That said, an encoding bug has been the bane of the plugin's existence and desperately needed squashing. So, hopefully it's squashed (huge hat tip to JM Simonet, who released a patched version of the plugin in the support forum ages ago, for which I'm very grateful).

Grab SEOSimple v1.4 from the SEOSimple homepage. And please report any problems you have either on the SEO Simple Support Forum, or in the comments on the SEOSimple home page (preferably the support forum, as the # of comments is a bit unwieldy).

Oh! And remember to vote for the plugin at the Joomla Extensions site. Please do this if for no other reason than it appears these dudes ripped off this plugin, are calling it their own, are making people pay for it, and have more votes than SEOSimple does.

The song lays out, with some slick verse, the importance of Web standards and proper design -- both for how it relates to the look of the site, and the way the site gets indexed by search engines. Check it out and see the lyrics below:

Design Coding

by SEO Rapper
Your site design is the first thing people see
it should be reflective of you and the industry
easy to look at with a nice navigation
when you can't find what you want it causes frustration
a clear Call to action to increase the temptation
use appealing graphics they create motivation
if you have animation
use with moderation
cause search engines can't index the information
display the logos of all your associations
highlight your contact info that's an obligation
create a clean design you can use some decoration
but to try to prevent any client hesitation
every page that they click should provide and explanation
should be easy to understand like having a conversation
when you design the style go ahead and use your imagination
but make sure you use correct color combinations
do some investigation, look at other organizations
but don't duplicate or you might face a litigation
design done, congratulations but it's time to start construction
follow these instructions when you move into production
your photoshop functions then slice that design
do your layout with divs make sure that it's aligned
please don't use tables even though they work fine
when it come to indexing they give searches a hard time
make it easy for the spiders to crawl what you provide
remove font type, font color and font size
no background colors, keep your coding real neat,
tag your look and feel on a separate style sheet
better results with xml and css
now you making progress, a lil closer to success
describe your doctype so the browser can relate
make sure you do it great or it won't validate
check in all browsers, I do it directly
gotta make sure that it renders correctly
some use IE, some others use Flock
some use AOL, I use Firefox
title everything including links and images
don't use italics, use emphasis
don't use bold, please use strong
if you use bold that's old and wrong
when you use CSS, you page will load quicker
client satisfied like they eating on a snicker
they stuck on your page like you made it with a sticker
and then they convert now that's the real kicker
make you a lil richer, your site a lil slicker
design and code right man I hope you get the picture
what I'm telling you is true man it should be a scripture
if it's built right you'll be the pick of the litter
everyone will want to follow you like twitter
competition will get bitter and you'll shine like glitter
if you trying to grow your company will get bigger
design and code right man can you get with it

My favourites:

• They describe themselves as an expert. This space is so new and changing so rapidly it’s impossible to be an expert, at Wolfstar we only claim to be ahead of the curve.
• The first thing they talk about isn’t how to integrate social media into overall corporate communications strategy or public relations plan. Just like traditional public relations or marketing communications you’ve got to focus on the business objectives and what communications can do to achieve them.
• The first thing they advise is you should start a blog or Facebook group. Focus on the business and what you want to achieve and then think about the tools and the technology.
• They promise you quick results and instant success. Online, social media and social networks are all representative of how society and the economy is changing, you’ve got to be in it for the long haul.

Be sure to check out all 10.

The truth is, I am certain I could help them with their SEO needs, but I am simply not willing to manage their expectations when it comes to SEO results, and so avoid it.

Using my client-base as an example, I would say that most non-/semi-technical folks have a rather skewed idea of what good SEO means. I blame this largely on the seedier side of the SEO industry, which tends to utilize the layman's lack of knowledge and implausible slogans ("Let us put you at the top of Google's listings overnight!", etc.) for profit.

This isn't to say that there aren't good SEO experts, it's only to say that in an industry with so many charlatans, it can be a painfully time-consuming process determining who to trust. All the more reason to at least have some understanding of SEO yourself, if for no other purpose than to know what you should expect.

I personally hold value in a few key things when looking at setting up good SEO on a site I am creating, they are:

Content

Having good content on your site may seem like a no-brainer piece of advice, but it's a bit more complicated than it sounds.

There is a bit of an art to writing content with a healthy balance between keywords (read: terms people would search for at a search engine), marketing-ese to sell your topic to visitors, and useful content that people actually want to read.

Good content will present itself in an organized manner that stays on a well-focused topic. It should be rich in keywords, but not so much so that it takes away from the prose itself.

Page titles

By page titles, I mean the <title> tags in the <head> of your HTML. I've seen SEO gurus load these with a straight list of keywords, but I dislike this as its SEO value is questionable and it takes usability away from the site. Rather, I suggest making sure your page titles are on-topic to the keywords you are looking to attract, and relevant to the specific page they are being displayed on. They should be relatively short and to the point, with the most relevant keywords at the beginning.

Example:
GOOD: "Cat care tips for pet owners"
On-topic, short, solid keywords
BAD: "cats, tips, pets, dogs, cat food, dog food, house cats"
Keyword rich, but not unique to the page, plus fugly for site visitors
BAD: "Petland Food Inc."
Many sites have the same page title (often company name) on every page. This will do little to help your SERP ranking

URLs

You'll notice when you search for a term in Google the results display the keyword (in bold) as found in the page title, a relevant chunk of the content, and in the link's URL.

With straight-HTML created sites it was easy to maintain decent URLs that contained keywords. If you had a page about cat grooming, you called it "cat-grooming.html" and you had inherent SEO. However, most modern Web sites are built on content management systems (CMS) that are often built in PHP or ASP. Because of this you can get some very ugly URLs that have no connection to the content.

Fortunately, any CMS worth its weight will have built-in (or add-on) Search Engine Friendly (SEF) functionality to re-write the URLs into something friendly to search engine bots (and site visitors).

HTML structure

This is something that may be more difficult to adjust if you are not the one designing your site. However, if just getting started with a site's design, it is worth mentioning to your designer that you want to make sure your markup is semantically laid out.

What this means is, you want to be using proper heading tags (<H1>,<H2>,<H3>, etc.) in a hierarchical way. The page's title/topic should be in the largest heading tag on the page (<h1> or <h2> usually), and subheading should be in a gradient transition to higher-numbered tags (<h3>, <h4>, <h5>, etc.).

Additionally, you will want to make sure the page's overall structure also fits this ideal. To the bots that search your site don't get the benefit of your ace designer's well-crafted eye candy. To them it is a simple list of code. Where that code falls can effect what it views as important.

Take the following common design mistake as an example. You have a site with a header, left sidebar, content and footer. a pretty common setup (see visual representation).

A designer not concerned with semantic markup may simply layout the page in the following order: HEADER, SIDEBAR, CONTENT, FOOTER. Unfortunately, this causes the bots to believe the text, links, etc., of the sidebar are more relevant than that in the content area - which rarely is the case. It is therefore important to layout the page as HEADER, CONTENT, SIDEBAR, FOOTER in the HTML, while using CSS to control the front-end display.

Semantic layout is not black and white, but rather very much a sliding scale. Sometimes it is simply not possible to have the most logically hierarchical markup and maintain particular features of the site. Take the hits where you need to, and just do your best.

Linkbacks from other sites

I should say, linkbacks from other authority sites. The principle goes something like this: Site A is a great and powerful site that has been around for ages (think NYT.com, Yahoo, TechCrunch, etc.), Site A links to Site B for whatever reason. Google sees this link and figures, "hell, if Site A thinks Site B is good, and we think Site A is good, then Site B is probably good too." And the value of linkbacks for SEO is born.

Now, any fool can go out and get your site linked to on a hundred thousand sites overnight, and many fools will try to charge you bags of money to do just this. Don't buy it. Getting natural linkbacks from other sites is tough work, but is the only truly valuable form of linkbacks.

There are a number of ways to do this, but really, in principle they all relate to creating content that people are interested in reading.

Age of site/Page Rank

This goes back to the "authority" bit in the section above. With new sites created and abandoned every day, it makes sense that some attention is paid to sites that have been around for a long time, or have earned a higher Google Page Rank. It doesn't necessarily make them a better source of information, but as a fuzzy rule, it does hold some weight.

Additionally, this is often the reason sites that have followed all the rules above still aren't owning their desired keywords - particularly when those keywords are in highly competitive markets (travel, web, consumer electronics, etc.).

If you feel you've done everything perfectly, and still you're not getting the SERPs you feel you deserve, perhaps a bit of patience is in order.

Meta Descriptions and Keywords

Ah, meta tags. If I had 10 cents for every time I've had clients sweat about their meta tags, I would be writing this from a tropical beach somewhere and not worrying about the piles of work I still have to get done today.

Well, here it comes folks - they don't matter. I think I just heard the SEO community collectively frown and growl. So, perhaps an explanation, before I get hate mail.

There was a time when the top search engines used meta descriptions and meta keywords to determine what a Web page was about. The meta keywords tag was the first to be dropped as a decider, and for several years now has not been used by any major search engine to help index the page. Why? 1. because they're too easy to fake, and 2. they're just not needed, bots can scan the entire contents of a page and get their own keywords. In short, they are valueless.

Though it has taken longer, the meta description tag is quickly going the same way. When the meta keywords tag became obsolete many webmasters/designers/SEO folks turned to the meta description as a way to bulk up their site's keywordiness. Somewhat predictably this caused search engines to develop better ways to determine what a site is really about. As, remember, a search engine has a responsibility to the end user - the dude searching for "all-natural woven monkey-hair toupees" - not the company trying to make sure their listing is at the top of the SERPs so they can sell more toupees.

And that brings us right back to content. Without much value left in the meta description and virtually no value in meta keywords, it makes it all the more important to ensure that your content is well written and keyword rich.

Certainly there is much more that makes up the rather complex "science" of search engine optimization, but that should give at least a basic overview of what I feel are the key elements to good SEO. I look forward to additions, corrections or questions in the comments.

• Windows 7: We heard it’s a lucky number
• Windows 7: Like Windows 6 — wait, there was no Windows 6
• Windows 7: Correct iterations be damned!
• Windows 7: Apparently 13 versions of Windows + 1 = 7
• Windows 7: Experience crashes and bad architecture under a classic name
• Windows 7: Vista 2 coming soon
• Windows 7: Please ignore all that stuff we’ve been doing for the past decade
• Windows 7: DOS 12.1182
• Windows 7: If it looks like Vista, and smells like Vista…
• Windows 7: If that’s the price, it might be worth it
• Windows 7: Give that marketer a promotion
• Windows 7: Because f**k it
• Windows 7: On the path to catch up with Mac OS X…in 3 iterations. So 15 years.
• Windows 7: When we hit 0, we’ll call it DOS again
• Windows 7: Oops, we thought we were naming our Mobile OS
• Windows 7: We’re way ahead of Linux (in numbers)
• Windows 7: The Vista Menace
• Windows 7: You may want to hold off on the Vista purchase
• Windows 7: How long until the first Service Pack?
• Windows 7: I can’t believe it’s not Vista

Specifically I want to display the comment's author (as a link) and be able to customize the number of recent comments that are displayed.

A search of Drupal.org revealed a number of comments.module hacks, but I hate hacking core modules and particularly try to avoid it on client sites.

Fortunately, the rather amazing Views module will allow me to do exactly what I need. Here's how to implement a (more) customized Recent Comments block using the Views module (click to enlarge any of the screenshots):

1. Download, install and activate the Views module (just as you would any Drupal module).
2. Under the SITE BUILDING (/admin/build) menu you'll now have a "Views" option. Click it.
3. You should see a list of Default Views. We're going to override the "comments_recent" default view by creating a new view with the same name. Click the ADD tab and insert comments_recent as the name, like so:
   
4. Next, scroll down to the BLOCK sub-section and fill out like so:
   
   You can change the Title field to whatever you'd like the block to display as its title. Also, adjust the Nodes per Block setting to the number of recent comments you wish to display.
5. Now we need to tell Views which fields to display. You can configure this a number of different ways, but I'm going to stick with my original purpose - getting the author's name displayed:
   
   You'll notice that I've set some labels for the 2nd and 3rd fields. I've used this to add "said:" and " - " to the block.
6. The final thing we need to add is a Sort Criteria. Scroll down to the Sort Criteria section and add a new criteria called "Comment - Created Time", then set the order to "Descending", as so:
   
   This assumes you wish to show the most recent comments at the top. If you want to go from oldest to newest, select "Ascending".
7. Click SAVE.

The only step left is replacing the Recent Comments block with the new block. Go to your Blocks page (/admin/build/block) and you should see a block called "comments_recent". Select the region where you want the block displayed, save, and you should see the new Recent Comments block appear on your site.

Optionally, you might want to style things a bit differently. The new Views-generated block puts each field you inserted into its own DIV, making it pretty easy to adjust things with a bit of CSS. Here's the CSS I used:

#block-views-comments_recent .view-item-comments-recent div {display:inline;}

This makes the individual DIVs for each field (the name, the subject, and the field labels) run as a continuous line, rather than the (default) block each on its own line. For additional styling, simply apply CSS styles to the relevant classes (view the source or use a dom inspector).

Well, I hope that helps any out there who, like me, need a more versatile and customizable Recent Comments block in Drupal.

Well, my loathing of Internet Explorer has not lessened, but I have begun employing a much easier way of notifying my visitors about their poor choice of browsers.

Before I get to that though, I should say I do understand that many people using the (soon to be decade old) Internet Explorer 6 are doing so because they can't upgrade (due to Windows Genuine Advantage) and don't know/understand their alternatives.

So, to you IE6 users, please listen. I know Microsoft is a big multi-gazillion dollar company. I know that it would seem they should be the go-to company for trusted software products. But I also know that when it comes to Internet browsers - they are just way off the mark.

Sure, upgrading to a new browser may seem like a big scary thing, but it's not. Hell, you don't even need to uninstall your copy of Internet Explorer if you're that attached to it (but I promise after using any of the alternatives for more than a day you'll forget it's even on your hard drive).

Now - go grab yourself a copy of Firefox, Opera, Safari or Google Chrome and do the world a favour by helping put down the sickly animal that is IE6.

Got a site? Spread the word:

As I mentioned before my little diatribe, I am now inserting a tad of code into my Web sites to gently let visitors know about their (perhaps innocent use of a) pathetic browser.

The code makes use of conditional comments.

By simply placing the following right after your <body> tag, you'll insert a nice little notice at the top of your page for anyone browsing your site with Internet Explorer 6 or less:

<!--[if lte IE 6]><div class="notice"><strong>Notice:</strong> You're using an out of date browser (released more than 7 years ago). To view this page properly, we recommend using a modern, standards-compliant browser - such as <a href="http://www.firefox.com">Firefox</a>, <a href="http://www.opera.com/">Opera</a>, <a href="http://www.apple.com/safari/">Safari</a> or <a href="http://www.google.com/chrome">Google Chrome</a>. All of which are 100% free.</div><![endif]-->

Now, you'll notice that the main container div above has a class called "notice", that's because I'm a man who digs a bit of style. By throwing the following line in your site's CSS file (or between <style> tags in your page's head) it'll pretty the notice up a bit:

.notice {margin:5px 0;padding:10px;border:1px solid #dedeb9;background:#ffffd4;text-align:center;}

The result:

And if you REALLY want to spread the word

Here's a little button you can throw on your Web site to help encourage others to do the same:

For anyone that tried to use the plugin with PHP4, I'm sorry about breaking your site. Actually it's an old PHP4 bug that broke your site, but I'll apologize anyway. So sorry I sat my butt down and whipped together a fix that will hopefully solve all you late-adopters' problems. Well, not all your problems - but the ones related to SEOSimple.

Grab the new version at the SEOSimple homepage.

Please report any problems you have either on the SEO Simple Support Forum, or in the comments on the SEOSimple home page.

Oh! And remember to vote for the plugin at the Joomla Extensions site.

One such site is the Hao Hao Report, a Digg-like social bookmarking/link sharing site that focuses on blog posts and news articles related to China (I live in China, so there's a vested interest).

Virtually since its inception I ran the Hao Hao Report on Pligg, and as much as I support the effort that the Pligg developers have put into the piece of Webware, in the two years I used it, it gave me a rather painful headache.

Though it's touted as an "open-source content management system", the last bit is a misnomer in my opinion. The term "content management system (CMS)" carries with it a certain weight and generally intends that it would provide a simplified method by which to manage content - any content. Pligg can't, in any easy way, manage anything outside of what it is intended to do - be a link submission service.

In addition, the project's templating system makes upgrading to new versions a painful experience. Should you customize your Pligg site's design to any degree, you will need to spend hours upon any upgrade combing through the Smarty-based templates updating core changes.

That I had to hack the core code just to allow myself, the administrator, the ability to physically delete (as in remove from the database completely) stories and users from the site did not add to my coziness with Pligg. In the spam-filled world we live in, this ability shouldn't be a patch after-thought, it should be the standard.

For an unknown reason Pligg only allows admins to "unpublish" spam and "block" users - leaving the hundreds or thousands of entries and spam users plugging up the database with junk.

Spam is another area where the Pligg project is still just taking baby steps - unfortunately where they are just learning to crawl, spammers are already in full-sprint. The Pligg forum is littered with reports of Pligg sites being blasted with unmanageable spam, and the Pligg core being able to do little but watch in horror.

But the proverbial straw for me was when the Pligg project launched Pligg PRO, a pay-for-use collection of Pligg addons. Don't get me wrong, obviously I support people making money off their hard work, and in principle have no argument with Pligg developers doing so. However, when the core software is still in beta (after more than 3 years of development - it's still not at version 1.0) and the project's main page puts focus on paid development, something in this open-source community has gone terribly wrong.

So, for all these reasons I had been eager to find an alternative, but was somewhat stuck as I had a developed a community of 500+ members and thousands of submissions - a migration was essential.

Then I found Drigg. Drigg is a module for Drupal, a project that truly deserves the phrase: "open-source content management system".

Drigg offered all the essential components that I required from Pligg, and because it was built on top of the powerful Drupal platform, I am now able to expand the site in any direction I wish with just a few clicks. New pages, additional features, a massive library of expansion modules, are all quick to add.

What's more, Drigg comes with a Pligg migration script - which, though less than perfect, imported my rather huge collection of users and content with very few problems (backup backup backup!).

Now Drigg is missing a few things that I liked about Pligg, namely the External Vote Module, an Ajax-based "Live" page and a few other nifty gadgets that Pligg has. However, most, if not all, seem to be on the development map for Drigg, and in my opinion the gains far out-weighed the few toys that I'd have to go without.

Spam is still an issue, but instead of relying on the relatively small Pligg community to help, I have the entire resources of the large, well-established Drupal community at my disposal.

I've just tweaked a few things to better support UTF-8 encoding, word wrapping of the descriptions and better handling of the Section and Category page descriptions.

Please report any problems you have either on the SEO Simple Support Forum, or in the comments on the SEOSimple home page.