Posts by Dani

Huh?? Your IP isn't banned?

I didn't even know there were websites like that, limonzmm. Isn't there a standalone app called Twitter Adder or something like that? Then again, you can always grow the natural way ;)

Hey everyone,

As many of you might have heard, DaniWeb is currently working on opening up a new ecommerce store where we're going to be selling our swag ... tshirts, geek glasses, pens, silly putty, and soooo much more.

For a first taste of what's in store, we've partnered with a company called New Relic which offers web app monitoring software. If you deploy their software by next week, they'll send you a free DaniWeb shirt that says "I am a code ninja" on the front and has the DaniWeb logo across the back. It's just one of the many items we're going to start selling in the near future.

Check it out at http://bitly.com/daniwebshirt :)

Nofollow is an attribute added to links when you DO NOT vouch for the quality of the link (because it is an advertisement, or it is within user-generated content such as a commenting system where anyone can link to whatever they wish and you have no control over it).

Dofollow has turned into an industry term used to describe when links do not have the nofollow attribute.

Don't use nofollow when you vouch for links, such as linking to other pages within your site, or external links to quality sites you mean to link to. Use nofollow within blog commenting systems or for text-based advertisements.

The original concept is that supposedly links with the nofollow attribute don't pass PageRank, but I personally don't believe that.

You need a credit card. As vanessa suggests, I would start out with Google AdWords. It's powerful and can get complicated, but it also offers a starting point of only a penny a click, and new users get $50 free to start out with. Plus, it's pretty much the de facto standard as far as PPC is concerned, and so there's a lot of documentation and help out there for it.

Put your pages into a sitemap XML file and upload that sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.

The <em> tag appears italicized by default, and is meant to be used for emphasis on a word or phrase. The <strong> tag appears bold by default, and is meant to be used for strong emphasis on a word or phrase. Even though these tags appear italicized or bold by default, you can use CSS to change what they look like.

The <b> and <i> tags are meant to bold and italicize purely for visual appeal, and have been deprecated in favor of CSS.

Have good, high quality, compelling, unique content that people will naturally want to link to. Gain backlinks naturally. Have clean HTML code that makes proper use of CSS and JavaScript, and follows all the W3C best practices. Use social media and integrate Facebook and Twitter into your site to gain traffic from social networks. Oh, and Google Plus too :)

I don't understand how Davey is the only person who responded to this question referencing Star Trek.

That just gave me an idea. I can code an Advanced Search page that basically puts a nice GUI on top of those queries, so you don't need to know our URL structure.

Haha awesome! :)

Top ten in WHAT?! No one uses Google Plus since it came out. It has no advantages over Facebook / Twitter, and I think really is having a hard time finding its niche.

It's fine to be a late player to the game. Facebook came out when MySpace was on top. Google came out when MSN/Yahoo!/Ask were on top. The trick is not to enter the arena just for the sake of having a stake in the game. You really need that great unique idea, which Google Plus just doesn't have [yet].

Firstly, it's the last day of Q3, so it affords us the opportunity to do this before Q4 campaigns start tomorrow. Secondly, while we're sacrificing an entire day worth of income, it's worth the test to see if our advertisements are negatively affecting the site in any way.

You currently earn reputation points for activities such as giving reputation and marking threads solved. An upcoming feature we're working on here in the office is creating a swag store where we'll be selling those tshirts with all the funny sayings on them, etc, to earn some extra revenue. We're also going to be coming up with the concept of "Dani Dollars" which can be earned through activity points and solving threads and other such means, and be redeemed in the store.

It's going to be different for every individual site. The key is to get lots of inner-pages of lots of different sites that ARE COMPLETELY RELEVANT TO YOU to link to you. Relevance is key!! The only best way to get backlinks is to create great, useful content that people will naturally want to link to, aka "link bait". The backlinks will follow.

Nothing will be permanently saved in either place. There is a variable called $_SESSION[], which is an array, and you are setting the key "name" to the value 'John'. It will have the value 'John' while the php script is executing (unless you change it further down in code). This is all happening server-side. Nothing is happening on the client computer.

Do you mean AJAX (Like Facebook & Twitter) where they just auto-update without having to manually hit the refresh button? Unfortunately, we don't have the server resources to constantly poll the database like that.

We do provide the "Threads I've Posted In" and "Threads I've Started" links in the bottom toolbar of every page of the site. Also, at any time, you can click on the "My Favorite Forums" link in the bottom toolbar to quickly see if there are any new posts within your favorite forums, without ever leaving the page you're currently on.

Hey everyone,

I just wanted to invite everyone to my birthday party this upcoming November. This is actually going to be the second large event that DaniWeb is throwing, the first being last June during Internet Week NYC.

There's a Facebook event set up for it here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=279987105364597

To be added to the VIP list, please shoot an email to kerry[at]daniwebmail.com along with your full name and a link to your member profile.

I REALLY hope to see everyone there!!!!!!!! <3

Create amazing, useful content that people will naturally want to link to. Use twitter and facebook social media widgets to encourage people to spread word about it to their friends.

Hi,

First of all, thank you soooo much for your support. However, I'm not so sure we have any tasks that can be outsourced. Our big ticket monthly expenses are our office rent, web hosting and marketing expenses, as opposed to employee salaries. I do all of the development work myself, so we don't have any programming expenses or the like.

However, if you can, please please donate for just a few dollars a month. It gives you an advertising-free DaniWeb (among other benefits), which incredibly speeds up the site. Plus, it's much more robust than hacky ad blockers.

Unfortunately I can't recommend anything other than Google Analytics. There are some more robust solutions out there, but they cost money and are mainly tailored to advanced ROI and eCommerce features. Not only is Google Analytics the best free solution out there, but it is also the industry standard right now. Instead of being scared off by something too intimidating, I would highly recommend tackling it head on. Pick up an eBook about it and try to learn it. It really isn't that bad, and it has a very good learning curve in that it has many straight forward features that you can use without taking advantage of the more complex stuff. As you progress your knowledge, you can delve under the hood and take advantage of its advanced reporting tools.

The site is called DaniWeb because I wanted to create the site as a hobby when I was in college, and I happened to have had the domain name daniweb.com that I used to use when I was 13 years old to post photos of my dogs, and I didn't feel like spending the ten bucks on a new domain name.

Oh I'm so embarassed by that video, and it went viral through the SEO community because DaniWeb is effectively the only fully documented Panda recovery.

We don't allow images within forum signatures. Sorry.

You shouldn't have to manually submit your site to any of the search engines anymore. Engines like Google find your site by crawling the web, following links from other sites pointing to your site. The more sites that link to you, and the more "authority" those sites have (based on how many links point to them), the higher your Page Rank, which influences your ranking in the search engines.

Hi Dave,

I'm not sure what version of vBulletin you are running, but with the 3.x line, you can do this with template conditionals.

Add the following to the <head> section of the SHOWTHREAD template:

<if condition="!$threadinfo['replycount']"><meta name="robots" content="noindex" /></if>

Buy an SSL certificate from a company such as VeriSign.

> Some members the way they are answering for doubts are really useful.
> I said they are giving impressive answers quickly for java queries.

Why didn't you say so in the first place? :)

It tells Google that you like the page, and Google factors that into their ranking algorithm, which ultimately sends us more traffic and fixes our current Google woes.

You can now earn activity points for hitting the +1 button on various DaniWeb pages. Right now it's just on the homepage and articles/news, but coming to most forum threads soon.

I don't drink. Never have. Never will.

Your article eloquently describes what's known in the advertising industry as beyond-the-banner advertising ... Looking beyond leaderboards and medium rectangle banner ads to create a well-rounded advertising campaign (yes, I use marketing buzzwords) that includes social media, word of mouth marketing, and actually engaging with the audience.

That's exactly what advertisers are looking for nowadays -- to engage in two-way conversation with their customers and potential customers. And they need social media to do it.

As many of you are probably aware, DaniWeb was hit hard by Google's Panda algorithm update back in February. A news story written by Davey entitled Google Farmer Update: what went wrong? explained that the February 24th Panda algorithm targeted at content farms literally cut DaniWeb's US traffic by half. The global rollout that followed a month later did the same to all of our English-speaking traffic.

On March 3rd, I started a forum thread in Google's Webmaster Central forum as a plea of desperation. A couple hundred responses explained in detail all of the different things that I've done to try to regain Google's trust, along with a back and forth debate with some of the regulars in that forum as to what to do next. I'm going to spare you the details of rehashing everything in this article. You're free to read that forum thread and it basically is a play-by-play of the last two months of my life.

After quite a number of really tough weeks, I'm pleased to finally say that traffic is now on an upswing. The following Google Analytics graph explains it better than I ever could:

The graph indicates a slight dip towards the end of February when just the US was affected by Panda, and then a huge dip when Panda went global. However, you can see that over the past couple of weeks, traffic has been on the upswing, increasing day after day. …

Well that's because Windows-based C/C++ programming isn't really a separate language. It's more of a subset, and with hundreds of forums already, I prefer not to have additional deeper levels because they tend to be ignored/unseen.

From what I understand, the Sony Playstation network was taken down for like a week after the attack, meaning that no Playstation games could be played over the Internet. It turns Sony into a laughingstock IMO. (Think of it as Microsoft taking xbox live down indefinitely).

Yes, that's true ... Google won't be able to follow internal links to pages only accessible from pages within the /site/ folder, if the /site/ folder is in the robots.txt disallow list. What's more, Google probably knows about these links from external backlinks (or from before the /site/ folder was disallowed), and because it cannot find any links to them anymore, considers them "orphan pages" -- aka a bad navigation structure.

In that case, disallowing the entire /site/ folder is not a good strategy.

I've moved you into the registered users usergroup. Please go into your control panel and double check that the email you have on file with us is still accurate.

Isn't this spammy? It's called click fraud. What advertiser is going to advertise with you knowing that the people clicking their ad most likely are not interested in what they have to offer, but are only in it to potentially win a prize.

Once you leave rep with or without a comment, you can't reverse it. You can only reverse a vote with no rep.

You don't get anything without effort. If you didn't have to put in any effort, everyone would be an Internet millionaire.

Lucky for you, there is an option for you. It's time versus money. If you don't want to spend the time, then you gotta spend the money. You can purchase advertising. Try Google AdWords to buy visitors.

After you vote on a post, the little popup window specifies how much reputation you can add/take away by clicking the "give reputation" button.

Create great, useful, unique content that people will naturally want to link to.

Alexa rating is a third-party company (owned by Amazon) that aims to guess how much traffic you have. Focus on growing your traffic and don't worry about what your Alexa rating is. It's barely accurate anyways.

There was a long discussion about this in Area 51 over the past week, but I forgot to make the public announcement. To copy & paste what was written there:

The main problem that I do have with our reputation system is, as Sanjay put it, that it feeds the rich and buries the poor. All of the regulars have a crazy amount of reputation power. Everyone else can't even affect reputation by one point.

So here's what happens ... The majority of members leave reputation amongst each other, but they never increase their reputation because none of them have any power to affect each other.

They all rely on a top poster who has lots of reputation to affect them. The only chance they have of ever climbing up the reputation ranks is to receive rep from a top poster. Meanwhile, all of the top posters are all friends, and run into each other on the site on a daily basis, and throw reputation at each other left and right. Therefore, the rich get richer.

So here's what I've done ...

Firstly, you may have noticed that your reputation has shifted slightly. I've made some adjustments to prior reputations that some people received, therefore affecting your reputation today.

Firstly, reputation used to be very different back 5, 6, 7 years ago when it was brand new to us. Rep power was crazy back then, and if AD thinks that +30 is crazy, it used to be +150 and …

No, they wouldn't. You would need to use <strong>Some text in here</strong> You can then code that strong tag however you want
You can even do strong { font-weight: normal; } so that it will have SEO weight but it won't look bold to the website visitor.

We have flag bad post. We have infractions. We have rep.

Maybe we need a button for whiner!

It's called the ignore list.

Fixed, but you may need to clear your cache.

You just need to click the little Facebook like button at the top of the thread page or to the right of the quick reply box.

Oh c'mon people ... Only one person 'likes' something on all of DaniWeb today? Step it up :) haha

It's been over a year, but I have finally implemented a solution to this. Now, if you are not logged in, and you try to submit a post, you have the option of either registering OR logging in to complete the submission process.

Keep in mind that you should never hit the back button in your browser b/c, more often than not, you will lose your post contents that way. This is something your browser does, not us.