Insert the post title in your “read more” tag easily

Watching twitter today, i came across a tweet from Kikolani. Now i’ve been following her for quite some time getting valuable feedback and post ideas. Today’s tweet was about a post on TechJaws called “The Biggest Mistakes in SEO” which i found interesting. As always i have my agrees and disagrees but still it was a nice read. One of the author’s points was ““Click Here” or “Read More” Link Anchor Text“. Here is what he suggests:

Many people use “Clíck here” or “Learn more” as the linking text. This is great if you want to be ranked high for “Click Here”. [...] It’s much more descriptive (and relevant) to say “learn more about {keyword topic}”

I see the point on this and i agree. Besides, the info has already been retrieved from the database so no more extra load is going down. It’s not only SEO friendly, it’s reader friendly as well. That’s what’s most important. On the comments, Kikolani said she hadn’t figured out how to do it. I thought that many non techy people out there might find it hard, as well. So, here is how i did it! (notice it on the read more following)

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Interview with Peter the “Sire”

His real name is “Peter” but i can bet very few know him by that name. To all of us out on the blogosphere he is very well known as the “Sire“. Either ways he is the one to stick around for all of us, even when our post frequency drops or we need help. His exceptional taste of humor and his unique Aussie talk, is what makes him stand out of the crowd. He has been very frequent on my blog and generally, he has been a big part of my online life. So, i was really happy and proud to get his interview. He owns quite a few blogs, and if you haven’t already i would suggest you go out and meet him.

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Writing a simple web crawler in Perl

A few weeks back i posted on why our mailboxes are full of spam. I mentioned there that i had created a small and very simple perl script to crawl the internet and fish for plain text emails. It was a pretty easy task since Perl is designed for being easy on text manipulation.

The procedure i used was as follows:

1. I had a MySQL database for storing links to visit and emails.
2. I connected to the database.
3. Selected a link to visit.
4. Make sure it’s not an image / pdf / google page / amazon page. If so i jumped back on step 3.
5. Download the page.
6. Pattern match for emails.
7. Get the links within the page.
8. Insert emails and new links on the database.
9. Back to step 3.

This is roughly the idea. You can see below a small flowchart to get the general idea.

I would like to demonstrate how it’s done with perl. In order for you to run it, i’d suggest you have a machine with Perl installed (preferably Linux). If you don’t have Linux then you probably have to download a perl binary for Windows. Check out this page for furhter info.

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Should you be concerned about your WordPress security?

Since my early days, i’ve always been the one to second guess what the majority of people think. I’ve always been the “pain”, you know where. When i hear most of the people saying “this is bad”, or “this is not right”, there always is a denial feeling jumping out. Over the past few days i’ve stumbled across many articles about how WordPress is not that secure and, many have suggested that it’s even easy to hack a WordPress. I have had some serious thoughts about this and today, through a blog post from Sire, i stumbled across an article titled “How to Stop Your WordPress Blog Getting Hacked“. It lays out the subject very seriously, but as always, i have serious objections. I will take the points one by one.

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Interview with Tracy O’Connor

Here i am, once more, with one more interesting interview. This time, i had the chance and opportunity to interview Tracy O’Connor from IHateMyMessageBoard. I’ve known Tracy for not that long and we have had some nice time tweeting. She writes interesting posts over to her blog and she’s a valuable friend and follower. Since she is a mom and a blogger, i found it very interesting to get to know more about her. Moreover, lately, she had a post of her’s finding it’s way to Gizmodo and a huge traffic spike taking down her site. This is interesting on it’s own, since that kind of attention, most of the times, means a new big blog being born! Naturally, i asked about it as well. She was very kind to answer a few questions of mine and this interview is very fun to read indeed. So, without further due, here it goes!

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