June 22, 2006 / WordPress