James Moody: Geek in Paradise

Wow. It’s been a long time since I posted anything.

Business has been nice and steady, working with the new OS’s, etc. keeping my time filled for the most part. Blogging has been on the back burner forever.

I’ll be working on cleaning everything up, updating WordPress, Theme, etc. and see how it goes from there.

I did finally get the wife’s site, Sindi Is: transferred over to a blogging platform and got some of her older stuff up. It’s up to her to get the rest of her art ready for upload so her site should be filling up quickly.

Here we go!

In my previous post, I let you know that I had finally achieved zero supplemental pages in the Google Search results for my site. For those that don’t know, you can determine how many pages you have in the Supplemental results by using the following search string.

site:geekinparadise.com *** -ndsfoiw

Replace geekinparadise.com with your own domain name, of course. If you want to see the total number of pages indexed by Google for your site, drop everything after your domain name. I’ve read that you can use a different string after the (-), but most places I did research on used that string. As it stands now, geekinparadise.com has the same number of pages when searching both strings, meaning no supplemental pages.

Now, as promised, here is my robots.txt. Feel free to let me know if something isn’t necessary or overkill as I’m far from being a web genius.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: */feed/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /category/

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: */feed/
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /*.php$
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.cgi$
Disallow: /*.xhtml$
Disallow: /*.php*
Disallow: */trackback*
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /z/
Disallow: /wp-*
Disallow: /*.inc$
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: /*.txt$
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /*
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Allow: /*
Sitemap: http://geekinparadise.com/sitemap.xml

There’s probably some overkill and whatnot in there, but it’s worked out fine as far as I can tell.

Tags: WordPress Robots.txt Supplemental

The Windows Live Writer Team released the latest version of the very popular Live Writer Blogging program. Numerous enhancements have been added to the program, which was starting to get a little long in the tooth after a long period in Beta 1. Enhancements include inline spell checking (YAY!), better Blog support overall, integration and compatibility with various platforms (Sharepoint, Live Gallery, etc.) and API support as well for the different blogging platforms (Live Spaces, WordPress and TypePad were listed). Of course, visual tweaks, usability and better language support round out the bill.

This is my first post with the new Writer, and things are definitely looking alot better. Buttons, etc. are better placed within the UI and more options are available for actions you can perform. This is definitely an upgrade you want to undertake if you use Live Writer Beta 1 already, and a program you should take a serious look at if you don’t.

Quick Update: To get some of the new features included in this version, you will need to redetect your blog’s settings. Click on the “Weblog” Menu at the top, then “Edit Weblog Settings”, then “Update Account Configuration”. Enter the appropriate login information and it will then verify what options are compatible with your platform and make changes accordingly. Enjoy!

What does everyone else think of the changes?

Tags: Microsoft Window Live Writer Blogging Software

Well, that was an extremely fast cycle of testing from RC1 to RC2 to Final release! Version 2.2 was released today to the public for immediate integration into your blog’s unsuspecting hosting provider.

I’m going to give it a few days to see what others find out what plugins, etc. don’t work and need updates. The default themes were updated to work with the new version, but those of us with 3rd party themes will be playing Russian Roulette at this stage still imho, so I’ll wait. It does have built-in protection from completely breaking your blog though, so those that aren’t risk averse take joy in the fact you won’t go down hard.

There were quite a lot of new features, bug fixes, etc. in this version, too numerous to really list here and do them justice. Head on over to the Official announcement and read up on all the goodies you can start playing with as soon as you download it!