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Evaluating Lost Blog Readers: Ten Million vs. One Million

We reached the One Million — 1,000,000 — reader/hits/visitors milestone for the first time (again!) here on BolesBlogs.com since we became the consolidated Boles Blogs a year and five days ago.

Reaching a million of anything is an accomplishment and a joy, but it also forces you to reflect on what was and where you once stood as you wonder if you’d stayed the course and kept a finite focus, readership would likely be over Ten Million — 10,000,000 — reader/hits/visitors today instead of just a million.

In November 2007, when we were only the Urban Semiotic blog — we were close to smashing the one million mark — and we did just that a few weeks later!  It’s hard to imagine how many millions of readers we’d have tallied by now if we’d stayed a single blog.

Continue reading → Evaluating Lost Blog Readers: Ten Million vs. One Million

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The pair Networks Virtual Private Server Review

All of my non-blog websites, and all my Boles Blogs Network images, are hosted on my private server.  Over the years, I’ve bounced around from webhost to webhost searching for the right fit.  In the past, I’ve tried LunarPages and Media Temple and Mosso (now rackspace CloudServers) found all of them lacking.  Then I happened upon pair Networks — located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — and I finally found the right webhost for me; I’ve been a proud, paying, pair Networks customer for over three years.

Continue reading → The pair Networks Virtual Private Server Review

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Vindication in Their Death: Six Apart Goes Six Feet Under

Mena Trott dropped the other shoe just now as she announced Six Apart is dead, and gone, and Six Feet Under.  I printed out her blog post and I’m dancing on it as Six Apart’s non-virtual, paper, grave:  We Are Vindicated in their Death!

Continue reading → Vindication in Their Death: Six Apart Goes Six Feet Under

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Dead Search Returns: Caught Between a WordPress.com Rock and a Google Hard Place

UPDATE :  September 6, 2010
At noontime Eastern, I heard from Naoko again and she confirmed robots.txt has been upgraded site-wide on WordPress.com!

I had to change the privacy settings on all my blogs — and then back again to “public” — to force the new robots.txt file to update.  The plan worked.

All 13 public blogs are now set and updated and ready for Google and the rest of the indexed search world to remove our proprietary Movable Type search results.

Here’s a screenshot of the new robots.txt file disallowing the “/cgi-bin/” directory.  I highlighted the new addition:

Yay, WordPress.com!

THANK YOU from prying us from the rock!

UPDATE:
The moment I published this article today at 12:24pm Easter time, I followed up with WordPress.com support and gave them the link to this article in an attempt to better explain — with screenshots — the problem I was trying to solve.

At 2:12pm — less than two hours after I wrote to WordPress.com — Naoko replied:

Hi there,

I was waiting for this to actually go live, but a change has been made in our code.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Will be added to robots.txt (not visible yet, I need to check back with the developer).

Fantastic news!  That solves my proprietary Movable type search results problem across all 13 of my public WordPress.com blogs!  Here is my reply:

Hi Naoko!

Oh, that’s great news!  Is this change on a per-blog basis, or is it site wide?

If it’s side wide, are there plans to include robots.txt proprietary search disallows for the other blogging services?

I will update my article to reflect the information you provide.

Thanks!

Best,

db

I will keep you updated!

I don’t see the “/cgi-bin/” disallow yet on any of my blogs in robots.txt, but the moment it goes live, I will go back to Webmaster Tools and specifically ask that the “/cgi-bin/” directory be removed now and forever from all my blogs.

As well, because of this robots.txt disallow addition, I will now be able to effectively venture into Yahoo! and Bing to see if I can get the same directory deleted in those services for all my blogs.

Thank you WordPress.com Gods!

ORIGINAL ARTICLE:
I recently discovered a terrible Movable Type artifact that still remains festering and alive within me — via Google Search Returns — six months after I became a Six Apart refugee and gave up my expensive, self-hosted, standalone, blog hosting and returned to my first blogging home: WordPress.com.  You can see an example of the problem below in the third search return in the screenshot.  That “Memeingful: Search Results” link takes you to a proprietary Movable Type search return that has been dead for six months.  Click on that link, and you’ll be taken to a “Not Found” error page on WordPress.com.

Continue reading → Dead Search Returns: Caught Between a WordPress.com Rock and a Google Hard Place

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The Second Sign as Six Apart Comes Apart: Vox Bellyflops

We’ve been on Six Apart Death Watch for six months now, and yesterday, the Second Sign appeared that 6A are slowly clambering their way down into a Death Spiral from which they shall likely never recover.

Continue reading → The Second Sign as Six Apart Comes Apart: Vox Bellyflops

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Why the Boles Blog Network Moved From Movable Type Back to WordPress

Two years ago this Urban Semiotic blog was hosted right here on WordPress.com.  Then, we moved this blog first to Media Temple and then to Pair Networks on the — we were soon to learn — unwieldy Movable Type blogging platform from Six Apart.  Matt Mullenweg sent me a kind private note to wish us well on our departure for Movable Type.  This article details our Movable Type hoary road and the bright path we beat back to WordPress.

Continue reading → Why the Boles Blog Network Moved From Movable Type Back to WordPress

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The Movable Type 4.3 Review

18 months ago, we made the blog publishing switch from WordPress.com to Movable Type. Once we were only Urban Semiotic and now we publish 11 blogs under the Boles Blogs Network banner and nine of those blogs are published with Movable Type. Yesterday, we upgraded our Movable Type installation to version 4.3 and the first thing we noticed was the expanded options for signing in to comment on all our blogs. You can now use your Google account to comment as well as Hatena, Yahoo! JAPAN and livedoor. We’ve already seen a spike in user comments across the blogs network because of this expanded opportunity to sign in and verify your identity.

Continue reading → The Movable Type 4.3 Review