04 Jun 2006

Redirect to www

History / Edit / PDF / EPUB / BIB / 1 min read (~88 words)
apache .htaccess rewriterule

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^your-domain-here\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.your-domain-here.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

This code placed in your .htaccess will give you the possibility to send any visitor coming to your-domain-here.com to www.your-domain-here.com. This has a great advantage especially with search engines because all your pages will be referenced under the same "subdomain" as if you had both, you'd get www.your-domain-here.com links and your-domain-here.com links which would count as different pages.

Well, it took me some time until I realise that this cool slider bar option as something negative about it: it hides contains from search engines spiders.

Using AJAX coding, the only one who can trigger the request to the server are the users, a bot wouldn't be able to read any content except the one that's appearing on the front page.

Is this going to kill my chances of getting spidered?
Actually yes. As the top navigation (the ­­Older and Newer links) are also programmed to trigger javascript, the spider cannot go anywhere. When it reads a # link, it just stays on the same page, no new content for the bot to read.

The thing though is that the spider can still view your list of latest post which are static. When they go to theses pages, nothing is in AJAX format, the links are all going to another post so it's fine. The only impact the slider has is it removes a bit of power from your front page.

09 May 2006

Bump online people threads to the top

History / Edit / PDF / EPUB / BIB / 2 min read (~270 words)
forum

Have you ever been on a forum waiting for people to reply to your threads? Do you find it frustrating to have to bump your own threads so you can get the response you're looking for? If yes, then you might want to look at this concept idea:

When you are online, varying from 5-10 of your "latest" post would be bumped to the top automatically as your are online. This would increase the chances of getting a reply to your messages. As well all know though, forums are being browsed by thousand of people so bumping all those threads all at once would be useless & cpu consuming that's why instead of bumping all of our threads, we would be able to bump 5 chosen thread each time we are online.

Doing so will help your own forum to grow as members who are online longer have better chances of getting replies and then to reply so more posts. The problem with current forums is that threads which aren't always done end up not being answered. Why not make sure all threads are getting the reply they should get? When a user is satisfied with the answer, he can remove the thread from his list => yes, this means we could ask for others people thread to get replied to.

Yet, this is only an idea. I'm sure that forums such as vBulletin and Invision Power Board will find this thread and will add it to their next release as people are avid of answers. By giving them a better opportunity to get their answer, community grows, people are happy, everyone's happy :).