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Drama of the Textual Aesthetic and the New York Times

If you haven’t visited the New York Times Opinion Pages online lately, you’re missing one of the truly dramatic textual aesthetic events in a generation.  As you can see in this screenshot below of a Frank Rich article published on Saturday — the fonts, and the complete look of the Opinion Page are crisp, precise and beautiful and look just like the printed page you buy on the street or pick up from your front doorstep — and that magnificent spectacle didn’t happen on accident.

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WordPress.com is a DMCA Safe Harbor for Blog Publishers

There are moments when, as the publisher of the 13-blog strong — Boles Blogs Network here on WordPress.com — I find something on the web that instantly sickens my stomach with anger.  Yesterday was an example of that sort of “Immediate Internet Illness.”  I read an alarming article from Wired.com’s Threat Level concerning Righthaven — a “Copyright Troll” — and their purposeful, chilling, delight in making money by filing lawsuits against, what amounts to, fair use and freedom of speech by bloggers and online forums.

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Is It Spam or an Interesting Comment?

Spam is getting sneakier by the day!  If you run a blog — and if you care about publishing only cogent comments — you probably already know precisely the problem I am addressing today.

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When Freshly Pressed is Sponsored Stale

When WordPress.com first introduced the Freshly Pressed concept, I was quite excited. Here was an opportunity to learn about blogs about which I was unaware — with 50 million blogs being counted in 2006 and nearly 200,000 new ones being made every day, it’s impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff without some kind of assistance. According to Joy Victory, the Editorial Czar at WordPress, it is not too difficult to get your WordPress blog featured on the Freshly Pressed page.

Each post that makes it to Freshly Pressed contains original content created by the WordPress user. Bad stuff includes (but isn’t limited to) plagiarism, hate speech, fear-mongering, adult/mature content, improperly used images that belong to someone else, spam or content that is primarily advertorial.

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Windows Live WordPress Spaces: Is Microsoft Buying Automattic?

Yesterday, it was announced that 30 million Windows Live Spaces blogs were being moved over to WordPress.com as Microsoft gives up the ghost of their free blogging space to Automattic.

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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