The Real Ryan J. Parker

Every couple of weeks (or so it seems) I come across a blog that mentions the drawbacks of showing your FeedBurner FeedCount before you have a large number of subscribers.

I most recently came across this topic at JohnTP.com and HarpzOn.com, and both of these websites agree with the popular consensus that showing your FeedBurner FeedCount when you’ve got few subscribers actually hurts you.

I don’t know about you, but I can only respond to this notion with:

Are You Kidding Me?

I fully agree with the idea that we live in a me too society, and that by showing you have a large number of subscribers a reader is more likely to subscribe to your feed based on this number alone (this is one of the reasons why I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of Copyblogger sooner).

I don’t, however, buy into the notion that showing your FeedCount when you’ve got a small number of readers will actually hinder your efforts in obtaining subscribers.

If someone doesn’t want to subscribe because I’ve only got 30 or so subscribers then this blog probably isn’t for them. I have subscribed to plenty of small blogs because of their content, not the size of their ego (I mean FeedCount).

This now leads me to the point of this post: Why do you show your FeedBurner FeedCount?

I show my FeedCount because I like giving everyone a rough idea as to how many subscribers I’ve got. When I say everyone I include myself, as I hate having to login to FeedBurner to see this stat.

Why do you show your FeedCount? Do you think that having a small FeedCount is hurting your efforts in obtaining subscribers?

Tags: feedburner, feedcount, hurts, blog, are you kidding me?

Is Microsoft checking to see if your website contains perverse content by using unsavory search strings?

It sure seems so.

While running a quick check through my websites’ access logs this morning I came across an interesting line in the access log of a website I’m slowly developing:

131.107.0.95 - - [17/Mar/2007:10:45:07 -0400] “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 200 13016 “http://search.live.com/result.aspx?q=cumshot&mrt=en-us&FORM=LVSP” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; Win64; x64; SV1)”

If you’re having a hard time deciphering this line, here’s what it says: someone accessed my website using a referrer from Microsoft’s live.com using the query string of cumshot. What’s interesting to note, however, is that the referrer line is invalid, as the live.com search application isn’t result.aspx, it’s results.aspx.

Let me first say that I’ve seen websites request pages with their own website’s URL as the referrer string to try and get people to visit their website, but this is obviously not one of those cases as it sends me to live.com, not somerandompornsite.com.

Having no idea how someone would find Probability Calculators by searching for cumshot, I decided to dig a little deeper to see what was going on.

Doing a lookup on the IP address, 131.107.0.95, I get:

nslookup 131.107.0.95 ns1.msft.net
Server: ns1.msft.net
Address: 207.68.160.190#53

95.0.107.131.in-addr.arpa name = tide525.microsoft.com.

If you’ve never done an nslookup before, it’s basically saying that this IP address belongs to Microsoft, and Microsoft is giving me the authoritative answer.

Doing a reverse lookup on tide525.microsoft.com yields the same IP address, so it’s a good match.

Now the only question left is: Why?

Why is Microsoft doing this? Some websites take the searcher’s query string to provide targeted content to the user, but why is Microsoft checking for this query string? Is it really that hard to determine if a site is targeted to an adult audience?

To be honest, I’ve got no problem with unsavory search strings, but I doubt everyone feels the same way as I do, so I wanted to write this post. Have you seen this in your own access logs? Do you even care that Microsoft is doing this?

Let me know what you think.

Tags: microsoft, live search, live.com, unsavry, referrer, search, string

Ask and you shall receive: I’ve updated my Show Unread Comments WordPress plugin to incorporate a few suggestions from people just like you.

The first change made to the plugin is actually a bug fix. With the initial version, the statuses of comments on pages were not marked appropriately, and status indicators were not showing up next to comments on pages. This has been fixed, so you’ll now see comments being tracked properly on pages.

The next change made to the plugin is the most popular feature request: the ability to return a binary value with show_unread_comment_status().

Now all you have to do is pass bin for $type and you’ll be returned true if the comment has been read and false if the comment is unread. This should make dynamically updating CSS for read and unread comments a snap.

Make sure you visit the Show Unread Comments page to get all the intimate details.

If you’re in a hurry you can download the latest version of the plugin at:

I’ve still got one more feature I’d like to get implemented, and that’s for the ability to create a direct link to the oldest unread comment when you’re viewing a given post or page, so if you’ve got any other feature requests or find a bug make sure you comment below or contact me so I can make sure to include it in the next version!

Tags: show unread comments, 1.1, update, wordpress, plugin

This isn’t something blogs do all that often, but ever since I saw how JohnTP separates his pingbacks and trackbacks from his regular comments I’ve wanted to take the time to figure out just how to do that myself.

From the user’s perspective, separating pingbacks and trackbacks provides a nice, clean look that doesn’t break up the flow of reader comments. As such, I hope every blog seriously considers separating pingbacks and trackbacks from regular comments. If you’re still having doubts I’d like to make the choice easier for you: the steps below show you how to separate comments from pingbacks and trackbacks.

First, you will need to modify the comments loop in your template’s comments.php file and add the following code:

This will make the $comment_type variable available so that you can place an if () statement to determine if the comment is a comment, pingback, or trackback.

Next, you’ll need to add an if () statement inside of your comments loop so that only normal comments are shown. To do this you’ll need to wrap all of the code inside of the comments loop between:

and

Now that you’re only showing normal comments, you’ll need to make a copy of your comments loop so that you now have two comment loops, one right after the other. The only change you’ll need to make in the second loop is to change:

to

Now all you have to do is style the second loop to your liking. For my template I stripped out the excerpt text and added the following code to print out an appropriate indicator for pingbacks and trackbacks:

<?php
if ($comment_type == 'pingback') {
    echo "Pingback";
} else if ($comment_type == 'trackback') {
    echo "Trackback";
}
?>

Now that you know how to separate your regular comments from pingbacks and trackbacks what are you waiting on? Go separate them already!

Tags: wordpress, separate, comments, pingbacks, trackbacks, comments.php

When I published yesterday’s blog post I realized it was posted an hour later than it was supposed to.

I had set the post to publish at a little after 6am Eastern, but instead it was published at a little after 7am Eastern.

This lead me to believe there was some sort of Wordpress DST bug that needed to be patched, but thanks to this post it turns out that Wordpress has never had any code to adjust for DST.

As such, if you’re like me and forgot to update your time zone offset then it’s about time you go ahead and do it, and stop living in the past already!

To update your time zone offset go to your Wordpress administration interface and go to the Options menu. If not there already, ensure you’re at the General tab. At the General tab update your time zone offset to the appropriate number. If you’re on Eastern Time, like me, then update this from -5 to the now correct -4. If you’re in a different time zone then you’ll need to update accordingly.

Someone’s already requested Wordpress add code to handle DST changes, so maybe this won’t be a big issue in the future.

What are you waiting for? Come on ahead into the future with the rest of us already!

Tags: wordpress, dst, patch, time zone, change, offset