I have checked a number blogs earlier and found out that most of them don’t care of the permalinks issue. If you’ll notice, wordpress permalink by default shows a question mark and numbers in it, obviously not search engine friendly. You can customize this by going to Dashboard > Settings > Permalinks section of your wordpress powered blog. You’ll see five options there for your permalink:

• Default – http://www.kontrapelo.com/?p=123
• Day and name – http://www.kontrapelo.com/2008/09/12/sample-post/
• Month and name – http://www.kontrapelo.com/2008/09/sample-post/
• Numeric – http://www.kontrapelo.com/archives/123
• Custom Structure – you can create your own here

Of all the choices, I usually prefer making it custom that don’t include the postdate. Why? Well, here’s the idea:

url #1: kontrapelo.com/2008/09/12/wordpress-seo
url #2: kontrapelo.com/wordpress-seo

The first url above tells Google that “2008/09/12″ is more important than “wordpress-seo” as it is placed first. Placing the “date” first before your “name” structure pushes your keywords away. This is the best permalink structure for me but if you’re working a way to have your article featured in Google news which requires a 3-digit included in your url, it’s a no-no. If your wordpress blog already has 100 posts prior to targetting appearance in Google news, then something like “name/id” will do. If the blog is new, then work your way to have a 3-digit number in it. You can play around with the “year/month/date” placing it after the “name” structure.

In addition, I’ve read an article before (can’t remember where) saying Matt Cutts mentioned in WordCamp 2007 in San Francisco that the best permalink structure you can use is just the post title with hyphens.

Well, to make it simple, the whole idea here is to take a domain like http://kontrapelo.com and redirect it to http://www.kontrapelo.com consolidating all incoming links to a single domain, wether they use “www” or not.

Here’s a simple mod_rewrite rule you can add to .htaccess to accomplish this, put it above any other rewrite rules that you are using, you may want the other rules to apply to the www. domain after the initial redirect.

note: replace the sample domain with your own domain.
RewriteEngine on

#Redirect http://kontrapelo.com to http://www.kontrapelo.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^kontrapelo.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.kontrapelo.com/$1 [r=301,L]

If you’re about to promote your video, find existing videos in youtube similar to your niche which already has tons of views or those uploaded by users who are really getting good traffic via their uploaded videos, then copy their tags to the video you’re uploading.

The logic is that whenever their video is watched, your video will appear in their related videos in the sidebar which will give you lot more possible views.

Here’s more promo codes that I’ve collected:
OYH3 – $3 off / $6.95 any .COM (renewals too… just used it)
BTPS7 – 20% any order of $50 or more
OYH1 – 10% off whatever
OYH2 – $5 off a $30 purchase
BTPS4 – 10% off anything
chill1 – 10% off
chill2 – $5 off $30
chill3 – $6.95 .coms
hash1 – 10% off
hash2 – $5 off $30
hash3 – $6.95 .com registration
gdd1101c – 10% off any order of $40 or more

You can use these codes upon checking out in Godaddy, just paste them in the promo code box and hit update cart, you’ll notice the changing of prices.

I hope you’ll save a lot from this list too…

*a promo code may change without prior notice. When it happen, just try using other codes in the list

Excerpt from the Google Analytics help center:

Benchmarking is an optional Google Analytics service that shows how your website’s statistics compare against other industry verticals. In the beta version of this service, you are able to compare your site’s Visits, Pageviews, Pages per Visit, Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site, and New Visits data against benchmark data from categories of other participating websites. You can use this data to gain broader context for your site so you can identify additional opportunities to improve your site’s metrics.

To enable this:

1. Log into your account. You’ll see the yellow data sharing settings box on the Analytics Settings page. Click the “More data sharing options” link within the yellow box.
2. Select the second checkbox to specify that you want to share your data “Anonymously with Google products and the benchmarking service”. You can also choose to share your data “With Google products only” to take advantage of advanced Google advertising products and services as they become available.

See screenshots I have taken:

XML is short for Extensible Markup Language made to transport structured data across different systems and platforms.

I remember an article from W3C pointing out the following things:

• XML is for structuring data
• XML looks a bit like HTML
• XML is text, but isn’t meant to be read
• XML is verbose by design
• XML is a family of technologies
• XML is new, but not that new
• XML leads HTML to XHTML
• XML is modular
• XML is the basis for RDF and the Semantic Web
• XML is license-free, platform-independent and well-supported

This supports the explanation that xml was created to manage uses of structured data in the web. RSS is a good example of a modified xml format which carries headlines and contents of your blog.

Also note that xml is not replacing html, it is for describing the data and its structure while the latter focuses on how data looks.

Here are some screenshots:

1. Screenshot of articleyard.com, a directory that I own. You can see that the guy who went to my admin panel even left me a message, how sweet…

2. Screenshot of 63s.org, owned by Philip Tiangson. I went to his admin panel, took a screenshot and showed it to him. I didn’t do anything that will harm his feelings so nothing to worry guys, he didn’t kick me afterwards..

So to make everything short, there is really a hole into the article dashboard script. And as the script is widely used by hundreds or even thousands of webmasters, this is something huge if the hack will spread. Someone asked me on how to do it saying that every article dashboard user should know it so they can protect their sites but I didn’t gave it thinking that it might fell into wrong hands so what I’ll just do is to give tips on how to protect your site.

If you’re using a cpanel, here’s a quick tutorial:

1. On the homepage of your admin panel, click the password protect directories button
2. Navigate to the directory that you want to protect
3. Click on the tick box next to the icon
4. Optional, enter the name that you want to appear in the protected resource name.
5. Then click on the save button.
6. Finally, add an authorize user to enable access to the directory.

I have done this to article directories that I own, and it works perfectly against the recent exploit. Hope this will help others too..