Then came the ATOM format, followed by RSS, and finally I could visit one location, check all the updates and click-thru to read further if I wanted to. Brilliant invention!

Next, RSS Readers moved to the cloud and now thanks to products like Google Reader, I can check my RSS feeds on any device that I have with me. It could never have been better for webmasters and readers! The webmasters/editors could see what kind of loyal readership they possessed, which gave them some increase of power over the advertisers to command more money. The readers were happy because they could pick and choose the articles they wanted to read and not have to check every website individually. What more could someone ask for?

It turns out that people wanted to discuss articles and information online. And thanks to the rise of social media, like never before this could happen in a very convienent way – even if the website did not have a commenting system in place. And I think this where the whole “RSS is Dead” chant is stemming from. The whole reason people wanted to keep updated on their favourite websites was to get information quickly and easily from a source that was trustworthy. Since they could not often speak directly to the webmaster or editor, they had to rely on the information being pushed to them. Now though, people can ‘follow’ and ‘like’ individual people or brands, and pull information from them whenever they like, rather than waiting for a blog post announcement.

And that is my attempt to explain and boost the dead arguement.

The New Use for RSS (post Social Media)

So here is why I think RSS is not going to die, but rather just be used in a different way. And it actually follows on nicely from my previous point. The above paragraphs come from my own personal experience online in relation to how I stay current. The really important people/sites/businesses I care most about – I follow extremely closely on social networks because I get to build the relationship and receive near instant responses to my queries.

There is, however, another set of feeds that have replaced those that were lost in my Reader, and the funny thing it is also relates to social media. This new group of feeds purely exists in there to provide fuel for my personal social media strategy. I read a whole bunch in order for me to share the information with those in my personal, online and business circles. I feel obligated to do so, because I get so much from others and I want to pay forward more good articles.

And I know I can do the same thing by getting my news and information straight from a Twitter/LinkedIn feed, I think I can add more value if I am the original source of the share – rather than just see me with a Twitter page full of RTs from other people. Plus the fact there is a little bit of ego involved in being the first to share something awesome, I am not going to lie to you.

And there is no way I could fulfil the above actions without having RSS. So webmasters/bloggers and businesses – do not listen to the mob that is constantly proclaiming doom and gloom, and help us share you information and grow our own reputation and your readership.

The catalyst for this post came from Google themselves yesterday. I received an email from Google Alerts (I completely forgot that I had them setup for this website) saying that it had something new in it’s index from this website. The new URL it had discovered was the post just before this one about successful hobby blogs. Why this particular alert caught my interest is that this was not the first post of my blog reactivation – that happened a few posts (and about a week) before.

So I got to thinking that maybe Google might have noticed the jump in new content on this website and for one reason or another I have stepped through some kind of filter/trigger that allows my website to be taken a little bit more seriously.

So I fired up my terminal and grabbed the server access log for this domain to see if there has been any changes. The good news is I had logs starting from about Nov 2011, so I had a good data set to analyse and see if there had been any noticeable increases in crawling (note the word used).

I ran a little Python script to make the whole process go a little faster with some extremely basic logic. What I didn’t count on (and I have no idea as to why it went like this) was that the timestamp data for the last couple of weeks (from the beginning of April until now), were not in chronological order. I am going to check with my server guy for some ideas as to why this happened, but it is extremely unusual behaviour. I overcame this setback with some manual changes to get it right, as opposed to building some logic around these edge cases. I will be keeping an eye on this and hope to come have some answers for you at a later date. Or better still – if you know why, please leave me a comment or email me and I will share it with everyone.

Anyway I have attached the graph for the requests, and as you can see over the period, there was not much of a difference in the amount of crawling requests by GoogleBot to warrant the Google Alert to come through.

Graph of GoogleBot Requests

What this tells me is that there is not a direct correlation between crawling and indexing. So whilst Google does go around crawling URLs with its spider, the frequency of your crawling does not speed up your change of getting pages into the index. As a point of reference, my other recent posts before were definitely crawled even though I never got an alert.

Now from the top of my head, I do not know from what index Google sends out their alerts from, but I am guessing it’s close to the primary/secondary level rather than something older.

I know from speaking to bloggers as well that blogger rhythm is often said to be much more important than the amount of content that gets generated. I am subscribing to this theory as well from here on in and I will update in a month or so about whether or not crawling/indexing behaviour has changed due to my “rhythm.”

How you can use this information for your SEO strategy?

Simple.

1. Setup Google alerts for your domain (not keywords), using a query such as inurl:bentortora.com
2. Grab your crawl logs and grep them for GoogleBot requests
3. Record all the new/updated pages/urls on your website for the same period as your log files
4. Record the date you received a Google Alert for the created/updated page
5. Compare with when it was crawled
6. Figure out the pattern of crawl rates and content releases to make sure that you release on a day that Google will visit
7. Figure out average time difference between crawl and index, that way you can give some rough timelines to clients/managers on turn around times for your SEO campaign.
8. Take the opportunity to clean up a lot of dud requests coming into the server (for instance – I noticed Google spending some time in my javascript folder and requesting those scripts – I don’t need it there at all.

So I hope everyone took something away from this and I am extremely unwell today so please forgive the bad writing. I should give this post a re-edit when feeling better (I will also fix up my python script and release it too).

Why this article appealed to me is because most days I offer advice to many companies about blogging, content generation, content distribution and analysis of the content’s performance. One of the main contributing factors to the success of all the advice is that the implementation workload is spread across a team of people.

However, after a full day of consulting, pitching and analysing – the last thing that I really want to do when I get home is fire up the Macbook Air and repeat this all over again, by myself, when I haven’t even caught the night’s rerun of Seinfeld.

And that is why all my hobby blogs (including this one – I’m classifying it as a hobby at the moment) have failed. There is no other word for it.

So I was pretty excited about seeing the video from Matthew Cerrone about how he was so dedicated to stick out his hobby and make it his day job. Whilst I was watching it, I flagged what he has done correctly, contrasting it to my wrong choices:

1. He picked a subject he loved – One of my biggest failures was a mortgage website, started primarily because I knew the returns from affiliates was so awesome. Bad move.
2. Dedication – I am not sure how much time he spent in the early days when he was holding down a day job, but the fact that after work he was willing to regularly clock some minutes on it has motivated me to be consistent here.
3. Focus – One blog, not 5 (I kid you not, I was trying to maintain 5 blogs and a day job for a while. Stupidity.
4. Courage – To realise you are on a good thing like he did and take the risk to shift the entire focus to the project is definitely something I have lacked. I guess it is the conservativeness inside of me that prevents true success from blogging full-time.

So the take away for this post is quite simple: I am more motivated than ever to make this blog (BenTortora.com) my primary focus and to make it a success more than any other attempt at blogging before. And I feel I owe it to myself since this website, more so than any other, carries my own name.

And since it’s the time when I go to update my personal website with a few of the things that I have done in the last 4 months (trust me it has been a crazy Q1), I discovered this unfinished thought/post that had been sitting in my drafts for longer than I want to reveal.

It comes from the fact that I have always loved the combination of products and the service. Magazines, CDs, and vinyl records made up 50% of my budget when I was a teenager and I still have kept many of the ones that I really was excited to purchase. And I don’t just mean the local news agent or JB store. I am talking the specialist ones from Newtown to the city where the complete experience existed along with the love of the products.

And I feel that the elements that make up that tangible experience: the smell, the sound, and the interaction with those that loved the same things I do, is unfortunately disappearing.

Those of us that work online everyday are punishing ourselves trying to replicate the above experience on the Internet. This is the truly impossible dream (much like owning your own home in Sydney), because the medium of a machine and the interface of a screen and an input is not even close to how your naturally purchase.

What online does really well is information and convenience – not experience. I don’t even think about buying something now without asking my social network and researching (I don’t want to use the G verb) online anymore – because I know that that channel is gives me what I need to go to the next step.

And I am willing to put up making 50 clicks and stepping through some awful, clunky and unintuitive UIs to get the large bulky stuff delivered straight to my door.

For those 2 major benefits though, I miss quite a lot. I don’t get personal friendly service, I don’t get the chance to build a relationship and get the benefits of a joke or a flirt in exchange for another 5% off. I don’t get to go for a coffee after and enjoy the day and gloat to my friends about my amazing purchase. And I am most definitely not remembered by anyone in the website – I am just another blob of data and an order to process.

Would you rather an algorithm and some SQL queries tell you about the latest news or product releases, or someone who becomes a mate down at the local store who calls you personally and knows you well enough to determine whether or not something is right for you?

This isn’t a memorial tribute to bricks and mortar stores. Nor am I calling for a massive change in how online stores operate.

What I am yearning for someone to do with traditional retail experience, is to give me something when I walk into your store that I cannot get online: good, old-fashioned customer service

Just wanted to give a quick thanks to Grill’d @ Surry Hills for the awesome service. Asked if I bought something would they give me access to the wifi, and he said it isn’t the policy to stop all the uni students mooching free Internet.

However it is currently Friday @ 6pm.

And I am very charming…

So he gave me VIP access to the Wi-Fi! #winning

So now I will be a customer for life at this particular Grill’d and just going that extra mile for a customer made my awesome day even more awesome!

Thanks guys!

Well we both did some research and found some really interesting links and information on how to run multinational, multilingual websites. We will share our thoughts here for all so others can learn from what we discovered because finding good information was harder than we first thought.

Taking a Website Multinational

We won’t go into the required technologies and code required to replicate a website across countries, because that is beyond the scope of this post. We assume you have your platform sorted in this case and just want to know about how you need to modify templates and URL structures.

Get the Right Top Level Domain(TLD)

The first thing you need to do is to make sure you have bought all the country specific domain names for your organisation. In a perfect case scenario you would go for a URL that was character for character identical. For example, Mike had made sure he bought www.gradconnection.co.uk and not www.grad-connection.co.uk (the character change is a notable difference in the eyes of search engines).

Pick a Default Language to Display

Even if your new market speaks multiple languages in the same country, your website needs to default to one in particular. This becomes a business decision and should be done on what is best for the users in the region. For example, in Hong Kong, the vast majority of websites default to English and not Cantonese.

Meta Geo-Location Data Tags Mean Nothing

In the footer I have referenced links from Google’s Webmaster Blog that state that meta geo-location tags do not help identify a website with a particular country. So don’t waste your time.

Setting up a MultiLingual Website

This is where things get really tricky, so take notes, there is a lot of work to do here.

The HTML lang Attribute

One thing that was discovered during our research is that the HTML attribute is fairly important in multilanguage website. So for example:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">

means that this page is being served in the English language.

So when it comes to serving the same website in multiple languages, each and every page needs to have the correct attribute value in place so search engines and search readers know what to do with the words on the page. HTML lang attribute – remember it!.

How do you know what the right value for the attribute is? After searching high and low, we found this link that provides all the language identifies (RFC 3006). Have a search through that page and find the relevant code to serve in the markup of your page.

How you flip the attribute value in your template files is completely up to you, talk to your developers and explain the importance of having it there.

Language Context & Grammar Need to be Correct

Running your website through Google Translate is not an effective or sensible multilingual strategy. If you do not want your website being tripped as being spam, your only option is to get it hand translated. Period.

On a different Google Webmaster Blog post (referenced in the footer), they even recommend all boilerplate text, template buttons, navigation, etc be translated. Not only will this benefit your users, but it will also add to the authenticity and trust-factor of your web site.

Always use UTF-8 Encoding

This is simple fix, make sure the following piece of HTML appears in all your templates (note: there is different markup for HTML5 and the previous HTML standards):

HTML5

<meta charset="UTF-8" />

Previous Versions of HTML

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>

Every Page in Every Language Needs a Unique URL

The 2 options available to the development team are:

• Sub domains: So en.gradconnection.hk, zh.gradconnection.hk, etc
• Sub directories: So gradconnection.hk/en/, gradconnection.hk/zh/, etc

Once again this becomes a business decision, along with a chat with your developers. Sub domains might cause problems with mobile websites and other network setups. Whatever option you choose to go with, stick to it and implement the required URL routes.

Use Sessions to Set User Language Choice

Once a user arrives at your website and makes a conscience decision to switch the language, the best place to store that is in a session for the duration of the visit. If you want to remember that preference, store it in a cookie. Do not do server-side redirects based on IP location, browser settings, etc – Google doesn’t recommend it.

Also interesting fun fact we discovered: GoogleBot does not send any language data in its server request calls. So don’t try to get tricky with that either.

Same Language Linking

For maximum SEO impact, common sense as well as a couple of blog posts have mentioned that links that are pointing to a specific language page have the most impact when the link in marked up in the same language. So links coming from a Spanish website should have spanish words in the anchor text and point to the Spanish version of the page on the website, not the English version or the homepage.

Conclusion & References

So after implementing all of the above points, you are well on track to having a fully effective multinational and multilingual website. And if your platform can’t handle any of the above changes, then you might have to reconsider before you go worldwide.

If anyone else has some good recommendations about going international, please leave a note in the comments!

References

• Using Language Identifiers (RFC 3066)
• Styling using language attributes
• Unifying Content Under MultiLingual Templates
• SEO for MultiLanguage International Projects
• Working With Multi Regional Websites

Tasks I Needed to Dev

• Add custom theme settings to my WordPress Theme project – What I discovered here is that WordPress now has a WordPress Settings API over the last few versions and most themes/plugins are ridiculously out of date and not applying these new standards.
  • Using The Settings API: Part 1 – Create A Theme Options Page
  • Settings API « WordPress Codex
  • Localizing WordPress Themes and Plugins
• Setting up GIT repos – Something I have never religiously done is use a version control system, and I thought this is a better time than ever to do it properly. Was reading up on setting up and using GIT properly.
  • Top 10 Git Tutorials for Beginners
  • GIT Immersion
• Stepping through and fully understanding how the ZURB foundation framework operates and how to migrate some of my existing client templates to that framework. Result: 2 massive thumbs up!
  • Foundation Framework by Zurb
• Using the FatFree PHP framework for new projects, starting with my internal project management system. Loving it more than CodeIgniter at the moment, and spending time on the IRC channel to get help from the (small) community. Thanks for the help so far guys!
  • FatFree PHP Framework
• Setting up the WordPress Debugging/Testing plugins on my local development instance. I cannot believe I did not do this sooner! Great feedback on all the work.
  • Review Your WordPress Theme
  • WordPress Theme Test Environment Setup

That is about it for now. Whether or not that is 5hrs exactly I am not too sure, but it’s a rough guess.

If there is anything I missed out or you have better resources, share them in the comments and I will add them to my list (and give you props).

The latest film that I just watched was about Joel Bukiewicz of Cut Brooklyn, a writer come knife maker. He alluded to Malcom Gladwell’s premise stated in his book Outliers that success can be attributed to 10,000hrs on a particular skill.

And to see Joel working towards that and then go on to produce an amazing product before even completing the 10,000hrs has inspired me to do so with my programming. I have not focused on pure programming for a year or so, being focused on other areas.

But starting from tomorrow I will be documenting every hour of my coding experience until I get to 10,000. If anything else, it will provide a great story to my family and friends in the future.

So get ready for the first hour starting from tomorrow.

The fact that the software controls so much of the Internet’s content and distribution after 5 years is a massive credit to him and his team. I have a new found respect for the software.

But more importantly it is the decisions he has made toward the community and that is what I have think has caused the uptake in the installations and support for the software. He found his market, got the people behind the product, and let things progress from there.

And that brings us to his State of the Word 2011 presentation. I had not previously seen any of the other keynotes, but I was thoroughly impressed by this one. Definitely worth 40min of your time if you are a WordPress user or developer. I have embedded it here:

What Matt has motivated me to do

After watching this video I was definitely inspired to create something more than ever. To see someone create a piece of work he is so proud of and to have gained respect from a community and have it reflected in installations is something I would definitely love to be a part of.

I know it won’t happen over night, but I do know it will take hard work and the right idea to get off the ground. And starting later this year, hopefully I will be finishing a piece of web based software to be distributed, forked and improved by developers over the globe.

I have the vision and the ability, if only I could find the time…

• Block the requests from the domain/IP address via the htaccess file
• Filter them out of your Google Analytics reports

This morning I spent the last 40min blocking domains and IPs because I feel it is the best way to tackle it. Reasons being:

• Filtering dud traffic out of reports is the server request equivalent of out-of-sight-out-of-mind
• If you block it at domain level, you are covered if they change their IP address regularly or the domain changes hands and moves to another server.
• I like just serving 403 status codes to people – makes me feel tough

Sure it was time consuming and I will never win the war, but at least now both my server and my Google Analytics reports love me that little bit more.

If anyone knows of a tool where you feed it a list of referring URLs and grabs the IP and can tell if it is part of a spam/traffic-faking network can you please, please, please let me know in the comments!

Happy 403ing!