For the past couple of weeks, I had noticed that most of the Google ads appearing on the home page of my site were for credit card offers, credit repair services, credit-no-matter-how-much-your-credit-sucks offers, and so on … and I was puzzled about why ads of that type kept appearing. Since the ads are supposed to be contextual, it didn’t seem like any of my posts supported them — especially when I would look at other pages and the ads did seem to reflect my post content very accurately.

I was doing some general cleanup on the site on Friday evening, and ran the site through an RSS feed validator to see how it fared. That’s when I saw errors referencing hundreds of links that I didn’t recognize. It didn’t take me long to track the links to my WordPress header.php file, where I found this:

Click the picture to see it full-sized. It’s obvious to me now that Google was generating ads for my site based on this content. There were, in all, about 600 such links at the very end of header.php. I didn’t put them there, and I don’t know anything about the two sites you can see repeated throughout these links (nor did I try to find out). I removed the 600 lines of code from the header.php file, but on Saturday discovered that several hundred others had been added, referencing two different sites but similar content. In both cases, the blocks of code were surround by <font> tags that caused the text to be hidden.

If you want to see if this has happened to you, bring up your site and select View/Page Source if you’re using Firefox, or View/Source if you’re using Internet Explorer. In my case, the spam links always appeared at the end of the source listing, but you might want to page through the entire listing since I suppose they could appear anywhere.

After the second occurrence, I changed my WordPress admin password as well as my hosting login password. So far it hasn’t occurred again, but I can see that this is yet something I’ll have to keep an eye on. If I figure out how it actually happens, I’ll certainly share it here.

Leanne Wildermuth of Artist By Nature has written about the same thing, and it was from Leanne that I learned that the source of the problem was header.php:

Got Spam in YOUR Templates?

For now, I’ve also removed most of the ads from my site, except those for Amazon.com. I may not put them back….

I’ve made a few site updates and learned some things in the process, so it seemed like a bit of sharing was in order.

First, you’ll now see "Print this" at the top of each article. The print capability is made possible by the WP-Print WordPress plugin developed by Lester Chan. It does a really nice job of formatting posts for printing, and has three configuration options that let you choose whether or not to include comments, images, and a list of all links referenced in the article. I looked at several other options before choosing this one, and I’m very satisfied with it. I use it personally when I’m writing a new article based on some previous content, since I find it easier to work from a printed version — especially in the case of some of my longer articles. If you’re a WordPress blogger and you want to provide your readers with print options, check out Chan’s plugin page  where there are several versions you can download.

Second, I’ve changed content in the far right side for my Flickr photos, so that you can now choose to view the photographs as slideshows like you could before, or can also view the related Flickr page as a complete collection. It occurred to me that some folks might not care for the slideshows, so this was a good way to link to the photo pages by collection rather than always defaulting to slideshows.

Finally, as my friend Audee notes in her comment on my article about Zoo Atlanta, I’m now sending my site through FeedBurner and have incorporated various "feed flares" at the bottom of each article. You can also now subscribe to my feed by e-mail, and subscribe to posts and comments. I’m still experimenting with some of the flares as well as the advertising, so different elements may come and go as I check out some of the sites I’m now encouraging people to submit my articles to.

I did discover, unfortunately, that there is a known issue using FeedBurner with Yahoo! web hosting. Attempts to use my old feed URL, which was:

http://www.afewgoodpens.com/blog/feed

should automatically redirect to the new FeedBurner URL:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/afewgoodpens

but it doesn’t, and displays a "document has moved" error which points to the old feed URL (going nowhere, therefore). As you can see from the description of the problem on the FeedBurner forum, there is no solution available yet. I found that this meant two things for my site.

First, if anyone was subscribing to my feed with the original URL, it would no longer work. If you’re one of my subscribers, and that happened to you … my apologies. Had I realized this was happening, I would have posted something announcing the change first.

Second, my account on services like MyBlogLog and Blogcatalog needed to be updated. MyBlogLog uses the feed URL to fetch new posts to display on its site, so I had to update my account to point to the FeedBurner URL. Easy.

Blogcatalog, however, uses RSS autodiscovery to locate a site’s feed, and that was a bit of a problem since autodiscovery tried to use the old feed URL — which should have redirected to FeedBurner but did not. I don’t really understand how all this works, but I’ve concluded that the WordPress code normally handles the redirect, yet something about Yahoo’s hosting prevents that from working normally. I ended out adapting the RSS autodiscovery tips  and modifying WordPress’s header.php file with the FeedBurner URL hardcoded. Hardcoding like this is never the best solution, but it will hold me up until a permanent fix becomes available.  In any case, it appears to have worked; my account page on Blogcatalog was reporting an error finding my feed, but has since updated to show a successful discovery and also shows the FeedBurner URL as the feed URL.

Got a headache yet? I do … this stuff never seems to just fall into place quite right, does it?

I’m a little disappointed that this is another quirk I’ve run into that’s specific to Yahoo! web hosting and their WordPress implementation. While I have to be fair and say that I’ve never had a problem with my site or its availability at Yahoo!, site performance and availability is but a minimum requirement for a web host these days. In my opinion, Yahoo! oversold their hosting service to newbie WordPress bloggers like myself by making it so easily available, by implying that they would update the WordPress installation but never doing it, and by nearly running from the room screaming if you call their  support line and even use "WordPress" in a sentence. They could have a kick-ass blog hosting service, if they’d just make an effort to actually support WordPress users — something that might even make then unique in the industry. Are you listening, Yahoo!? Call me, let’s talk about it….

Oh, well, enough about that … the weekend’s here and Atlanta weather is supposed to be sunny with temperatures in the 60s … what could be better than that?

… well, not programming exactly;  we (meaning: I) have spent way too much time on that today as it is. However, I have gotten the load time on the home page of this site way, way down … from about 16-18 seconds to a pretty consistent four or five. Considering that there’s still a lot of content here, that’s pretty good. I might as well confess that the main thing that motivated me to do this was that I was getting annoyed accessing my own site, which is a pretty strong indicator that my visitors might have felt that way too.

So navigating here is a little different now. The Newsgator blogroll and news headlines are each on their own separate pages: My Blogroll and My News, and there are navigation links from the header and from both sidebars — plenty of places for you to click to get there and take a look at the work of some very fine bloggers. My Blogroll links will take you directly to site home pages; My News shows excerpts from some of the most recent articles in each category, all with links you can click to read more. If you’re interested in links or news only from a particular category, see the “My Blogroll” and “My News” listings in the sidebar, from which you can go directly to that category.  You can use your browser’s back button or click the category heading to return to the home page.

More on this later perhaps, but I should mention that belonging to the BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog communities is introducing me to a whole lot of new and extremely good blogs and fascinating people that I probably wouldn’t have found otherwise — but I’ve not yet added them all to my Newsgator feeds so they don’t show up on the new pages. I think I’m still trying to figure out the best way to pull all these resources together in one place (or a few tied-together places); or at least, trying to figure out the best way to spend my time between newsreaders, blogging communities, social networks, stumblingupons, diggs, twitters, and a few other things. Still, I’m comfortable with the idea of just jumping into all these activities and sorting out the priorities as I go along. If you’re reading this, and you’re a blogger, and you haven’t joined BlogCatalog or MyBlogLog, please do so, and let’s connect.

A couple of lessons I learned from this last set of tweaks:

(1) if you’re an Amazon associate and are including Amazon links in your site like I am, watch out for the “Product Reviews” script. The script is new (I think) and provides a small window with product and review information when you mouse over an Amazon text link. It’s very nice, actually, I liked the way it looked and the images and info it provided — but I removed it from my site after numerous tests showed it was adding as much as three or four seconds to the page’s load time. Your experience may certainly vary, but I would experiment with that script before using it.

(2) If you’re modifying your WordPress templates …well,  don’t even think about changing anything until you’ve made a copy of the files you’re planning to change. I’ve always been obsessive about saving work-in-progress with tools like word processing and spreadsheet software, but for some reason haven’t been doing that with files like sidebar.php. Believe me, ignore this advice and just one time accidentally paste something on top of thirty lines of code and realize it just as it’s too late to stop yourself from pressing the save button … and you’ll wish you had that copy! It’s great to have nice, clean home pages … but not so great when they’re nice and clean because most of the content isn’t showing… yipes!

I’m going to be making a few changes to the home page of this site over the next day or so, so apologies in advance to anyone who stops by and notices some wonky behavior. I plan to move the Blogroll and My News sections out of the sidebars and to their own pages, with various links from the main page, to improve load times. Right now it takes as much as 16 seconds for the entire page to load on a DSL connection — which is way too long. I expected that would probably happen when I embedded the Newsgator blogroll and headlines scripts to begin with, but I wanted to watch it for a while and see how things went.

Here’s a nice article with some tips on speeding up your load time, where I learned about Numion’s Stopwatch tool — a nifty utility that can show you how long it takes to load any web page.  Another one I came across does a in-depth diagnosis of your page and displays optimization suggestions; it’s the Web Page Analyzer.

It was interesting to try the tools with several browsers, and see the performance variations. Firefox consistently came in as the slowest — by four to six seconds, sometimes more. Internet Explore was next, and Opera — which I just started using on occasion a couple of weeks ago — was the fastest by far, loading my main page nearly 50% faster than Firefox.  Firefox still rocks, though.

Stay tuned….

I’ve made an additional update to this site, adding headlines from my Newsgator Online feeds to the sidebar at the far right. Adding headlines is quite easy, and builds on the procedure I described in my article Creating a Semi-Automatic Newsgator Blogroll on Your WordPress Blog.

Instead of selecting the “Blogroll” function for the locations you have created in Newsgator Online, you select “Headlines.” On the Headline settings screen, you activate the headlines script with a click for “Check here to enable Headlines settings for this location.” You can then specify the number of posts to be displayed by the headline script and the maximum number of characters for each headline. I currently have mine set for 7 headlines per location, with 50 characters each, which I may tweak a little for appearance or clarity. Note that you can also alter the layout of the headlines by removing or rearranging individual elements, such as the date and time.

This will probably be the last significant change to the layout of my site for a while, since — as I mentioned here – my classes begin again in a few days, and I’ll want to shift my focus to writing content related to that experience rather than spending time on technical changes. But I did want to send out a little credit and thanks, once again, to Lorelle VanFossen: the idea of adding options for readers to leave my site while still following my interests came from a comment she made on Dawud Miracle’s article Why You Want To Link To Other Blogs. Lorelle wrote:

I love the fact that blogging is the only industry in which you get more readers by sending them away from your business…. If they like what they find when you send them away, they come back for more, and bring their friends.

Incredible. We’re changing the whole concept of marketing.

This observation has stuck with me since I read it, especially because I’m so fascinated by the ways in which blogging, social networking, and technological change in general are affecting individuals and their lives, opening up significant opportunities to pursue their passions in ways that were not available a few short decades ago. In addition to changing the whole concept of marketing, every time a blog writer posts a new article or opens another part of their life to their readers, they’re contributing to the radical cultural and social changes we’re all living in right now … and adding this new out-links to my site is my way of going along for the ride.

I’ve updated the blogroll on this site to display home pages from my Newsgator Online feeds, instead of using the blogroll link functions available with WordPress. Nearly all of the websites or blogs I visit regularly have RSS feeds, so they make good candidates for my blogroll. I originally thought I could just embed the OPML file Newsgator can create in one of my sidebars to include the feeds; but that method doesn’t provide any folder organization or structure: it simply displays every feed in alphabetical order. It also makes excluding feeds a little complicated, because they have to be manually removed from the OPML file. And adding new feeds means recreating the OPML file and updating the sidebar — something I wanted to avoid, since I’m a bit (!!) of a feed junkie.

The method I came up with takes advantage of the ability to create custom feed “locations” in Newsgator. Individual feeds can be associated with any (and multiple) locations, and Newsgator provides a script that, once embedded in a WordPress file, displays all the links associated with that location.

Here’s how my feeds are organized in Newsgator. As you can see, I have numerous folders, each with multiple feeds.

I created a separate Newsgator location for each folder, then associated that folder’s feeds with the location. It may sound a little complicated, but it’s really not, and offers several conveniences for maintaining the blogroll that make it worth setting up.

Below are the steps you can follow to do the same thing. In this example, I’m creating a blogroll for the feeds listed in the “Science and Nature” Newsgator folder.

1. Select “Settings” on the Newsgator Online menu bar.

2. Select the “Edit Locations” tab.

3. Scroll to the bottom of the display and enter the name you want to assign to this location in the “Create location” box. (I use “Blogroll” plus the folder names for the location names; but since there is no technical relationship between the folder and location names, you can call them anything you want.) After typing in a name, press “Add.”

4. Scroll down to the location you just created. On the left of the screen, you will see “New subscriptions will be automatically added to this location. Click to change.” Click the underlined text then scroll back down to the location if necessary. You will now see “New subscriptions will NOT be automatically added to this location.” Changing this option ensures that feeds aren’t associated with the blogroll whenever you subscribe to a new one.

5. Select “Feeds” and then select “Uncheck all” on the Edit Location display. Then scroll around and select the feeds you want to associate with this location. Finally, scroll to the bottom of the display and select “Update”.

6. When Edit Locations reappears, scroll to your new location again, and select “Blogroll”. Click the check box to the left of “Click here to enable Blogroll settings for this location.”

7. In the box toward the bottom of the screen, you will see this:

   <a href=”$xmlurl$” target=”_blank”>$title$</a><br/>

   “$xmlrul$” directs the script to the RSS link for the feeds. Change it to “$link$” so that the generated links point to the feeds’ websites (home pages) rather than the RSS links. It should look like this after you make your changes:

   <a href=”$link$” target=”_blank”>$title$</a><br/>

   You can also format the links by making changes to this line of code. By default, a single blank line (<br/>) will be inserted after the link when it appears on your blogroll. In my case, it was more appropriate to format the links as list elements, with the <li> and </li> tags, like this:

   <li><a href=”$link$” target=”_blank”>$title$</a></li>

   Once you’ve made the changes you want, scroll down and select “Save Changes.” Scroll back to the location, once again select “Blogroll” and leave the window or tab open for now.

8. In a new browser window or tab, log on to your WordPress blog, select the Presentation tab, then the Theme Editor tab. Select the theme file where you will want the blogroll to appear from the files on the right; in my case, I updated sidebar.php so the blogroll appears in the column next to my posts.

9. Scroll to the area where you will want the blogroll to be displayed, and insert the following four lines of code (line three is a blank line):

   <h2><?php_ e(’Science and Nature’); ?></h2>
   <ul>

   </ul>

   “Science and Nature” will be formatted with the heading level 2 style because of the <h2> and </h2> tags.

10. Return to the Newsgator tab or window you left open earlier, and copy the script to the blank link in the code above.  The result will look like this:

    <h2><?php_ e(’Science and Nature’); ?></h2>
    <ul>
    <script src=http://services.newsgator.com/
    ngws/Blogroll.aspx?uid=nnnnnn&mid=##></script>
    </ul>

    (Note that “nnnnnn” will contain your Newsgator subscriber number, and “##” will contain a number associated with the location.)

    Select “Update File” to update your WordPress file.

Display your site, and the feeds associated with the location you created in Newsgator will now show under the heading you specified above (in my case, “Science and Nature”). All of the headings and links in my blogroll were created by following this procedure.

Any time you unsubscribe from a Newsgator feed, the link will no longer appear in your blogroll. If you move a feed to another folder and want that reflected in your blogroll, you will need to clear the check box for the feed in the old location and check it in the new location (which is still less work than updating links in WordPress). Similarly, to add a new feed to your blogroll (since you deselected automatic addition of new subscriptions), follow the same procedure: access the location where you want it to appear, and click the checkbox.

A few site updates and some housekeeping notes….

I’ve added the social bookmarking button available from the Add This! site to each post.

I’ve also added a Mybloglog “Recent Readers” widget to the sidebar. I’m not entirely sure what to do with Mybloglog yet, but I’ll catch on soon enough. My posts are now appearing there, and I’ve also set up a profile.

In addition, I think I’ve come up with a way to replace my sidebar Blogroll with my Newsgator feeds. Actually Newsgator already lets users generate a script containing their feeds, but it doesn’t take the folder/feed structure into account; it simply creates a list of links. From what I see in Newsgator’s support forums, there have been requests for this feature, but it doesn’t exist yet. I should be able to pull it off anyway with some creative cobbling, and may try it over the weekend. If you happen to stop by, the site should be fine, but the Blogroll may be unstable at times.

Finally, following David Airey and his list of Top 5 Essential WordPress Plugins, I attempted to install a feature I’ve seen on several sites and liked a lot. It’s the Subscribe to Comments plugin, by which anyone leaving a comment can elect to be notified by e-mail when additional comments are posted to the same topic. Unfortunately, activating the plugin causes this WordPress database error for me:

WordPress database error: [Access denied for user to database ‘blog’]
ALTER TABLE wp_comments ADD COLUMN comment_subscribe enum(’Y',’N')

I take this to mean (and a few searches around the Internet seems to confirm) that the way I’m set up with my web host doesn’t allow me to alter the structure of the WordPress database via this plugin. So, while I like the function a lot and I think it’s a fine plugin, I’m not so sure I should even inquire about changing whatever needs to be changed to make this update possible.

I have to admit this sort of thing frustrates me a bit, and reminds me of a recent article from Lorelle on Wordpress, Bloggers Are Not Webmasters and Webmasters Are Not Bloggers. While I have enough passable HTML knowledge that I’ve been able to modify this site’s various templates and can even poke at the PHP code a bit to make it do my bidding, I’m way over my head when issues surface that have to do with MySQL or the WordPress database. I’m pretty fearless and fairly patient about trying different things and learning from what works and doesn’t work, but I have no context within which to translate a database error and correct it. Lorelle’s article is a good reminder that even though I might find a solution to the problem with additional research and some phone calls to my web host, that’s not how I should be spending my time. So … I’ll give some thought to what I wanted to accomplish by installing the plugin, and take a look at alternatives, whether they’re plugins or something else.