Submitted My Arma & Printmaking Blogs to Technorati

I submitted my Arma Blog to Technorati a month or so ago. Technorati is a blog directory that indexes and ranks blogs according to keywords, number of incoming links etc. I've got an overall Authority (what Technorati calls its ranking system) of 115. (Larger I believe is better.) My current profile for my Arma Sandbox.

Just for fun I added my Printmaking blog and Arma Twitter account. My twitter account has better Authority (124) than my blogs!

Not sure what the point of this is but its quite the game; I feel like going out and writing posts just to get my Authority up. If nothing its an objective benchmark and will encourage me to write. Especially my Printmaking blog, which isn't abandoned, it just looks that way.


My Technorati profile

Tynt Update

Back in June I had implemented Tynt on my Arma Blog. It worked quite well, keeping track of what pages people were copying text from. It showed me that people were actually finding my blog useful and were copying code examples for their own use. I liked it so much I installed Tynt on my Printmaking Blog as well.

I'm going to remove Tynt from my Arma blog now; its served its purpose. I'm going to keep it on my printmaking blog as Tynt  keeps track of image copies as well, something I'll want to know on an ongoing basis.

Why Google Is Still The Best Search Engine

About three months ago I submitted my Arma blog's sitexml to the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing). I had done this with the XML Sitemap Generator Plugin for WordPress.
Google indexed my site right away and it showed up in search results that day. Actually Google had already started to index my site but now I could see the results in Google's webmaster tools.

I signed up for Yahoo's Site explorer and Bing's Webmaster tools so I could verify that they had received my site submission. They had. And I waited for them to crawl and index my site. After a month I manually resubmitted my sitemap to Bing and Yahoo, as they had yet to crawl my site. Two more months pass and finally both Yahoo and Bing have indexed 2 of my pages - and those not even the oldest pages.

So three months to index two pages. And people wonder why Google is the search engine of choice.

Translating Web Pages.

For my Arma Blog I've noticed that a large number of people visiting my site are not from English speaking countries. Taken as a whole citizens of non-English countries are the bulk of the readers of the blog. (Thank you Google Analytics for tracking this info.) This is not surprising since OFP, ArmA and Arma II have always been more popular outside North America.

So I took a look around to see what my options were. I could pay someone to translate existing and future  pages into the dozen or so languages, but I'm making exactly $0 off my little hobby so this is not an option. I had been relying on people using Google's web page translation service if they were having problems reading my English. This assumes they know about it and want to go through the extra steps to translate the page they are interested in.
Looking at the available Wordpress translation plugins I went with Global Translator

1.  It only translates pages that readers have requested into the languages they require - nothing extraneous
2. If the required page has not previously been translated the plugin automatically sends the page to Google translate, caching the page for future use.
3. The plugin integrates with my existing Google XML Sitemaps, so any cached pages are automatically submitted to the search engines with my next XML sitemap update.

Pretty darn slick. Since I installed the plugin yesterday 31 pages have been translated, so people are finding this useful.

Caching my Wordpress Blog

Speeding up my Arma Wordpress Blog

Yesterday for my Arma Blog I installed a plug-in called WP-Cache that will generate static pages and cache them automatically. To quote the plug-in:

It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and then building the page from the database.

Currently google webmaster tools tells me that my average load time is 1,615 milliseconds, highest is 3,247 lowest is 514. These numbers are for the months of May, June and July.
I'll keep and eye on it for the next little while and see if it makes a difference, though visiting the blog it does feel like it loads faster. Could just be my imagination, so I'll wait for the numbers.

I Don't Understand Google Adsense

Image via Wikipedia

I thought I understood how it was supposed to work.

1. Google reads the content of your webpage to create keywords.
2. Advertisers bid on the keywords 
3. Appropriate ads are placed on the webpage.
4. Webpage owner paid when ads are clicked.

See it's #1 that doesn't appear to be working for me. Google keeps giving me ads based on my Arma blog's tittle "Sandbox".
If I was actually trying to make money off this blog I'd be upset, because no matter what I do Google is not serving me ads based on my content, keywords, blog categories, or meta tags. I've filtered my Adsense categories down to Video Games, Sexuality and Dating. Still I get ads for sandboxes. 
My next step is to use the Competitive Ad Filter and list every toy site that I notice popping up.

Building a Computer for Arma 2: Operation Arrowhead

I'm finally going to break down and build a computer so I can play Arma.

Image via Wikipedia

Building a Computer to Play Arma 2: Operation Arrowhead.
Just waiting for a price quote - so maybe by next Tue. I'll have something new?

Tynt

Trying something new on my Arma Blog: a free service from tynt.com
A bit of script, or in my case a plugin. Everytime someone copy pastes a chunk of text from my site the source url is automatically pasted as well. Not sure if it has any use, but a cool little thing as it has shown me that people are finding useful info from my site and pasting it elsewhere.

For example from July 13-16 2010 people cut and pasted 46 times from my site.