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Happy Birthday to the Greatest Mom Ever :)
Posted by: | CommentsToday’s my mom’s birthday yayye!! Happy birthday to you mom 
She is the most resilient, supportive, loving, nurturing, caring, yet soft spoken, mother anyone can ask for. If you only knew what she had to go through to raise someone like me… you’d be amazed I am eternally grateful for her and what she has done for me. I continually draw support from her each and every single day.
Here is me dedicating a song on my guitar to her… And given the fact that I just started playing, about the only song I know HOW to play (besides a part of the Simpson and Star War’s theme songs) is “Happy Birthday”.
So here’s take #72…
Love you mom!
P.S. And for the heck of it, here’s one of the MANY MANY outtakes…
Getting Delisted from Google – Counter SEO??
Posted by: | CommentsIn case you don’t know what I mean by “delisted” from Google, it essentially means removing one of your website or a portion of your website from the Google search result.
Now why would I want to do that? Doesn’t that seem kinda silly in the realm of SEO where you want as much exposure as possible? The answer is that there may be times where you have sensitive material you want to “hide” from the public.
In my case, it was a bunch of SEO Networker content Fernando and I put together that we didn’t want released into the public. Well, unfortunately, Google bot got a hold of it and was more than happy to list its location. Now anybody can search for it and get their hands on it.
So I went on a mission – how do you remove certain elements of your website from Google without actually removing it from your server? After all, you still want it available to a select group of people.
Three things are required for this to happen:
- Get a Google Webmaster account and verify your website
- Setup a (proper) robots.txt file and upload it to your server (your top folder, where you main files reside)
- Submit a delist request to Google via Google Webmaster
Signing Up for Google Webmasters
Signing up for a webmaster account is a process well explained by… well, the process itself so I won’t bother listing out what needs to be done here. Just head over to Google Webmaster and click on “Sign in to Webmaster Tools”, then follow the instructions provided (i.e. log into your Google account).
Google Webmasters
Your Robots. txt…
Okay, this is the fun part
Robots.txt is a file you put on your server (associated with your domain) that tells the search engine bots what they can/should and can’t/shouldn’t crawl. If that was greek to you, let me explain another it in simpler terms. Search engines have to know what part of your website they can show in the search results. They look to your robots.txt file for permission.
You can go to Robotsxtx.org for more details.
The real question is… what do you put in this file so Google (and other search engines) know what NOT to crawl?
So this is what you do, first create a file called robots.txt (all in small letters) on your desktop. Open it in an editor like notepad. And then copy and paste the following snippet of code in there:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /example/
Disallow: /sec
The first line says “what is stated in the following lines every single search engine robot“. Then the ensuing lines tell them each of the folders you DON’T want listed.
For example, http://www.yourdomain.com/example/ would NOT be listed. And neither would any of your subdomains that start with “sec” such as http://www.yourdomain.com/seconds and http://www.yourdomain.com/secrets.
Then you save the robots.txt file and upload it to your domain – at the very top folder (i.e. http://www.yourdomain.com)
Telling Google to Bug Off… Nicely & Strategically of Course
Okay, the last step is a snap and it takes place right inside your Google Webmaster account. You simply log in, and on the menu to the left, click on “Tools” and then “Remove URLs”.
And all the remains now is to click on the button that says 
and then following the instructions on the screen (selecting an entire website, just a directory within your website, specific files, or some outdated info still residing in the Google’s database – this would force them to update what your webpage looks like in their database.Confused?»
Voila, That’s It Folks!
Google’s response was fairly quick, they had my requested folder delisted by the next time, when I checked on it. Which folder got delisted…? That’s for me to know and you to will… never find out
Converting WordPress Posts to Pages & Allowing Comments
Posted by: | CommentsThis was neat, I spent a couple of hours last night scourging the web to figure out how to convert some WordPress posts into pages (on SEO Networker).
The first obvious solution was to simply copy and paste. This isn’t the most elegant solution but it got the job done (I tested it out on one of my posts). Of course, that has its handicaps in that I had to rename the page a different URL so that I can delete the old post (thereby freeing the OLD URL) before changing the page BACK into the old URL.
Confusing eh? Yes. And a pain in the butt!!!
But more importantly, a conundrum came up… What about all the comments associated with each of the posts? How do I port those over?
That opened a new can of worms, comments aren’t working on pages! How do I enable comments on pages? On the surface it looks like WordPress made this a snap by making it a simple option when you edit your pages (see below).
But alas, that didn’t do it! What to do what to do?
After doing some extensive research, I came across a thread on WordPress.org that showed me how to do it. You have to actually edit a bit of code in WordPress to make this happen:
You need to edit the page.php file for your theme and insert the following: <?php comments_template(); >
In the default theme it slips in best just before the close of the <div id=”content” class=”narrowcolumn”> tag on line 17 (I’m looking at theme version 1.6).
That’s all there is to it. You might also want to edit the comments.php file of same theme and add <?php if (!is_page()) { > before the line that reads <!– If comments are closed. –> and <?php } > after it. (It’s around line 57/58, again in default theme version 1.6.) This’ll stop the “Comments are closed” message from appearing on pages which to me doesn’t quite fit given the context.
Voila! That worked – yaye!
So I can have comments on the WordPress pages, but that still bags the question of how to transfer the comments from the post to the page. I refused to accept the brute force method (copy and paste) so I did a bit more digging.
The solution I found was in a neat little plugin called p2ponverter. With literally the push of a button, it converts your posts into pages (or vice versa).
P2PConverter
And the best part is, it keeps all of your comments! How cool is that?
So there ya have it, converting posts to pages (while keeping all of the associated comments) and enabling comments on WordPress pages. All in a good night’s work
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