Some of the feed addresses in WordPress, namely wp-rss2.php, wp-rss.php and wp-rdf.php no longer work in these versions. The www.yourblog.com?feed=rss2 or www.yourblog.com/feed/ addresses still work. As Otto42 one of the WP Moderators writes:

The fix for this will be in 2.5.2.

And you should never have been using wp-rss2.php in the first place. The correct feed URL, for all WordPress blogs, is either ?feed=rss2 or /feed. It has been that way for all versions since 2.0. The wp-rss stuff is a left over from the old 1.5 days, over three years ago. We really should remove it, IMO.

BTW, if you are using non-default permalinks, then you can simply DELETE the wp-rss.php and wp-rss2.php file, and all your feed users will get redirected to the correct URL of /feed the next time they hit the site. Those got integrated into the permalinks, there’s no need to keep those files around anymore. This will fix it right now, no waiting around.

Of course this issue is a major problem if you are feeding one of these ‘legacy’ addresses into FeedBurner, as I was on this blog. Update that to yourblog.com/feed/ immediately. Deleting the problem files as Otto42 suggested didn’t work for me, returning a 404 “page not found”. Instead, I’ve updated my .htaccess file as follows to point everything to /feed/ and then onto my FeedBurner URL


# BEGIN Redirect Feeds
Redirect 301 /wp-rss2.php http://yourdomain.com/feed/
Redirect 301 /wp-rss.php http://yourdomain.com/feed/
Redirect 301 /wp-rdf.php http://yourdomain.com/feed/
Redirect 301 /feed/ http://your-feedburner-url/
# END Redirect Feeds


You could probably do the same job with the FeedSmith Plugin but you would still have ensure that you are not using a legacy feed URL as the source in FeedBurner.

Update 30/06/08

Grrr…just realised that updating the empty FeedBurner URL may have sent some of you some of the old posts your missed. Sorry about that, didn’t mean to flood you.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Feeds, WordPress

What are Google’s Safe Browsing Blacklists?

If Google detects malware or phishing attacks coming from your website they will put the URLs onto their blacklists and take steps to warn their users. They will place a message next to your results listing, an interstitial warning page when the user clicks the result and a pop-up alert if the Google Toolbar is installed. You can view examples of these warnings here..

This is a useful initiative to stop innocent users infecting their computers but being listed by Google in this way can have a serious effect on an online business. Users will be worried about the warnings shown to them and rankings/traffic can drop noticeably. The quicker you deal with this situation the better so early alerts are essential.

Introducing SERPGuard

SERPGuard is a Ruby on Rails project using the new Safe Browsing API that Google has helpfully made available. We built this application as part of our in-house client suite but decided to release it publicly.

Why would I use this tool?

Google has made their API available for exactly this kind of real-time reporting. Although they are already sending emails out from Webmaster Central you may want an additional checking mechanism. When it comes to something as serious as lost rankings, clicks or sales; you can never have enough alerts.

This tool will also be useful for webmasters who did not want to link up their entire portfolio within Google Webmaster Central. Our tool provides an independent and relatively anonymous way of checking all your sites in one place.

SERPGuard is RSS-powered. You will have a unique RSS feed which will update should any of your sites become infected. This gives you more choices in how to be alerted. One suggestion would be to create a new account at Twitter and feed the SERPGuard RSS stream to that account via Twitterfeed. Just follow that new account to receive instant updates by RSS or SMS to your mobile.

Technorati Tags: API, Google, Google Toolbar, malware, phishing, safe browsing

This new initiative will mean a complete redesign of the site. Under their current subscription model, only a small part of their content is published on the web. They intend to add editing tools and incentive programs to encourage expert contributors and users to contribute, expand and update the work. These contributions will be taken on board by the Britannica editing team and fact-checked before being added to the encyclopedia.

Encyclopaedia Britannica itself will continue to be edited according to the most rigorous standards and will bear the imprimatur “Britannica Checked” to distinguish it from material on the site for which Britannica editors are not responsible.

Should Wikipedia be worried?

This is a direct challenge to their authority in the niche but Wikipedia has a substantial userbase. Britannica has been quite clever though in allowing more direct attribution to the contributors. While Wikipedians are nameless outside the core community, Britannica authors will receive full honors and accreditation.

Readers and users will also be invited into an online community where they can work and publish at Britannica’s site under their own names. Interested users will be able to prepare articles, essays, and multimedia presentations on subjects in which they’re interested. Britannica will help them with research and publishing tools and by allowing them to easily use text and non-text material from Encyclopaedia Britannica in their work.

We will publish the final products on our site for the benefit of all readers, with all due attribution and credit to the people who created them. The authors will have the option of collaborating with others on their work, but each author will retain control of his or her own work.

These terms are bound to appeal to many of the academics and serious core contributors of Wikipedia. Moreover, as the works are controlled by the contributing author it may eliminate the fustration of having to continually defend your material from other editors.

Opening up to the masses will greatly increase the volume of the website, again reducing the available real estate on popular SERPs. With Google placing so much stock in authority sites, Britannica is bound to do well. However, it’s not all bad news, allowing UGC on an authority site usually presents an opportunity for online marketers.

Technorati Tags: Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Wikipedia

Dan Thies is one of the most experienced SEOs in the industry, so when he releases a post or e-book you’d be wise to pay attention. Dan has just completed his updates for his free e-book “SEO Fast Start 2008″ and posted it to his site. You can download it here

This e-book is an excellent course to new or intermediate SEOs. It takes you through an optimisation process or strategy for a website, which Dan terms “The SEO Fast Start System”. Each stage is explained in clear, understandable terms and covers everything from the ideal site structure and recommended directories to PageRank sculpting (third level push).

This e-book is compulsary reading for my staff (and myself) and I’m very grateful to Dan for releasing this information free of charge. New additions for the 2008 edition have been helpfully notated, so previous SEO Fast Start readers can quickly scan for this new material.

Download SEO Fast Start SEO e-Book (97 page PDF)

Technorati Tags: Dan Thies, e-book, PPC, SEM, SEO, SEO book, SEO e-book

Facebook vs MySpace Daily Page Views

Facebook vs. MySpace Daily Reach

Although Alexa figures have been never been truely representative, they are quite effective at showing trends. Even if this is not the correct traffic figures, the rapid upward trend of Facebook would suggest this is only a matter of time before they are No.1. Their successful headhunting of Google talent can only help.

Most commentators look at the user numbers to determine which social network platform is the most successful. The Times reported that Facebook’s audience grew by more than 270% to 52.2m users in the 12 months to June, while MySpace grew by 72% to 114.1m. In my opinion the important point here is the percentage of growth.

As Vanessa Fox pointed out for RSS feeds, subscription numbers do not indicate current usage. In the same way users can be subscribed to a feed but no longer read it, they may also have moved away from MySpace without closing their account.

The Alexa figures and the slow percentage growth may also point to a rising number of deflections from MySpace to Facebook. It should be worrying for investors that Facebook, which only opened it’s doors mid 2006 is now threatening the position of MySpace. A fact not gone unnoticed by Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. who bought the site in 2005 for $580m. He recently lamented that users were, “all going to Facebook”.

The market seems to agree that Facebook is destined for the top spot, valuing it at an astronomical $15billion. The big question though, is who is going to buy the platform? As DaveN points out, a purchase by Microsoft could give them significant user data for their age and gender targeting. It could also push Live.com back into the game for advertisers.

As a user, I’ve really enjoyed viewing the sites other friends in the industry have recommended. As an SEO I am also starting to see the benefit that this system can offer my clients by driving traffic to their pages. We now see 25-30% of referrals coming from the system.

However this got even better with the release of their new toolbar last month. The plugin gives users a visible ranking of the site in Google, Yahoo and Ask. If a friend in your network has recommended the site, their name will appear next to the result. You can download the plugin for IE or FF from the StumbeUpon site here.

So take last night, I was searching for online favicon makers and lo and behold, two of the results have been rated by my industry colleagues Barry Welford and Matt Keegan. Of course, you’re going to pick these first. Even without the direct recommendations of friends in my network, I’m still finding myself drawn to the sites that have recommendation stars from the SU community

This is social search in action. You don’t need to go to the social network to ask these recommendations, they will be built into the searches you do every day. I’m sure these ratings improve click through from the results. Not only because you are more likely to trust or value a site with a recommendation but fundamentally, because we’re lazy. As Jacob Neilson writes, basic laziness is a human characteristic that might even be survival-related (i.e. don’t exert yourself unless you have to). In any case, people like to get maximum benefit for minimum effort when searching for information.

Users follow the information scent. They will estimate a given hunt’s likelihood of success from the clues along the way. We look for these clues, even subconsciously, to help us choose the right path. You can see marketers put this theory into action for PPC conversion, they keep the advert text and landing page copy aligned to encourage the user to click on through. The trick is to keep giving signs that the user is on the right track for the information or service they want.

These ratings by StumblerUpon are one of these clues. They give us the impression that clicking this link will bring a positive result. That’s why our nature pushes us to chose these recommendations over the others and reason enough for me to give StumbleUpon my time.

If you want to join me on StumbleUpon, you’re more than welcome. My username is http://nickwilsdon.com.stumbleupon.com

We’ve recently been getting into Ruby & Rails here and so far it’s impressive. As you know, I’m not a programmer but from talking with the team they like the simplicity of the coding and the speed at which they can develop. Now more web hosts are supporting the language it seems a solid option for application development.

So grab a copy of this download and throw it at your developers, they will thank you for it in a few months. The RoR coding is so simple even I’m thinking of having a go at learning this, the support for XML and AJAX makes it ideal for SEO tools.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think Google have done some amazing things to advance the web, they have a lot of clever guys working for them. Doing PPC in Russia for these last 4 years has made me look on the sophistication of Adwords and WMC with a renewed sense of appreciation. The problem is they have been too successful. In many markets they have a dominating market share, in the UK for example they enjoy an 82% market lead according to the latest statistics from Hitwise.

While that position means they can freely push innovation and market direction, it also means they don’t have any checks and balances on what they do. Without the fear of competition they don’t have to worry about their customers too much. Equally the webmasters are locked into depending on one engine for their search traffic. That isn’t too healthy for web.

Depending on one search engine makes businesses more susceptible to changes there. Paid links or bad neighbourhoods – you name the latest threat. A few tweaks from Google can break a business and that is a sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of every webmaster.

The thing I really enjoy about the Russian market is that we still have three strong search engines. It makes online marketing more exciting and I really believe it gives webmasters more stability.

So my wish to the SEO genie would be to slip some market share to Yahoo!, MSN and Ask. Let’s get some competition back in the game.

To keep this going, I’m calling out the following people:

Jim Boykin at http://www.jimboykin.com
Chris Garrett at http://www.chrisg.com
John Andrews at http://www.johnon.com
Fantomaster at http://fantomaster.com/fantomNews
Digital Ghost http://speakingfreely.wordpress.com

* P.S. Sorry Matt, I couldn’t resist the call of photoshop. Heh ;)

IMNY Charity Party sponsored by Best of the Web

We are happy to welcome the attendees of the SMX Social Media Expo to New York with an Internet Marketers of New York Charity Party sponsored by Best of The Web. Simply donate $40 at the door to help the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society fight cancer and enjoy three hours of open bar partying with fellow social internet marketers. At the end of the night we will be raffling off prizes. Special thanks to Best of the Web for covering the cost of the party.

The party will be held on October 15th, 7-10pm. More Information can be found here

Hat tip to Marty

7 Grab content from the WP database (recent headlines, stories, etc… and display it on any page in the legacy site.

Unless you have a programmer on hand I can see some of you looking at this and wondering how it’s done. For this post, I’ll outline a couple of technical tips on achieving this with some basic HTML knowledge.

Note: The following techniques will only work if the Web 1.0. page you are running this on is also a .php page. Please backup any pages before trying these out. See the disclaimer.

1. Including the Header Link

When you copy over functionality, such as your latest blog posts you will need to also copy in the link to the wp-blog-header.php file in your WordPress installation directory. This “hooks up” the function to the WordPress core and allows it to work. As an example, lets take the post archives output:

<h2>Archives</h2>
<ul>
<?php wp_get_archives('type=monthly'); ?>
</ul>

So all we would have to do here is make sure that above this code we place a link to our copy of wp-blog-header.php:

<?php require($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/path-to/wp-blog-header.php"); ?>
<h2>Archives</h2>
<ul>
<?php wp_get_archives('type=monthly'); ?>
</ul>

What I have done here is tell my new page how to find the wp-blog-header.php file but writing in the path from root. You will have to change the code here for /path-to/ to reflect your setup. While you could replace $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] with the full path (i.e. on cpanel /home/username/public_html/) this method prevents you ever having to make code changes should you move servers.

2. Showing Your Latest Posts

Now this is the functionality we most often carry across to our old Web 1.0. sites. This will allow your users to read your latest news as well as providing some fresh front page links for the robots to follow, helping to rank these new articles faster.

I always recommend using the Customizable Post Listings Plugin by Coffee2code. The reason for this is that you can easily control the display of the posts, especially the character length of the post description. It is well worth reading Lorelle’s write up of the plugin to get an idea of what you can achieve.

As before, we would simply install the plugin and use one of their hooks plus our path to wp-blog-header.php

<?php require($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/path-to/wp-blog-header.php"); ?>
<h2>Recent News</h2>
<ul>
<? php c2c_get_recent_posts(10); ?>
</ul>

AHHH It’s broken my site!

OK, if you’re unlucky this can sometimes happen, and the reason you need to test your site extensively after copying across any WordPress functionality. In non-techie speak, this is because functions we call from WordPress conflict with ones you are already using in your current CMS. Not to worry though, there is still options you can use before calling in the programmers.

3. Magpie RSS Parser

In cases where I have wanted to show the latest posts but have had trouble with code clashes, the Magpie RSS parser often saves the day.

The first thing to do is to download the Magpie directory, unpack it and upload this to your web site. Put this into the root folder, and rename the whole folder ‘magpie’ to keep things simple (not magpierss-0.72 or similar).

Now we need to put some code on our Web 1.0. site to show the recent posts. There are many configuration options with Magpie and I would recommend joining the mailing list for support but this will start you off.

<?php
require_once($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/path-to/magpie/rss_fetch.inc");
$num_items = 3;
$rss = fetch_rss('http://www.my-wordpress-feed-address');
$items = array_slice($rss->items, 0, $num_items);
foreach ( $items as $item ) {
$href = $item['link'];
$title = $item['title'];
$desc = $item['description'];
$cat = $item['category'];
$date = date('M j\, Y', $item['date_timestamp']);
echo '<h4><a href="'.$href.'">'.$title.'</a></h4>';
echo '<p>'.$desc.'.<a href="'.$href.'">more</a></p>';
}
?>

Now to explain this code.

require_once($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/path-to/magpie/rss_fetch.inc");

Again, here we write in the path to the new magpie directory and the file rss_fetch.inc. If this was located in http://www.mydomain.com/magpie/rss_fetch.inc you would copy the line above, if your magpie directory is located elsewhere, adjust accordingly.

$num_items = 3;

Pretty self explanatory, here you put in the number of items on the RSS feed you want to show.

$rss = fetch_rss('http://www.my-wordpress-feed-address');

Here we put in the URL of the RSS feed we want to display. Usually this would be the posts feed but you can play around with the various options. Maybe you want to display your comments feed or just one category of WordPress. You can even use this method to display the RSS feeds from other social media the company is involved in, like Twitter or Flickr.

If you are using this code on an e-commerce web site, with SSL enabled then remember you should change the http to https, so that users are not sent warning messages when entering a secure area.

The rest of this code will display the post titles (as URLs) and the description. Now the one problem with Magpie is that there is no way to control the length of the description (AFAIK). This can be a problem as large descriptions can sometimes cause design issues when pressed for space on the page. As Magpie outputs the RSS content without altering it, you would need to make any adjustments on the WP blog itself. Some solutions for this are to enable excerpts in the RSS feed not full posts or creating custom size descriptions using the WordPress Excerpt Editor plugin

If you want to bypass the problem altogether, simply remove the lines for the description and just show the blog post titles:

<?php
require_once($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/path-to/magpie/rss_fetch.inc");
$num_items = 3;
$rss = fetch_rss('http://www.my-wordpress-feed-address');
$items = array_slice($rss->items, 0, $num_items);
foreach ( $items as $item ) {
$href = $item['link'];
$title = $item['title'];
$cat = $item['category'];
$date = date('M j\, Y', $item['date_timestamp']);
echo '<h4><a href="'.$href.'">'.$title.'</a></h4>';
}
?>

Anyway, sorry for the long and rather technical post but hopefully this will help with your Web 1.0. mashup creations. Good luck!