Im looking for your suggestions on what I should write about. To make it easy for you to tell me I have added Skribit to the sidebar on the homepage here.

Its a simple service where you can suggest topics for me to cover and ill do my best to write content that matches those suggestions.

Some things I have been thinking of writing about include: -

Scraping – basic principles and technique
Making your on page links less attractive than the links that pay
Link bait starters guide

Lately I have been finding it easier and easier to post regular entries here and I thought I would share the reasons why. I like most people with a blog that gets a few readers find it hard to motivate myself into getting all the bits together to make up a new post.

You know, text, images, open up photoshop, get a brew, log in – thats enough to make me think ‘meh ill do it later’

Well now I have a way of working that cuts through all that crap and I can just get back to writing.

Software: -

For writing the posts I am now using MarsEdit on the mac (This page has some good suggestions for those on windows). MarsEdit is a great offline blog writing tool. Heres a screenshot of me working up this post.

(Note that MarsEdit underlines my crappy spelling)

I then send the finished post up to the blog automatically as a draft and publish when I am ready and have finished the tags, extras and stuff.

To add the images I have moved to using Jing which is a fantastic tool for grabbing, formatting and annotating the image before uploading it straight to Flickr leaving the embed code on my clipboard so I just paste it into MarsEdit.

You can add arrows, text and frames to suit. I will even screenshot straight out of photoshop to save me the effort of saving it as a web image first (Told you I was lazy)

Once the post is uploaded to the blog I will log in at my convenience and add some tags, meta data etc. Zemanta is a great tool for adding links automatically to any post as well as offering up so

me image suggestions to help illustrate the post too.

Image by Zemanta via CrunchBase

Small things I know but they make the creation of posts a job that can fit in around the rest of the jobs you have to sort.

Some things to add to this way of working: -

For post ideas I am thinking of adding Skribit but to be honest I hate what they have done with the latest version.

I am also thinking of writing a simple plugin that allows me to post a new blogpost announcement to Twitter automatically as its published, depends how useful others think that would be?

This morning I have added a new site search to this blog to make life easier for anyone wishing to find some of my older posts now that I have moved across onto the .co.uk version of my domain.

I tried this out with the standard Wordpress search functionality but have never been impressed with the results. So I installed my own, it looks like this: -

But you can see that as its right there on the sidebar, hey its Sunday morning and my head hurts OK?

The advantages of the new search system are: -

It ranks the search results better

It offers suggestions as you type (I love that feature!)

It indexes sub directories of the blog

The last one is the key for me as I have a number of tools off the main blog on their own pages and this well search them too. Cachechecker is an example of this, heres the search page for it

Last job to do is set up a Cron job on the server to re-index the site every day.

So how can this be done? Thought you’d never ask…

I am using Sphider which is a free PHP based spider. Very quick and simple to set up and offers a huge number of features.

Its installed on a subfolder on the site and then I just copied and pasted the search form into the blogs sidebar, bit of css and we are good to go.

Let me know how it works for you!

Incidently loving POPrl at the moment for sharing this link

Its been about two weeks since I moved across from the .com version of my site across to the .co.uk version.

I did what most of us would do and 301′d the site across, some tweaking needed but fairly basic stuff.

I know whenever you do a full site 301 there are a few days when watching Google work it through can be a stressful experience but they are doing a good job so far.

Time yet for a major fekk up but so far so good…

Have you had any problems doing something similar?

Moves can go wrong…

A week or so ago I had a ping from my mate Dean Hunt. Dean has a site in the top 50 online money making blogs and he had a problem.

He had spotted that someone, somehow had managed to insert about 50 links into his site linking off to lots of parasite hosted pills sites.

Not good for business even worse for rankings. We have since found that he wasnt the only one!

(There are in fact over 13,000 sites with this issue from what I can crawl)

So after a bit of advice from DaveN and Ben I managed to clear the problem and since then Dean’s rankings have returned!

Without going into much of the detail about how they did this (If you’re interested I did a small write up on Deans site) the end result did seem to pose a problem for a lot of blogs.

Dean like everyone else couldn’t see the links in his site as they had been cloaked for Google only so I decided it might be useful to create a simple tool that would show you what you linked out to from Googles perspective via the cache copy or your page.

Cachechecker is a simple tool that shows you what links are present in the Google cached copy of your page. Click here to try the tool for yourself, its cheap free and easy.

Its simple granted but the story made the front page of Sphinn so I know its something that worries a lot of folks.

Anyone have any comments or suggestions ?