Gnorb.NET

Newsflash: The term driving the most traffic to my blog over the last few days is the term “Elita Loresca Pics.”

Yes, you read that right. The mere mention of Channel 7 weather babe hottie bunny person Elita Loresca (sorry for the objectification) has aparently brought an influx of traffic to Gnorb.NET the likes of which I’d never before seen. (Ok, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. A bit. It’s really not that far from the truth.) The weird part is that she’s never actually been the main feature of on a post.

Never, that is, until now.

(A quick search on the Gnorb.NET will display the total number of posts Loresca’s been mentioned in. Currently that’s 2, not counting this blatant attempt at boosting my rankings within the search engines.)

If you’re wondering how I found out where my traffic is coming from you need to check out MyBlogLog, a site which offers free a Web traffic analyzer (as well as one for $25/year, for all you lazy bloggers). After a quick look at where my traffic was coming from, it was painfully obvious that a good chunk of it — up to 25% of it — was coming from people looking for pictures of Elita Loresca. Most of these were from Yahoo Search. After a quick search on both Google and Yahoo, I found out that I’m ranked pretty highly for both that term and Funky truck 4wd. (Too bad I can’t have the Funky Truck 4WD game on my site; I’d rather not be sending all those visitors off.)

Now, I know The Wife’s going to kill me for doing this, but if pictures of Elita Loresca is what my audience wants, then it’s pictures of her they’ll get. I’ve posted here a number of pictures from around the Net of Mrs Loresca. If that’s what you’re looking for, then by golly here ya go. If you’re not looking for this, then you can safely ignore this post.

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It’s not often I (read: never) write about my job here, but I’m asking for advice, should anyone be so kind as to share.

I’m currently working with a software development company. This company is considering implementing a business blog for a number purposes including marketing (not as in SEM or SEO, but to a group of clients who would frequent our site); news, opinion and information regarding our industry; creating a system of online help and a knowledge-base for both clients and developers; and as an aide to the current development cycle. I’ve been put in charge of putting together a presentation for a group of decision makers in which I seek to present why a blog would be a good solution to some of our needs. If any reader has worked at a company using blogs for business, I’d be very interested in hearing about your experiences with it.

The angle I’m planning to work from is that of an ‘internal company blog’ where our clients are actually a part of our company, a part of our development process, and a part of the decision making process in regards to new features. The blog would also be used to add a personal side to the company where company heads could share their thoughts on our industry, and where developers could create an online-help/knowledge-base for both our clients and themselves.

I’ve done a good amount of research, but I’d be interested in hearing some of your stories, the good, the bad, and the ugly. How has business blogging helped your business, if at all?

(FYI, Yes, I just made up that word.)

Whenever there’s a comment posted on this site, the system shoots out an email telling me there’s a new comment or trackback in “X” story. A few weeks after starting this site, I started getting replies to stories (from what I figured to be spam-bots) talking about online cas1n0s, p0r-no-graphny, and all manner of vile online-behavior. (I’ve masked the names so they don’t get picked up by web spiders.) the messages would have some text advertising their site and about 3 links (including a link in the name) back to their site.**

That was about the time I put the breaks on and decided “no comments containing links will get on this site without my approval.” For a long time, this worked out fine. Recently, however, I started getting trackback notices. (Trackbacks are used by blogs and other sites basically as a link exchange for certain stories.) That was cool, or so I thought. I started getting tons of them, all the time.

This got seriously annoying.

The trackback would contain the title text in the “Comments” section and — of course — a link back to their site with a specified name. (Most of these URLs were from Russia.) This wasn’t really bothersome until this weekend, when I got a TON of comment e-mails in my inbox. Either the Russians were suddenly VERY interested in my site, or some link whore wanted to boost their gambling site’s PR.

I deleted all the trackbacks and have therefore instituted a new comment policy: nothing gets posted without my prior approval. Luckily, this site’s small enough that I can do that without much hassle. Sorry if this causes any inconvenience.

** A quick Search Engine Optimization Lesson
Search engines determine how important a site is for both a given term and in general by calculating how many links there are to that site from other sites and what those links say. For example, if you were to link to Gnorb.NET from your site, and you did it with text that said A humor filled look at married life, Florida, open source technology and God, then search engines would pick up that link as a vote for me in two ways: first to determine how importat my site is overall (this is called the PageRank, but it’s really only applicable to Google), and how relevant my site is to the terms in the link. If you were to look for “Florida” in a search engine, and if there are enough links to my site with the tag “Florida”, then my site would come up near the top for relevancy of what you’re looking for. The formula also takes page content into context, but links tend to be more heavily relied upon for site relevancy and importance.

What these sites are attmpting to do is to put links to their on my site by putting comments on my site. These comments contain multiple links — with their chosen key words — to their site, making it seem as if I’m “voting” for them in the search engines. The biggest problem from that is that whenever I cast a vote for another site by linking to it, I essentially give that site some of my accumulated PageRank. In essence, these sites are trying to steal from me in order to boost their own rankings.

I was just at C|Net’s News.com.com.com and ran into this headline: Microsoft Meets the Hackers. It talks about a “Blue Hat” conference MS just recently had with — uhmm — hackers friendly towards the new “Big Blue”, I guess. Here’s a snippet:

The demo was part of an extraordinary two days in which outsiders were invited into the heart of the Windows empire for the express purpose of exploiting flaws in Microsoft computing systems. The event, which Microsoft has not publicized, was dubbed “Blue Hat”–a reference to the widely known “Black Hat” security conference, tweaked to reflect Microsoft’s corporate color.

While it’s nice to see that MS is finally starting to become somewhat cool by opening itself up — just a little bit — to the public, I’m starting to get annoyed with all the [Color] Hat names which have been started to get associated with Hackers. Up to now, here’s what I’ve seen:

White Hat — Ethical hackers
Gray Hat — A hacker (or cracker) who’ll hack a system in order to bring its flaws to the attention of its makers.
Black Hat — A cracker who’ll hack a system with malicious intent.
Red Hat — Either a Linux company or communist free (as in speech) software loving hackers.
Blue Hat — Hackers sympathetic to Microsoft.

(”One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish…)

I’m starting to feel like I’m reading an altered version of Dragonlance. Why don’t the hackers come out and say what this hat color coding trully is: a character alignment a la Dungeons and Dragons. I mean, c’mon people! Why not just come out and say whether you’re Lawful Good, True Neutral, or Chaotic Evil (or any of the points in between),and just get over the fact that you use a strange mix of D&D, Star Wars, and television commercials to invent this entire hacker-lingo? Who are you trying to fool, your imaginary girlfriend? Heck, I’ll bet it was one of these hackers that came up with that stupid color coded system for the terror threat level. Seriously, is it ever going to hit “green”?

Sheesh.

Anyway, I’ll stop here. I just drove in from Tampa and I’m ready to hit the sack.

Just took a look at Gnorb.NET with the Links Web Browser. Not bad. Looks really good, really organized. I’m not the one to take credit for that, however. When I first installed bBlog and decided on this theme, I picked it because (1) it looked good, and (2) it used CSS based layout as opposed to tables (good for SEO). It may be that this is by design, or it may be a wonderful serendipity, but either way, I can now rest assured that people looking for content and not fluff will be able to view this site without much problem.

(For the record, I like to use text-only browsers when I’m looking to just read and not have to worry about graphical content, or large, annoying, overpowering ads. Text-based browsers are much faster than graphical Web browsers. For you who are still using 56K modems, you might want to consider the text-only option. And you can rest comfortably knowing that Gnorb.NET looks good in text.)

Also, on something completely different, I decided to rip off a bit of this site’s graphical design for a small project I was working on> I’ve been doing some volunteer work for WorkForce One here in South Florida, helping them design a simple newsletter. It was a simple little thing, nothing big or complicated, and likely will be revamped very soon. You can see it here. It doesn’t use table-less design, but likely will soon, especially since it looks so good with browsers and email clients that represent the contents as text.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m reading Dan Shafer’s HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS. Great book, and one I highly recommend that Web designers (and wannabe designers) read. I’ll probably start posting some of my project online, so watch out for that.