http://metabestblogwin.com It's like that story in D. Hofstadter's book about the Tortoise, Achilles and the Djinni who pushed and popped their way into nested levels of awareness, only it's a blog. Sat, 13 Oct 2007 14:17:30 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Several weeks ago, I installed a new design at Consumerism Commentary. Theoretically, this was going to be a good move, from a fluid table-based design to a static CSS-based, compliant design. The fixed center column for text required that I rethink the placement of my AdSense ads, however. I ... http://metabestblogwin.com/2007/10/13/change-isnt-always-good-adsense-income-decreased-40/ I am a long-time DreamHost customer. I still recommend them to my friends who want to create simple websites that will never attract much traffic, but not to business clients who are interested in having a major web-hosted application that can support 100,000 pageviews or database queries an hour. As ... http://metabestblogwin.com/2007/10/01/the-simple-wordpress-transition-from-dreamhost-to-mediatemple/ Are you interested in producing a mobile version of your WordPress website? I recently got a Treo smartphone and, after a bit of painful surfing to some of my favorite sites, I got motivated to create mobile versions of both FiveCentNickel and Raising4Boys. As it turns out, there are several plugins ... http://metabestblogwin.com/2007/09/22/creating-a-mobile-version-of-your-wordpress-website/ Check this out... WordPress Plugin: No Self Pings I've always like the auto-pingback functionality of WordPress because I'm often too lazy to do manual trackbacks. That being said, I hate the internal 'pingbacks' that occur whenever I link to my own articles. Yes, they provide a way forward from older to newer articles, ... http://metabestblogwin.com/2007/09/15/stopping-self-internal-pingbacks-in-wordpress/ Quick update to my approach to controlling blog spam... I wrote previously about some of the steps I had taken to reduce spam, but those steps turned out to be too leaky. Thus, I ended up settling on a combination of Peter's Custom Anti-Spam, which is a simple captcha that ... http://metabestblogwin.com/2007/09/03/anti-spam-tactics-peters-custom-anti-spam-and-trackbacks/ Just a quick note to let y'all know that Alexa has finally released a Firefox-compatible version of their toolbar. I haven't downloaded it yet, but let me let you in on a little secret... If you download and install the toolbar, your Alexa rank will improve over time. The reason for ... http://metabestblogwin.com/2007/07/20/alexa-releases-toolbar-for-firefox/ You may be interested in this information if you have any sites hosted by Dreamhost. This is from an official communication from the web host. This email is regarding a potential security concern related to your 'xxxxxxxxxxxx' FTP account. We have detected what appears to be the exploit of a number ... http://metabestblogwin.com/2007/06/05/major-dreamhost-security-breach/ Shaun Crowly from A List Apart put together an interesting article about writing headlines that points to one of my biggest personal pet peeves: headlines that sound like advertising copy. The same things that catch the readers' eyes and encourage people to read an article are what I find annoying. ... http://metabestblogwin.com/2007/06/04/always-use-these-ideas-when-writing-post-titles-maybe/ As you may or may not know, my personal finance weblog turned two years old on May 1st. In celebration of this momentous event (and in hopes of generating a bit of a buzz) I decided to host a giveaway. While it hasn't yet run it's course, things are shaping ... http://metabestblogwin.com/2007/05/07/five-tips-for-running-a-successful-online-giveaway/ Over the past month I've made a few miscellaneous screenshots with the intention of writing larger articles about what they demonstrate. I haven't found the time. Instead, I'll post them here, for a lark. The first three are Digg-related. I've been fortunate to have four posts reach the front page ... http://metabestblogwin.com/2007/04/23/a-look-at-the-digg-effect-in-action/