Poking around the intersection of KM and Social Media
I love the iPod. It’s single-minded simplicity. The beauty of it’s design. It is without a doubt the very best portable MP3 device available. So when I was thinking of a great prize for a promotion at BigBlueBall, the iPod was a perfect choice. Yes, BigBlueBall.com is going to be giving away a custom-engraved, blue iPod Mini to one lucky member. I’m going to be posting the details on the site in the next week, but for now, you can drool over this teaser.
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” Or so the saying goes. I like that philosophy, but in conflicts with my inate desire to push the envelope. And so two of my websites running vBulletin are due for an update. GetGamer.com and BigBlueBall.com are both currently running vBulletin 3.06 — and it’s time to upgrade to 3.5.
For anything but a plain-vanilla installation of vBulletin, the upgrade process is a PITA. The myriad of template modifications on both sites need to be reverted and reintegrated. Every add-on needs to be reinstalled… assuming a compatible upgrade is even available.
vBulletin 3.5 integrates a few nice enhancements for members, such as AJAX-enabled quick replies and Skype integration. But the real benefit comes on the management and administration side. Moderating is much easier with the new AJAX enhancements, and future upgrades will theoretically be easier with the new plug-in system.
The good news is that vBulletin 3.5 does work. I’ve got test copies of both forums currently running. Next step is to complete all the template modifications, then test the required add-ons and switch everything over. If all goes well, GetGamer should be up-and-running on vBulletin 3.5 this weekend, and BigBlueBall next weekend.
The theme for the final Photo Friday of 2005 is, most appropriately, the Best of 2005. For that, I chose this shot of Venus d’Arles at the Louvre.
Recently I wrote about BigBlueBall slipping in search results. In that article I mentioned how I was using the robots.txt file to restrict what Google’s spider would index. Then it occurred to me — could canonical issues also trigger a duplicate content penalty?
A little explanation is in order for the uninitiated. Canonical issues, in this context, refer to www.bigblueball.com and bigblueball.com (no www.) both referring to the same page. People are smart enough to figure out that they are one and the same and not really duplicate content, but a search engine cannot make that assumption. Why? Because they could actually point to different content.
So what can you do? I did a little search, and found a great resource on doing 301 redirects. Basically it involves using the .htaccess file (assuming you’re running on an Apache web server) with the following code:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]
If the search engine tries to access the site without the “www.” it gets a 301 error telling it to permanently redirect to the new URL (with www.), thus eliminating any possibility of a duplicate content penalty (for that, at least). This also ensures that any non-www links people have made to the site will continute to work just fine.
Oh, and for an update on search relevance. In my original post I mentioned that searching on “msn messenger” BigBlueBall was listed in the 318th position. I’m happy to report that it’s moved up to 189. Still not great, but better.
Nicole on the Windows Live Messenger team posted news of Windows Live Messenger beta invites being auctioned on eBay. The WLM team even has a pool to see how high the bid price for an invite will go. Of course, I’m still giving away WLM invites for free, although it’s a long, slow process. To date, I’ve only been given 13 invites to share (and yes, they’ve already been given out).
You can argue the ethics of auctioning off an invite to beta test a product that Microsoft will give away for free, but early Gmail users will remember a similar phenomenon when Google begain testing their email service.
We’ve all heard the “moderation in all things” credo extolled by Horace. Letters from the Global Province brings us the counterpoint: the virtue of excess.
“Moderation is a fatal thing… nothing succeeds like excess.” – Oscar Wilde
Moderation may be safe, but moderation is never the cornerstone of revolution or innovation.
Hope you’ve had a good holiday. I’ve been enjoying my family, pretending to watch football and more or less catching my breath after a busy year. As I was thinking about the past year, I wondered which of the articles on my blog were the most popular. So here are the Top 10 articles from 2005:
Looking over these posts you catch a glimpse at what matters to me. Stuff that catches my attention. Tools that are worth sharing. I hope you’ll follow along in 2006, sharing your views and ideas as well.