The Matthias Chronicles

Tuesday, August 19, 2008, 3:20 AM

Sprucing up things a bit

by Mar Matthias Darin

As can be seen, I have been making several changes on my blog today. One of the first thing I did is get rid of some junk that was slowing it down. I may be getting rid of some more crap as well as time continues.

I also consolidated my style sheets to improve speed. I augmented my page load timer in the left panel to hundredths of a second. I also implemented one of my favorite effects... The first letter of each paragraph is slightly larger then the rest of the paragraph. I think it adds a little elegance to the blog.

Now for my most dramatic change... My EntreCard visitors section underwent a major overhaul. I have nice colors and now every EntreCarder that drops on this site will have their page rank lookup and listed next to their link. In order to send a clear message to spammers, I have decided to not follow unranked sites.

I don't particularly like doing this, but I'm getting fed up with these pathetic lame moronic drug happy spammers that think they'll slip something in. It ain't happening!

I review every comment before it gets posted. Sadly, this applies to EntreCard as well. It too has its share of spammers. This will hopefully kill them off as well.

Let me know what you think of the changes...

Comments from Karen Zemek

I like your blog changes, not too sure exactly what PR means (my pnn blog is ranked 3 but my two blogspot blogs are not rated and I can't figure out why.

Comments from Lea

I agree. Spam commenters are quite irritating. I too moderate comments on my site. I also use the Defensio plugin for wordpress. I still get the spam...but its diverted for easy deletion.

Comments from Julia

Wow, you put pretty much effort in sthis site and it looks great! though it's a bit sad to see other people's PR and know that I'm far away from it ^^

Anyway, spam seems to become a bigger problem for a lot of people I recently read alot about it on other blogs, too. Hope you manage to deal with it and if you use their IDs let me know hat happend :D

Greets Julia

Comments from carol

Matthias, My blog isn't page ranked. I guess I am not big enough to be spammed so I don't have experience with what you are taking about.

If I understand page rank correctly your decision will hurt little blogs like mine.

I will still be reading you daily on my e-card rounds.

Comments from Mar Matthias Darin

Thank you. I'm glad its looking better.

Karen: PR means Page Rank and is specific to Google.

Lea: I'm thinking of a little humiliation for the spammer since I also record the IP address that does the spamming. Maybe its time I had a little chat with their ISP...

Julia: You'll see it here when I drop the ax on those sleazy scum sucking spammers. Hmmm... Maybe its time for another off the wall wild and extreme rant???

carol: Not as much as you might think. This is going to be weird and hard to say, but the blog owner is their own worst enemy. You can raise or lower your page rank but I can not. Its all in the choices of which links get followed.

If you link to a page with no rank, you inherit part of their rank. The same holds true with links that have a page rank greater then or equal to your own as well. Other factors still apply, but this is the quick and dirty over-simplified defination.

Lets assume your blog has a page rank (PR) of 1. On your page, you have 5 links. Link-1 has a PR of 1, Link-2 has a PR of 3, link-3 has a PR of 0, Link-4 has a PR of 7, and finally, Link-5 is unranked or has a PR of -1.

The average is 2. Now Google take 25% of the average or .50 and adds that to your PR. Unranked site are subtraced after the average is computed, not during computation, so a rank of 2 plus a -1 leaves a page rank of 1 (your new page rank for linking to an unranked site, or better put: Google penality).

Google does not count sites that link to you, only sites you link to in the page rank calculations. If your page rank falls below 0, you become unranked or get put into Google Hell, the secondary database.

Also, bare in mind, I can not control who drops on me, so my decision only effects my EntreCard drop list in my right panel, not comments. My comments are always followed because I hand screen each and every one of them...

Hope that helps.