Brad Linder's digital home

Review: Force of Nature (on the greening of Walmart)

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 21:46:00 +0000

Force of Nature: How Wal-Mart Started a Green Business Revolution-and Why It Might Save the World by Edward Humes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There are a lot of reasons to hate Walmart, and while Humes skims over them he doesn't ignore them. The company puts smaller stores out of business, squeezes its suppliers so that it's tough to make a profit (but it's tough to say no to the biggest retailer in the world), doesn't pay its employees a living wage, faces more gender discrimination lawsuits than I can count... and the list goes on.

But over the past half decade Walmart has also made some astonishing strides toward greening its business.

The sheer economies of scale are astounding. Walmart has enough locations and employs enough people that simply turning off the lights in the vending machines in employee break rooms saves $1.5 million per year.

Any small change the company makes has a huge impact. So when Walmart decides to reduce packaging, make vehicles more fuel efficient, use organic cotton, or make other changes, it can generate millions of dollars in savings and/or have far-reaching effects on the environment.

Things get even more interesting when the company starts looking at ways to encourage suppliers to make their industries (dairy, fish, clothing, electronics, and others) more sustainable.

Of course, the fact that Walmart can have such an impact is also evidence that the company is by its very existence bad for the environment. Walmart and other national and international retail chains depend on shipping supplies and finished products across huge distances in huge quantities -- and many of those items are things that nobody really needs in the first place.

It's nice to think that the solution is to end the era of big-box retailers and go back to mom and pop stores, but that doesn't seem very likely given the current state of affairs, and Humes paints a pretty good portrait of a company using its clout to generate the next-best thing: a world where mass produced products aren't simply stocked on store shelves as if they sprung from the ground already finished. Instead, retailers like Walmart are taking an active role in determining the environmental impact of everything they sell -- and soon may be taking more steps to ensure that consumers also have access to that information to help make better informed choices.

I'm not sure that I'm any more likely to shop at Walmart after reading this book, but it does make me feel slightly better about the direction our consumption-based economy is headed.

My carbon footprint is smaller than most people's. I don't own a car. I work from home. I don't eat meat. And for the past year I've been buying most of my produce from local sources at farmers markets.

But it will take a lot more than my personal choices to change the world... and while Walmart and stores like it are certainly part of the problem, some are also starting to become part of the solution... to a degree.

Humes could probably spend a little more time in this book discussing the areas where Walmart has fallen short of its environmental promises -- and in other areas as well. But he does a good job of describing the process of Walmart's greening since 2004 by putting human faces on the story and profiling the people that are making things happen... or at least trying to... or at least saying they're trying too...

View all my reviews

Mini-review: A Princess of Mars

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 16:40:00 +0000

A Princess of Mars: John Carter of Mars, Book One by Edgar Rice Burroughs
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

After seeing a couple of trailers for the new movie John Carter I was wondering what the heck I just saw... and decided to give the first book in the series I try.

It takes a hefty amount of suspension of disbelief to read a sci-fi adventure written a hundred years ago. There's a lot that Burroughs clearly gets wrong about gravity, energy, and of course Mars. There are also some baffling elements such as the idea that human-like species could have evolved independently on multiple worlds, but the Barsoom series is hardly the only offender there.

Burroughs doesn't offer much in the way of character development or even a very complex society. Really? Everyone on the planet speaks the same language and has the same telepathic capabilities?

The tale is also rather violent.

But you know what? It's still a fun read. If there's one thing Burroughs manages to do, it's to grab your attention and keep you wondering what happens next.

I wasn't sure at first whether I'd pick up the next book in the series, but after reading the last few pages I don't think I have much choice.

View all my reviews

Book review: The Deal From Hell by James O'Shea

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 20:13:00 +0000

The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers by James O'Shea

O'Shea may think he's written a book about how profit-driven, ego-centric people ruined some of the nation's largest papers, but that's because his own biases are at work here.

Actually what this book does is paint a picture of why it's hard to run a newspaper as a for-profit business with the goal of constantly increasing revenue.

He belittles the bosses that want to print the stories "people want" involving celebraties and gossip rather than important news of conflict, politics, and holding government accountable. But he side steps the question of paying for that coverage.

In a perfect world, readers that want to support different types of news would pay for the publications where it exists. Or advertisers would pay to reach those readers. But one problem that people consistently ignore is that advertisers have long been throwing money away on traditional media because there's simply no way to gauge how readers are reacting.

Online ad rates aren't lower because they're less effective, but because they're more effective... but they don't pay enough to support the kind of journalism great papers have produced over the years.

Whether intentionally or not though, he makes a pretty strong case for a public broadcasting style form of member-supported public interest journalism.

Update: OK, I got to the end of the book, and it turns out O'Shea *does* realize that the problem is that journalism emerged as a profession with a non-profit ethos and a for-profit business model. He's now heading up the non-profit Chicago News Cooperative, which I hadn't realized when I started reading. It may very well be a model for the future of news.

That said, it still bugged me how much he belittled local news coverage and praised national and international reporting as a matter of course -- he also tended to paint all online news with the same brush as second class citizens, even though he's now heading up an online news outfit.

He also largely paints a problem without offering a solution... and misses some of the problems in the process. Yes, newspapers have always been delivered to consumers at ridiculously cheap prices considering the costs of printing and distributing them, not to mention reporting the news.

But even if ad revenue wasn't declining, people that have gotten used to getting news for free or cheap online and through broadcast media would probably be drifting away from paying for the print editions.

This book is definitely worth reading if you're interested in the current state of the news industry, but it shines brightest when O'Shea is recounting his own personal experiences in the center of the storm. It's kind of dry reading when he slogs through the financial management of the papers he's talking about and the finer points of the deals that were made.

Like any good news story, it's the people that make this book interesting, not the numbers.

View all my reviews

Crypto

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 18:32:00 +0000

Crypto by Steven Levy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Steven Levy has an amazing talent for taking complicated, technical material and turning into engaging narrative.

I'm not particularly interested in cryptography, but knowing that Levy was interested enough to write a book about it prompted me to pick up Crypto and give it a try.

Not only does he manage to take a complex issue and break it down into (mostly) easy-to-follow language, but the he weaves a story that's not really about codes, cyphers, or security, It's about people -- as all of the best stories are.

Levy brings the people behind the story to life, and lets you know what makes them tick, and that's what makes Crypto fun to read. Incidentally, you end up learning a bit about codes, cyphers, security, and more along the way.

It's also fascinating to see how a small group of people in the 1970s envisioned a future with eCommerce, online bankings, electronic mail and other digital transactions we now take for granted. At the time there was little hard evidence that cryptography had any real use outside of national defense or games.

That said... the story Levy tells unfolds over the course of 30 years, so there are a *lot* of people to get to know over the course of this book's 350 or so pages. While that might not sound like a lot of pages, the book feels longer than it is, because every chapter or two you find yourself starting a new story -- and I sometimes found myself struggling to remember some important detail or person that had been introduced several chapters back when it became important again later.

I'm not sure there would have been a better way to structure things... Crypto is a complicated topic with a complicated history. But while I enjoyed reading this book, I'm not sure I'll want to read it again anytime soon.

Still, it's a compelling enough read that I look forward to picking up another Steven Levy book soon.

View all my reviews

Rule 34

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 15:55:00 +0000

Rule 34 by Charles Stross
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Stross does a good job of fleshing out the near-future world first introduced in Halting State, and of introducing new characters.

The second-person narration does a good job of trying to get you into the head of the characters, but it falls a little flat at times when used as a device to describe things that you would already know if this was really *you* we were talking about.

Still, the most impressive thing here is that Rule 34 is a character-driven story that hypothesis the implications of technological, political, and economic advances over the next decade or so on life, crime, and policing.

I just finished the book though, and I'm already thinking about going back to read it again -- because while the loose ends are tied up at the end, this book is rather dense with information, and knowing who was doing what and why would probably go a long way toward explaining their apparently inexplicable actions earlier on. Maybe...

View all my reviews

Rooftop garden tour (October, 2011)

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 15:45:00 +0000

The last time I wrote about the urban container garden on the roof of our Philadelphia apartment, I was dealing (poorly) with an infestation of bugs that had attacked my Asian greens. I never did come up with a good solution for that problem, but I have to admit I didn't try very hard.

That section of the garden has become something of a science experiment in the past few months as I let the greens go to seed to see what the seed pods would look like. Maybe I'll try growing leafy greens again in the spring, but the growing season on the rooftop is almost over for now.

Eventually when we build a deck on the roof I'd like to create a small cold frame that we can use to grow cold-weather vegetables such as spinach, but for now the garden is in a race against nature to see how many snow peas it can produce.

Overall snow peas have turned out to be my vegetable of the year. By sowing a fairly large number of seeds (given the small space) directly in the soil I've managed to get a pretty good crop this fall. The pea pods mature very quickly once the plants are full grown and I have to pick a few every day -- sometimes even twice a day.

It usually takes 2-3 days to pick enough for a meal, but so far I've been happier with my fall snow pea crop than with anything else I've tried growing on the roof.

The climate probably has a lot to do with that. This fall hasn't been too warm, too rainy, or too cloudy -- although we've had a bit of each condition.

The amount of work I put into trying to grow sweet peppers this summer, on the other hand, is barely paying off. I've picked about three peppers so far -- two with very thin skin and one nice and juicy red bell pepper which was a bit on the small side. I'm hopeful that two last peppers that are hanging on will fully ripen before it gets too cold for the plants to survive.

Halting State

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 21:08:00 +0000

I've been reading science fiction and speculative fiction stories since I was a kid. But I've tended to have a soft spot in my heart for the stories of the past... set in the distant future. Authors have a lot of freedom when they're writing about a distant world we're never likely to visit in our lifetimes... even when that world is earth after a major technological advancement.

The best stories often just take one simple idea and try to run with its implications. What if we lived in a world with robot servants? What if we discovered we could teleport across short distances?

But every now and then contemporary science fiction authors take a much more plausible idea and run with that instead.

When I first read Neuromancer I was blown away by the complete world William Gibson imagined where cyberspace was real. But he wasn't predicting a far-flung future. He was looking at the existing technology of networked computers in 1984 and imagining one way that technology might evolve -- and what some of the implications could be for society.

And so a million cyberpunk novels were born, and I went back to reading classic science fiction stories.

But this week I read Halting State, a 2007 novel by Charles Stross that does for augmented reality what Neuromancer did for the idea of cyberspace. And for the first time I was really impressed with the implications (both good and bad) of this technology which is available today, but which is still in its infancy.

As a technology blogger and reporter I've been covering augmented reality apps for computers and smartphones for a few years. But I've never been particularly impressed.

Sure, apps such as Layar, which allow you to point your phone's camera down the street and see information about nearby restaurants or tourist attractions pop up over the top of the picture are fun to play with for a few minutes. But right now you have to hold your phone in front of your face and look at it instead of the road ahead of you to get the most out of these apps. Just make sure not to walk into that pole that would be in your peripheral vision if you weren't relying on your phone's narrow-angle lens.

With today's technology, there's almost always an easier way to sift through data than using augmented reality. There are hundreds of apps that will show me a map or list with those same restaurants or tourist attractions -- and those apps help me make decisions much more quickly and efficiently.

But Halting State imagines that by 2018 your smartphone will stay in your pocket and link up to a special pair of glasses that will give you a heads-up display with all the data you could ever need. Walk into a gaming convention and instead of enthusiasts wearing costumes, you can flip a button and orcs and dragons will enter you field of vision. Police officers can use a different augmented layer reality to pull up information they need while on patrol. And of course nobody with one of these setups need ever get lost, since you can see the directions floating right in front of your face.

Halting State isn't just about augmented reality. It also projects the future of video gaming and live action role playing games, distributed computing systems, and a few other trends that might or might not take off. But the world of Halting State feels very plausible based on today's technology and shows why people are so excited about making apps like Layar, even if they don't seem very useful today. In the future they might be.

Of course, as 2018 approaches, this book could end up looking a lot like a 1950s story that imagines human beings colonizing the moon and fighting Martians. Things don't always turn out the way you think they will in the future.

But I enjoyed Halting State and I'm looking forward to reading Rule 34, the second book in the series. It was published in 2011, and I'm wondering if Stross has made any changes to his world of the future to keep in line with the changes in technology over the past few years. You also have to love any author that apparently titles his book after an xkcd comic.

Endings are hard

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 15:35:00 +0000

As a radio producer I've often struggled with the difficulty of ending stories. It's easy to start a story. People often say just start at the beginning, but there are plenty of different places to start .You can start with an idea, an event, a character, an example, or any number of different elements

Ending, on the other hand, is difficult -- because in reality stories don't end. You can end an argument or a thesis by stating the conclusion at the end. But that's not a story. One of the only honest ways to end a story is by using the cliche "only time will tell." Because when reporting the news we're often coming in at the beginning or the middle.

Ultimately, it will take years to know whether that new pilot program, art project, environmental regulation, medical advance, or other change will be judged kindly by history. Even if we're starting to see positive results today, we don't know what will happen next... and that's the reason I find myself laughing so often at the trite endings I often hear in news stories (because the trite and vague ones are often true) or at the phony-sounding endings that try to draw conclusions from the insufficient facts presented in the story.

It's not something I've had to think about as much as a blogger, because I've decided that (at least as a tech blogger) it's enough to just lay out a series of facts and stop writing when I feel I've presented enough. But these aren't stories. I struggle as much as anyone with figuring out how to end narrative stories.

But I've been spending more leisure time with fiction recently, and I've found a few interesting approaches there.

One of the reasons I tend to enjoy TV shows more than movies these days is that I like the idea of fictional narratives that are open-ended... like life. Movies tend to have contrived endings that tie everything up in a neat bow. But even when a story comes to an end in a good TV program, it's really just the end of a chapter, and you know another chapter is coming next week... until it doesn't.

Unfortunately show sometimes get canceled before they have a chance to wrap anything up. This too is like life. You don't always get all the answers you're looking for before you move on, but it's still a deeply unsatisfying experience to watch a TV show that's been canceled, knowing that you're going to be left with unanswered questions when you work your way to the end.

Hulu recently started showing episodes of Charlie Jade, a TV show produced about 6 years ago that ended after one season. Most of the major plot lines were tied up by the end, but the writers had clearly planned a second season because there was a big reveal at the end that would have left fertile ground to keep exploring. I suppose in some ways that might be a truer, if less satisfying ending than one where there's nothing left to explain.

Because let's face it, what happens after you bring down the big corrupt organization, win the big game, or defeat the bad guy? Life doesn't end with happily ever after... things keep happening.

Every now and again I find myself frustrated with all the work I have to do and I daydream about early retirement. But it's not like I'd sit still forever. Sure, it'd be nice to read a few dozen books without work to distract me, but eventually I'd go stir crazy and try to find something else meaningful to occupy my days.

Earlier this year I read Lev Grossman's The Magicians. It attempts to take the idea of a world where magic exists to its logical extremes. Sure, in the Harry Potter books students have to go to school and take classes in order to learn how to use magic, but in The Magicians, the process of learning magic is far harder and more complicated than learning languages, algebra, or how to drive. Anyone can do those things, but it takes a ridiculous amount of hard work, both intellectually and physically, to get things right in Grossman's world.

Given how hard he makes it seem during the first half of the book, I was almost disappointed with how natural it seems to become for the characters as the story progresses beyond their school days. By the end of the book I wasn't sure I was looking forward to a sequel at all -- although Grossman made it clear that the story wasn't over -- whether you ever read a second book in the series or not.

That probably had as much to do with the fact that the protagonist was a jerk as it did with the conclusion of the story though. It's kind of disconcerting to read a story through the eyes of a character you don't like, even a you come to sympathize with him throughout the course of the story as he's hit by various highs and lows and seems to learn and grow a bit as a person.

It turns out The Magician King, the second book might be a much better story than the first. I say might, because I honestly can't decide. But instead of taking the difficulty of magic to its logical extremes, it takes two other things there: the idea of living with the knowledge that magic is real and the idea that stories really don't end.

Without giving away too much of the plot, one character struggles desperately to learn all the things learned in the first book without the aid of a magical university, while the other learns that the story doesn't end when you get to happily ever after -- but if you keep looking for more adventures you might have to deal with the consequences.

This book, which I finished last week has an excellent, if maddening ending. It leaves you wondering what happens next... and again kind of has me hoping that there isn't a sequel, because I don't think it's necessary. There are a million possible ways the story could continue to unfold -- just like real life.

I found myself enjoying The Magician King more than I'd expected I would and a large part of that is that it answered the question of "what comes next" after the first book in a way that felt real... and difficult... and painful. I'm not sure it was a fun book to read, but as a thought experiment it worked quite nicely -- even though it presents a world I'm not sure I'd want to live in for a lengthy period of time.

One of my favorite TV programs had two pretty great endings. At the end of season 5 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, there was an ending with a bit of finality to it as the show left its original network and ran the risk of permanent cancellation -- but even the death of a major character which completed a story arc didn't answer the question of what the world would be like after that death.

The series did come back and two seasons later there was another conclusion -- this time with a much more open nod to the idea that anything is possible next. It's not surprising that the producers eventually decided to continue the story in comic book form, but even if they hadn't the story would have continued in the minds of many fans because there were so many places for the story to continue going.

Anyway, this is just something I've been thinking about a lot thanks to the aforementioned TV programs and novels I've been consuming recently (and I'm not a fan of passive consumption where you don't at least take a little time to shout at the author or do a little thinking when you put down the book or shut off the TV)... so I don't have any real good point to make at the end of this particular blog post. I just wanted to leave a note pointing out that good endings are tough... because unlike reality, stories that have authors and readers inevitably have to end somewhere... and they usually end on unsatisfying notes.

Google Panda 2.3 and recovery

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 16:11:00 +0000

The good news is that Liliputing appears to have recovered much (but not all) of its search engine traffic. The bad news is that I have no idea if any of the hundreds of changes I made to the site had any impact at all, or if I just wasted an awful lot of time.

For the past few years Liliputing has been one of the top resources on the web for news and information about netbooks, tablets, and other affordable mobile computers. But a few months ago search engine traffic started falling off a cliff, and the changes seemed to coincide with Google's launch of a new search algorithm code-named Panda.

While Panda was designed to help separate high quality web sites from low, there are plenty of examples of false positives. I could be biased, but I'm pretty sure Liliputing was among them. The site is full of original articles including dozens of the most detailed computer reviews you'll find anywhere on the web. We never copy and paste content from other sites, and in fact, I've avoided even posting press releases or block quotes longer than a few words.

Anyway, I've been documenting the steps I've taken to try to convince Google that Liliputing is a "high quality" website -- and in fact, some of those changes really have improved the user experience, so I'm glad I made them. For instance, there's no reason you should be redirected to a new URL every time you click on an image in a gallery.

A week ago I started to notice that search engine referrals were close to what they had been a few months ago. I was cautiously optimistic, but figured I'd wait a few days before declaring victory.

The last few changes I'd made to the Liliputing really seemed like they might have made a difference. I reduced the number of links in the sidebar, header, and other areas of the site so that overall there were far fewer links on each page. I used Google's new tool for specifying how URL parameters should be handled to reduce pages that were essentially indexed twice. And I identified every post on the site that had fewer than 100 words and either added a "noindex" attribute or updated the post with new information or more details.

That last change was one I'd been putting off because it just seemed so daunting for a website with more than 7,000 posts. As it turns out, I only had to edit a few hundred articles -- and when I did, I realized that some weren't just light on information -- they were also outdated.

That little exercise has changed the way I think about blogging. While Liliputing is still largely a news site, every time I write a new article I try to imagine what someone would think if they found this post 3 years from now. Would it still offer useful information?

Because search engines don't surface a series of posts in chronological order the way they were written, you have to assume that it's possible someone will find your article with absolutely no context. That means you should give them enough information in each post to fully understand the topic -- or at least links to follow to get more information.

This doesn't mean you need to post a full review each and every time you mention a tablet or netbook. But it does mean it's not enough to just mention the model number and assume everyone knows what you're talking about.

Anyway, so when traffic started to pick up almost immediately after making those recent changes, I figured I'd finally cracked the code. After all, Google's only real advice for dealing with Panda so far had come down to: Write better content, and get rid of low quality content.

Today I found out that Google rolled out a Panda 2.3 update at pretty much the exact time that Liliputing was regaining its search engine traffic.

So while I'm glad I made many of the changes I did, it's possible web traffic would have recovered anyway.

It's also possible that the only reason Liliputing has started to recover is because I made those changes and Google rolled out an update to Panda which recognized the changes.

From what I understand, Google pushes out Panda updates manually. So even if I made dramatic changes to my site in early July, just days after the Panda 2.2 update rolled out in June, Google may not have noticed until Panda 2.3 was ready to go.

In other words... I wish I could tell you I've cracked the Panda code. But I'm not sure that I have. All I know is that Liliputing is doing better than it was a week or two ago... but that the biggest thing I've learned is that we need to continue building an audience of loyal readers by broadening the scope of coverage and using social media and other tools so that we get enough traffic to keep the site running even when search traffic is on the low side.

Liliputing still hasn't had a full recovery. I'll be honest, I never monitored my traffic stats closely enough before Panda to know how much of my traffic came from Google and how much came from other sources. But overall traffic is a bit lower than it used to be. That could be from a decline in Google search. It could be due to the fact that I've essentially told Google not to even bother looking at hundreds of pages on my site. Or it could just be due to the fact that traffic tends to dip in the summer anyway.

Overall, something's changed and it would be nice if I knew if I had anything to do with it.

As I watched my visits and page views climb over the past week, I imagined I'd write a post this weekend declaring victory and explaining how I managed to show Google that my site was a high quality site (which isn't the same thing as gaming the system or tricking Panda... because Liliputing really does have thousands of pages of high quality, well-researched, original articles).

Instead all I can say is I guess I'm happy that things are improving and if you're lucky and/or worked hard, maybe you'll see the same thing on your site?

Update: So it occurs to me that there's a framework under which this all makes sense: Google is intentionally trying to kill SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

That would explain why there have been so few stories about publishers making changes to their sites and then recovering after they were hit by Panda. It would also explain why most recovery stories that we do hear seem to happen at a moment when Google is rolling out a major algorithm change: because it's not us... it's Google.

In other words, Google doesn't want webmasters to make specific changes to their sites in order to make their content easier for search engines to discover. It's Google's job to find the best content, no matter how your web pages are formatted. Instead, Google wants publishers to focus on creating good content. Period.

Which is all fine and dandy. But when Google changes its algorithm in a way so that publishers that have been cranking out good content for years are suddenly penalized, the only rational response is to try to figure out why they've been penalized and take specific steps to get back into Google's good graces.

I never paid much attention to SEO before Panda. I figured if I continued to publish content that was of value to my readers, Google would find it and direct even more readers to it. Once Panda hit, I suddenly had to start looking for SEO best practices.

If you'd asked me a few months ago if I would be OK with Google rolling out an update that specifically makes it tougher for people to game the system using SEO practices, I would have said sure. But if you had told me that the way Google was going to do this was to make dramatic changes to try to identify high quality sites from low quality sites and that there was a decent chance that some websites would get caught on the seventh circle of Hell by accident for up to 5 months, I probably would have felt differently.

Infestation

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 22:59:00 +0000

The battle for the rooftop garden continues. While my green bean plants are still shorter than I would have expected at this time of the season, they're generating some full-sized and rather tasty beans.

The Pai-Tsai, on the other hand, seems like a lost cause. I had hoped that I could find a hot weather alternative to bok choy to grow in the rooftop, but it appears there were some bugs waiting for me to make that same decision. They've mounted a pretty serious assault on these Asian greens.

The bugs could be aphids, but honestly, I'm new enough at this that I'm having a hard time identifying them. I'm going to try spraying some more garlic water on the leaves and then I'll probably give some soap and water a try, thanks to a suggestion from +Laura Garnick. But I won't be too disappointed if nothing edible comes of this experiment. After all, it was just an experiment.

I have several pepper plants growing and they all seem to be putting on some extra leaves after a long period of just sitting around and doing nothing. But the only one that's really starting to grow peppers is the plant I picked up at the start of the growing season from the GreensGrow nursery. The kids I started from seed indoors are taking things at a slower pace.

The green onions I planted this spring are also finally starting to look like food. I really thought they should have matured by now, but it turns out things never move at the pace I expect in my little rooftop garden.

The beans of summer

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 22:43:00 +0000

There's still a fair bit of greenery on the rooftop, but the snow peas, bok choy, and spinach are done for the season, and the green beans, peppers, and pai-tsai are starting to come in... but not as quickly as I would like. I think that's going to be a recurring theme on the rooftop garden until I figure out how to provide a little more protection from the sun and a better watering method.

I may also need to find pots with better drainage -- I realized after watching green bean leaves shrivel up and turn yellow/brown and pepper leaves fold up at the edges that I may have been overwatering.

Anyway, I got enough snow peas to make 2-3 meals. Hopefully I'll get a better yield when I try again this fall. The few peas that we did get were absolutely delicious though so it was worth the time and effort to grow them, I guess. Oh yeah, and it was also a learning experience.

In late May I pre-sprouted some green bean seeds and then stuck them in the soil. They shot up like nobody's business within just a few days.

Just a day or two later they started to look like this:

And then this:

For a little while the beans were living peacefully with the bok choy and snow peas in a container garden that was overflowing with green.

I started seeds in two of the pots while planting peppers in two others. This is what the garden looked like in late May when I had peas, peppers, beans, bok choy, scallions, and strawberries all growing:

A little over a month has passed since I took that photo, and the rooftop looks quite different now. The beans and peppers have taken over. I've removed the snow peas and placed the stalks around the soil for mulch -- although there's probably not really enough of them to make any impact.

The beans which shot up quickly haven't grown nearly as tall as I would have expected. I suspect that might have something to do with my having overwatered them early on. The brown leaves are starting to give way to healthier looking green foliage, but I would have expected the plants to grow more before flowering.

Still, it looks like we've got a few tiny green beans headed our way. I'm not holding out hope to get a huge crop, but I'd like to be able to cook at least a meal or two.

One of the pepper plants has also started to grow a real pepper, and it looks like a few more may be on the way.

Again, the plant is shorter than I would have expected. I might have to do some homework to figure out if it will continue growing once it bears fruit or if there's any advantage to snipping off the tiny little peppers before it drains too many of the plant's resources.

As promised on the package, the pai-tsai greens I bought at the Asian supermarket do seem to be thriving in the summer, unlike the bok choy I grew this spring, which is a cool weather vegetable. Unfortunately I don't seem to be the only one who's noticed. The leaves are riddled with holes that appear to have been chewed by bugs.

I've been spraying the plans periodically with garlic-infused water, but I might have to look for something a bit stronger. I'd like to keep things organic, so I don't plan to use any pesticides though.

The leaf-to-hole ratio is actually getting better as the plants grow. When they were tiny, it seemed like the leaves were covered in chewed-up holes. It looks like as they grow larger the bugs are having a harder time keeping up. Or maybe the garlic water really is doing the trick.

I'm not sure if I'll actually end up eating any of the pai-tsai at this point, but I'm trying to decide if it's good to have something that the bugs like to eat hanging around so that they won't chew on the peppers and beans, or if I should get rid of the leafy greens so that maybe the leaf-eaters will just go away.

The onions are continuing to grow in... but I think I may have bunched them too close together initially. They seem to perk up a bit when I thin them out a bit. I probably need to do more of that.

So far the summer season has been more about learning and experimenting than harvesting and eating. But the summer is still young.

Kicking the Panda: Steps I've taken to try to deal with Google's latest algorithm update

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 19:53:00 +0000

Over the past few months I've made a number of changes to Liliputing and Mobiputing in an effort to recover from a loss of Google search engine traffic following the company's Panda update. Here are some of the things I've done. You can find more details and the back story below.

Remove some web pages from Google's search results and cache.
Switch from a full text RSS feed to a partial feed to reduce the number of sites automatically posting every article from my web site on another web page.
Send DMCA takedown notices to sites that have been scraping my content.
Add "nofollow" attributes to all affiliate links on my web sites.
Remove all broken links and fix links that redirect to another page.
Use an SEO plugin to block certain web pages from Google.
Change image galleries so that instead of opening a new web page with a new URL and very little content, you can now view large images on the same page.
Remove the Liliputing Product Database (at least temporarily).

A few months ago I discovered that traffic to my web sites was dropping. The change coincided with Google's Panda update which was designed to identify "content farms" which crank out high-volume, low-quality content. Unfortunately a number of web sites that produce 100% original content have been caught in the crossfire, because the truth is that Google's computer algorithms can't always tell the difference between the original source of an article and the hundreds of sites ripping off the content.

I've tried to take a Zen approach toward the traffic loss, understanding that it's not as if Google owes us any traffic at all. More than 50% of traffic to Liliputing has consistently come from Google, and if the search engine determines there's a better source of information than my web site, so be it. I'll just work my hardest to find other ways to generate traffic and hope that Google notices what the people who subscribe to my RSS feed, Twitter and Facebook pages, and just regularly stop by to participate in the comments already know: there are few places that cover the affordable mobile tech space as extensively as Liliputing.

Unfortunately, what I've realized over the past few months as traffic has continued to fall, is that without Google, my traffic and revenue wouldn't disappear altogether -- but it would be much harder to sustain Liliputing and Mobiputing. Right now running these web sites is my full time job and I have a few side projects. If Google decided to stop sending any traffic, I'd probably have to find a different full time job and treat the web sites as a side gig -- which would necessarily decrease the quality of coverage.

Anyway, Zen-like aspirations aside, I've been struggling frantically over the past few month to identify reasons why Google could be grouping my web sites with the content farms and delivering lower traffic. My first big breakthrough came when I submitted a request to Google for reconsideration.

While most web sites that have lost traffic due to Panda have been affected purely by an algorithmic change, it turns out that Google employees have also taken manual action against some web sites. Liliputing was apparently one of them. I submitted reconsideration requests for both of my web sites, and a week letter I got responses letting me know that there was no manual action taken against Mobiputing, but there was one for Liliputing.

Google doesn't actually tell you why the manual action was taken, only that it was and that your web site is therefore considered low-quality. It's often the case that a few bad pages on your site can lower the ranking of all pages on your site, and with more than 7,000 articles on Liliputing I didn't relish the idea of looking back through each one to identify potential problems. But I also didn't think I'd have to. I wrote most of those articles myself, and I have complete trust in the handful of people who have contributed other articles to the site. The problem must lie elsewhere, I figured.

So the first thing I did was seek out help from the Google Webmaster Forums. Almost immediately some helpful folks identified something I hadn't noticed: a spammy link to an adult web site in the footer of every page on Liliputing. A few years ago my web site was hacked and I had thought that I managed to remove all of the code that was injected into the site. I was wrong.

I removed the link from the footer and spent the next few days looking through every file in my site's theme and running scans on my database looking for several problems. I submitted a reconsideration request with Google again and waited.

Seven days later I got a reply. My request was rejected yet again. Maybe the problem wasn't the spam link at all?

That's certainly a possibility. But I noticed that when I ran a Google search for that term with the qualifier site:liliputing.com, thousands of pages were still showing up. Google takes a long time to completely crawl and index web sites, and it takes an even longer time to detect changes. Even though the link had been removed, it's possible that Google's computers hadn't noticed -- even though I explicitly stated that the link had been removed in my request.

So I might have to wait weeks or months before Google removed all references to the spammy link -- but it was also possible that the problem lied elsewhere. So I began an effort to identify other potential problems and take action. Over the past two months I've tried about 8 different strategies for improving traffic and getting Liliputing taken off of Google's hit list.

About 7 weeks after submitting my first request for reconsideration, Google tells me that the manual action against the site has been removed -- although it may take some time for Liliputing to be re-indexed, and there's no guarantee that traffic will improve because the latest Google algorithmic changes could be the real problem.

In fact, it's occurred to me that the manual action could be related to the spam link to the adult web site which may have been around for several years. While it's possible that Google didn't notice the link until the Panda update rolled out, it's also possible that I've been blogging with a handicap for years and I simply didn't notice it until I submitted my first request to Google a few months ago. Google provides broad guidelines for web site quality, but it's not easy to find specific information about why an individual site receives high rankings or low.

Anyway, traffic hasn't really recovered yet, but it's nice to know that Google has at least decided that Liliputing isn't a purveyor of "low quality" content. After reviewing Google's guidelines and reading hundreds of articles from other web publishers trying to figure out how Google works now that the game seems to have changed dramatically, here are 8 things I've attempted to do with my web sites. Some of them are probably good things to do whether they help my Google rankings or not. Other changes I'm a little less happy about, but overall they should help me focus on the core business of producing news and information articles for my two mobile technology web sites.

1. Removing web pages from Google's search results and cache

When I noticed that a site:liliputing.com search on Google was still turning up web pages that used to include a spam link in the footer, I decided to help Google speed up its efforts to re-index my web site. You can't really control how quickly Google scans every page on your web site, but you can identify pages that you want to remove from Google.

So I visited Google's Webmaster tools, opened the "Site configuration" area, and found the "Remove URL" option under "Crawler access."

From here, you can enter an individual URL and ask Google to remove it from search results and from Google's cache. If the web page has actually been removed from your web site, Google will stop sending people to that page. If it still exists, Google will probably eventually find the page again but it will re-index the URL so that any text which is no longer on the page will no longer be listed in Google.

It can take up to 24 hours for Google to remove a URL and it can take much longer than that for it to re-appear, but my hope was that Google would realize that I really had removed the spam link if I encouraged the search engine to remove enough URLs. Over the past few weeks I've removed over 600 pages... many of those links were also to pages that I probably shouldn't have let Google index in the first place, such as links to web pages that really only showed a picture or links to tag pages. I'll talk more about this in a moment.

2. Switching to a partial RSS feed

One of the things I started to notice when my traffic was dipping was that sites which were copying and pasting full articles from Liliputing onto their own web sites were starting to rank more highly in Google search results than Liliputing.

I've never been the sort of person to keep track of specific keywords that drive traffic to my site, but I do have a sense of a handful of web pages which have always received a lot of traffic from Google searches.

What I did notice is that if I copied and pasted a chunk of text -- say about two sentences -- from any recent article on Liliputing into Google, my web site would show up about halfway down the Google search results page. Sits which were "scraping" my content were showing up in the first, second, third, and sometimes fourth, fifth, and sixth places.

I used to ignore scraper sites because Google had always done a good job of ignoring them for me. But that seems to have changed with Panda.

Most scraper sites steal content the lazy way. They simply subscribe to a publisher's RSS feed and automatically post the entire contents of each post onto their web site -- sometimes first stripping out all links so that even though my RSS feed includes a link on every post pointing back to my web site, sometimes the scraped content would provide little evidence that it originated elsewhere.

So I reluctantly switched my RSS feed from one which shows the full text of an article to one which shows just the first few sentences.

I'm not a huge fan of partial RSS feeds and I've offered a full feed since launching Liliputing in April, 2008. But by switching to a partial feed, lazy scrapers are now only able to get the first few sentences of any article. A couple of scrapers are a little more ambitious and seem to have found other ways to continue copying full text, but this move has cut down on the amount of Liliputing content showing up on other web pages.

Many observers say that the Panda update has caused Google to penalize sites publishing "duplicate content," which covers both content that has been published multiple times on the same web site, and content which appears in multiple places on the web. For this reason, switching to a partial feed could possibly reduce the amount of duplicate content and reduce the likelihood of other web sites ranking above Liliputing in search results.

3. Sending DMCA takedown notices to scraper sites

In mid-June Google rolled out refined version of Panda which was meant to deal with the scraper problem -- my web sites were hardly the only ones with this problem. But while I've noticed fewer web sites outranking Liliputing with text copied and pastes from my site, there are still a few that consistently show up higher in search results than my sites -- where the content originated.

I've also noticed little change in search traffic since the Panda 2.2 update rolled out. It might just be a matter of time before we see any measurable results. But it may also be that the scraper site rankings are a symptom of something else Panda is doing and not a problem in its own right.

Before I came to this almost-conclusion though, I started doing something else I never thought I would have to do: sending DMCA takedown notices to sites that were scraping my content without permission.

US copyright law is an interesting thing. I'm not sure it makes sense for works to be protected under copyright for more than 70 years after an author dies... but I do appreciate the fact that you don't need to take extraordinary steps to claim ownership of something you created. Basically throwing a note on your web site saying that you're the original creator and being able to hold up some supporting evidence if anyone ever asks you to prove it is all you need.

When Google did a good job of noticing that Liliputing and Mobiputing were the original sources of content showing up on unauthorized web sites, I didn't care all that much about this and figured that if people wanted to use my content for their own purposes, that was their own business. Once the scrapers started to actually grab potential traffic that would have otherwise been coming to my web site at a rate that seemed like it could actually threaten my livelihood, I took a less kind view and at the advice of a friend I signed up for a membership with a web site called DMCA.com which makes it easy to track web sites which are taking your content and send takedown notices formatted to comply with US law.

It's tough to find contact information for the publishers of many scraper web sites -- but it's often much easier to figure out where the web site is hosted and send a note to the web host. The web host typically doesn't want to run the risk of a lawsuit, so they'll probably either get in touch with the publisher (they have to have contact information) or remove the content on their own.

You can also send DMCA notices to Google search and Google AdSense in some situations which can cause web sites to be removed from Google search listings, or even to have their Google AdSense accounts suspended if the publisher doesn't remove infringing content.

This whole process is time consuming and may really not make much difference. You can only send one DMCA takedown notice per URL. If a web site has copied hundreds of articles from your page, that means you'd have to send hundreds of takedown notices to get all of those pages removed. But hopefully by sending a few you can let publishers know that you're willing to fight and that the easiest thing to do is to remove your content from their pages.

I was a much happier blogger when I didn't have to worry about this at all, because Google did it for me. I'm hopeful that eventually that will be true again and I may stop sending notices and switch back to full text RSS feeds. But for now, these are two of the ways to help Google find original content -- by helping to remove the unoriginal content from the web.

4. Add "nofollow" attribute to affiliate links

Google doesn't look too kindly on web sites that have little to no content except for paid links to other web sites or affiliate links to retail sites. While I don't think Liliputing fits this category since we publish a huge amount of original articles with news and information about mobile tech as well as product reviews, there are some individual URLs on my web site that could look to Google like low quality content with long lists of affiliate links.

I regularly publish a list of daily deals on netbooks, tablets, and other mobile tech bargains. These posts tend to include a number of affiliate links, because I need to make a living, but that information is disclosed on our advertising page, and these pages have actually become some of the most popular because the only items I feature are products that are on sale. Some have affiliate links. Some don't. All are offered for below their normal price.

It turns out Google couldn't care less if you have affiliate links. But since Google uses links between web sites to determine which pages are are most well trusted, a high concentration of paid links could mess up Google's search results. So what the company recommends you do is add a rel="nofollow" attribute to affiliate links. This means that when Google indexes your page, it won't place any real weight on that link.

In other words, links that are nofollowed don't add any link juice. People can click on them as much as they like, but Google doesn't really pay much attention to them.

So I found a way to identify virtually every affiliate link posted in the 7,000 articles on my web site, and add rel="nofollow" to each one. You can read more about how I did that in an article I wrote last month.

Before I did this, I actually briefly removed every single "deals of the day" post from the site... but this didn't seem to make a difference, so I'm happier with the nofollow solution. I brought most of the previously deleted posts back online -- but not all of them because I took too long to come to this solution and misplaced some of the older articles. I have backups that I could restore, but it would be a lot of work to go through to bring articles that are mostly outdated anyway back online. I just hate deleting any published content from the web.

5. Remove all broken links and fix many redirects

Google Webmaster Tools isn't just good for removing links from Google's index. You can also use Google's tools to identify problems with your web site -- including broken links. It turns out that when you publish a web site for more than 3 years, many of the sites you link to may change URLS or cease to exist, which means anybody visiting your web page may click on a link only to encounter an error message.

While Google will point out many broken links, it's not very easy to use Google's tools to identify individual pages with errors or to fix broken links in batch jobs.

Liliputing, it turns out, had thousands of these broken links. There's an excellent tool that you can run from a desktop computer called Xenu which scans your web site to find a list of broken links. It can take hours or days to scan a large web site, but the tool is very powerful.

If you're using WordPress though, there's an even better option. It's a plugin called Broken Link Checker which not only identifies links, but lets you remove broken links or make other changes in batch jobs. It will also find links with redirects. For instance, I had thousands of links on my web site that were listed as www.liliputing.com, but they redirected to liliputing.com. That redirect takes a little extra time and server power, so removing the redirects may or may not help my Google search rankings -- but it's definitely a good thing to do.

I absolutely love this plugin, but there are a few problems. First, even with all of your broken links laid out in a simple format, it can take a long time to go through and fix them all -- and there are some false positives, so if you don't check carefully you could remove links that aren't broken at all.

Second, the plugin uses a lot of processing power, so if you don't have a good web hosting plan, you may not want to use it at all.

Anyway, long story short, I removed thousands of broken links and fixed thousands of redirects. I'm not sure I've caught them all -- and I'm not sure how much Google cares. But the upshot is even if it does absolutely nothing to help me recover from Panda, that's a few thousand less links that visitors could click only to be directed to a dead end.

6. Using an SEO plugin to prevent certain web pages from appearing in Google results

There are roughly a gazillion WordPress plugins that are designed to help your SEO or Search Engine Optimization in one way or another. Historically I haven't bothered using any of them, because Google never had a hard time finding my content. SEO, as far as I was concerned, was writing high quality, easy to understand content for my readers and giving blog posts titles that were descriptive rather than clever.

Then Panda hit, and I read all sorts of advice about reducing duplicate content by doing things like adding noindex attributes to archive pages. That way Google won't look at pages such as liliputing.com/tag/netbook, liliputing.com/category/1, liliputing.com/page/1, or liliputing.com/author/brad and see the same content on each -- and on the individual article.

What's the easiest way to do that? Install an SEO plugin.

I settled on Yoast WordPress SEO because I've had good experiences with other plugins from this developer, and because it offers a number of options that seem to meet my needs.

In the Indexation Rules section I blocked access to the site's search results pages and admin pages -- which are already blocked in my robots.txt file, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to double up. Then I started tackling additional areas and added noindex to author archives, date-based archives, category archives, and archive subpages.

7. Alter image galleries

One of the things people seem to think can lead to a low quality judgment from Google is pages with thin content and a high ad-to-content ratio. I never intentionally created web pages that match that description, but it turns out that indirectly I created many of these pages because that's exactly what WordPress creates when you upload an image -- particularly when you use the gallery feature.

When I uploaded multiple images for a single post and created a gallery with thumbnail icons at the bottom, it allowed users to click on any picture to view a larger image. Each of those images would open on a new page... but you don't just see the image on those pages. You see the Liliputing theme, complete with a header, navigation bar, list of featured articles, and advertisements. What you don't see is any article text. This page isn't really all that useful as far as search engines are concerned.

Unfortunately, WordPress doesn't use a standard URL structure for these image-only pages, so there's no simple way to add a noindex attribute using the robots.txt file. But I did discover a couple of neat tricks to avoid this -- and to make my image galleries look a whole lot prettier.

First, I installed the Lightbox Gallery plugin for WordPress. Now whenever someone clicks on an image in a gallery, instead of opening a new page, a full sized image appears on top of the current page while the background goes dark. Not only does this prevent visitors from going to a pointless new URL, but it also allows me to post larger images to my gallery since I don't have to worry about the width of the content column. I used to only be able to upload images that were 500px wide. Now I can upload much larger images which makes me happy, whether there's an SEO benefit or not.

But just because clicking on the image doesn't take you to a standalone image page doesn't mean that WordPress doesn't create one. It's still there, waiting for Google to discover it... but there's a fix for that.

I used the the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin's "Permalinks" feature to "redirect attachment URLs to parent post URL." Now if someone actually does manage to find the individual image URL, they'll be redirected to the URL for the article associated with the image.

8. Remove the Product Database

One of the most popular posts I wrote during the early days of Liliputing was a "comprehensive list of low-cost ultraportables." This was back when there were only a couple dozen netbooks to keep track of. The number continued to grow though, and so I created a database with detailed specifications for each model I came across.

Managing the database got a little beyond my ability, so I partnered with UMPC Portal, jkkmobile, and a number of other mobile tech web sites on a much more product database with netbook, laptop, and tablet information.

I've always felt that the database provided a useful resource for readers looking to compare specs between multiple devices. But I haven't done a great job of keeping the database up to date or of fleshing out the individual product pages with detailed reviews, opinions, and other specifications.

That's left many of the pages with a high ad-to-content ratio, and because specifications vary so little from one netbook to another, there is a lot of repetitive content on these pages.

It never occurred to me that this could be a problem until I looked at the traffic statistics for the product database and realized that visits to the product database were dropping at an even faster rate than those to the main web site.

Last week I made the reluctant decision to take the product database offline entirely. It's possible it could return one day in another form. For instances, instead of a sub-page of Liliputing, all of the partner web sites could link to a single, central web page where the product database lives.

Inconclusive conclusion

A few days after removing the product database I got my note from Google letting me know that the manual action against my web site had been revoked. I still don't know whether the problem all along was the spam link, or if the problem had to do with the product database. Perhaps it was the way Google was indexing my content, or all the broken links.

In order to scientifically test for each of these things, I would have to make one change at a time and wait to see if it made any difference. Since it's not clear how long it takes Google to react to changes though, (it could be days, weeks, or even months), there's no way to know how long you would have to wait after making each change. Just going through each of the changes listed in this article could easily take a year -- which is a long time to wait while watching traffic fall.

In other words, if my traffic does recover to any degree now that Google has removed the low quality label from my site, I may never know what change or combination of changes led to it.

I suspect that the manual action alone didn't lead to the decline in traffic. I've been told that Mobiputing wasn't under any sort of manual penalty, but traffic to that web site has dropped as well. Part of that may actually be related to the drop in Liliputing traffic, since Liliputing is one of the biggest referrers to Mobiputing. But I'm hopeful that some of the changes I made to each site will address items that had nothing to do with the manual action.

I've learned a lot about search engines over the past few months -- but I've also learned that there's a lot that I don't know -- and a lot that so-called SEO experts don't know either. But there's something else fascinating I learned: even while acting under a penalty, a huge portion of Liliputing's traffic comes from search. It used to be about 60 percent. Now it's closer to 40 percent. Google still does send traffic my way. If it didn't, there's little doubt that at this point I wouldn't be able to make enough money to pay the bills.

There are thousands of loyal readers who visit Liliputing every day without being sent there by a search engine. But it takes more than thousands of loyal readers to generate enough traffic and revenue to make a news and information blog profitable. The exact figure will vary depending on the topics covered, the types of advertising or other monetization employed, web hosting expenses, and so on, but in my case, it looks like it takes tens of thousands.

I've created Facebook and Twitter accounts for each web site, and there are a growing number of people using each to interact with the web sites. I'm making more of an active effort to alert other bloggers when I have exclusive stories that may be of interest -- something I used to do much more frequently toward the beginning of my blogging career, but something which I've been a bit less diligent about doing recently.

Will that be enough? It's too soon to tell. At this point all I can do -- and all most web publishers who find themselves in similar situations can do -- is to make the changes they think will help, continue publishing high quality, original content, and in the meantime, try to find ways to continue attracting readers without relying as heavily on Google.

Update: I forgot to mention a few other minor changes:

I use the KB Advanced RSS Widget to display the latest headlines from Liliputing in the sidebar of Mobiputing and vice versa. In both cases, I added rel="nofollow" to the formatting options.
In an effort to reduce the number of ads on the site (to increase page load speeds and have a better content-to-ad ratio) I've temporarily removed a Chitika sidebar unit. This ad only displayed to search engine traffic, but the Javascript code was always present.
When I removed the product database, I also removed sidebar widgets showing the last 5 entries and the top 5 entries, thus cutting down the number of links and images loading in the sidebar.
I previously had several hundred posts titled "Deals of the Day." I went back and manually added a date to each of these posts so that instead you see something like "Deals of the Day (6-24-11)."
I disabled trackbacks.

Update 7/8/2011

I haven't noticed any real impact after making all of the changes listed above, but the decline in traffic appears to have slowed. I'm hoping to hold steady and perhaps increase Facebook and Twitter referral traffic and reach out to blogs and web sites in other niches with story tips.

One of the criteria Google undoubtedly uses to drive traffic to web sites is the number of links from other web sites to your domain and to specific pages. When Google Panda rolled out the search engine slapped thousands if not millions of web sites with a bad panda label... and that includes many of the sites that were not only linking to Liliputing but also copying our articles in full without permission. In other words, many of the backlinks which may have once helped us are now hurting us. So it's time to start building new links from high quality sites.

The only real strategy I have for doing this is to act like a younger site that's hungrier for success. It occurs to me that we spent a lot more time writing long how-to articles and other features in the early days. While we still regularly publish detailed reviews, there are plenty of other web sites doing the same thing. So we need to publish more articles that really help us stand out.

This isn't to say the burden should entirely be mine. Google is still regularly giving first-place search results rankings to web sites that offer nothing more than a link to Liliputing. Somehow Panda appears to have penalized Liliputing but still appears to recognize the quality of our content. Hopefully this will change, either because of actions I've taken or actions Google will eventually take.

It also occurred to me today that a strategy I took to build traffic when launching the site might have been working against me. Liliputing was founded in April, 2008. But before I launched Liliputing I was running a blog called Eee Site. I had already built a loyal following of readers interested in news about Asus Eee PC netbooks, but I wanted to expand the scope of my coverage so I launched a new site which was focused on small computers and not just Asus netbooks.

I identified some of the most popular stories on Eee Site and copied and pasted them into Liliputing. I then deleted the bulk of the article from Eee Site and posted a "continue reading at Liliputing" link on each. This led to a few duplicated paragraphs on each site. The header for Eee Site also directed people to Liliputing.

That seemed like a good idea at the time, and in fact I did the same thing when launching Mobiputing. But now that Google is taking a firm stance against duplicate content, I wonder if doing this with a few articles on Eee Site, Liliputing, and Mobiputing might have been problematic -- especially since Eee Site hasn't been updated in three years and now has a Google Page Rank of just 2.

Today I went and deleted a number of articles that had been displaying the same text on multiple sites.

I had also been following a process I'd seen at some other major blog networks by doing the same thing even with recent articles. When I published a story on Mobiputing that I thought would be of interest to Liliputing readers I copied the first few paragraphs to Liliputing and suggested visitors "continue reading at Mobiputing." Today I deleted all of these posts as well.

We'll see if that has any more impact than anything else I've already done. Facebook and Twitter traffic do appear to be up a tiny bit since I created pages for each site and made social sharing buttons easier to find on each article.

Update: 7/17/11

Nope, removing those cross-linked posts last week doesn't seem to have made a difference. Today's project: I'm adding noindex, nofollow attributes to all posts that contain 100 words or fewer. There are more of these than I would have expected... but that's what happens when you run a site for a few years and don't pay that much attention to post length.

A quick glance at Google Analytics suggests that some of these short posts that are more than a year old have received only a handful of page views over the past 12 months -- or in some cases, no page views at all. Still, I hate to delete content from the site altogether without good reason, so I'm going to try noindexing the articles instead.

Update: 7/23/11

This week I took a few more steps:

Taking advantage of a new function in Google Webmaster Tools, I let Google know it should ignore certain URL parameters which didn't affect the content of a web site. This prevents Google from counting a single web page multiple times and considering it duplicate content. These parameters show up when someone clicks a link from Twitter, an RSS reader, or other third party service that I have no control over.
I also installed SEO Site Tools for Google Chrome and paid attention to some of the suggestions it made for my web site: for instance, decreasing the number of links on the home page.
That plugin also recommended checking my site against the W3C Validator, and I did manage to detect a couple of errors in Liliputing's code that were easily fixed.

Last night I started to see the first signs of a possible recovery. Search queries that used to drive a fair amount of traffic to my site started working again. This morning the share of traffic to Liliputing coming from Google is the highest it's been in months.

It's too early to say whether this will lead to a full, or even large recovery. But I'm cautiously optimistic. I'm still experiencing some issues after having been booted from Google News, but I'm working on that too. That might be a whole other blog post though.

I also brought the Liliputing Product Database back online this week, but added "noindex" to the header so that Google won't crawl those pages. This doesn't seem to have had any adverse effects, but leaving the product database offline for a month also didn't seem to have any real positive effects. To be on the safe side I'll probably leave that noindex attribute in place for now.

Sweating to the...documentaries

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Fri, 20 May 2011 21:54:00 +0000

After watching the season 3 finale of Primeval last week and realizing the series continues to have plot holes large enough to drive a whole... planet through, I decided I needed to exercise my brain a bit more. So this week during my morning workout routine I've been cleaning off the DVR and watching programs I've recorded over the past few years thinking "hmm that sounds like something I might want to watch some day." It's good to remember that TV can actually be a thought provoking medium - especially at a time when it seems like every good new fictional drama or comedy gets almost as soon as it airs.

Monday: Lakshmi and Me

I started off the week with an Independent Lens documentary looking at class differences in modern day India. The filmmaker turns on the maid that has been working in her house for the past 5 years and in the process discovers a lot about her employee and herself and gains a complicated friendship in the process.

Tuesday: Stolen Childhoods

Filmmakers document the plight of child workers around the globe -- including underage workers on American farms. It's not just a third world problem.

Wendesday: Presumed Guilty

Two lawyers take cameras into a Mexican prison and courtroom to follow the uphill battle of an inmate to prove his innocence in a murder case -- despite a complete lack of physical evidence. There's a happy ending to this story, if you count spending more than 2 years in prison before being freed happy, but it appears happy ending are the exception rather than the rule.

Thursday: Children of the Amazon

A filmmaker who visited villagers in the Amazon 15 years earlier returns and finds the land, the people, and the way of life largely changed. It's remarkable how quickly things can change. The repercussions of deforestation are many, but this story takes a look at the human toll.

Friday: Philadelphia: The Great Experiment

Philadelphia businessman and occasional political candidate Sam Katz backed this series looking at Philadelphia's history. The pilot episode aired a while ago, looking at Philadelphia in the 1860s and 1870s. It has a Ken Burns-style documentary feel, but it feels a little disjointed, like the producers are trying to cram as much information as they can into each 25 minute episode rather than telling stories with complete narrative threads.

Spring harvest

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Tue, 17 May 2011 22:25:00 +0000

After a very tiny spinach harvest, it was nice to be able to pick a few bok choy leaves and cook them up with dinner last night knowing that there would still be enough more for at least a few additional meals.

I'm a little concerned that the growing season appears to be shorter on the rooftop than it would be on the ground. It's colder and windier on a roof three floors up than it is on the ground, so it takes a while for plants that normally like March weather to get started... and then when the spring hits the plants get blasted by bright sunlight without much shade. I'll try spinach again in the fall and see if I can do a better job, but it looks like bok choy is a little more tolerant of my rooftoop conditions.

Interestingly I have four large planters on the roof, and the bok choy and snow peas in one pot have been growing far larger than in other planters. I don't know if it's because of the soil mix, the sunlight, the shade, or some other variable, but through trial and error hopefully I can figure it out. All in all I'm just happy that anything is growing.

The snow peas are starting to flower, which means I should start to get actual pea pods soon.

The onions are growing much more slowly than I would have expected -- but I think I might need to thin the crop a bit to give these little guys more room to breathe. They may be called bunching onions, but the bunches are looking awfully tight at the moment.

I put some peppers outside about a week and a half ago to see what happens... two seem to be doing OK while a third plant looks like it might be dying... but I've got a few more plants in the house and I plan to bring them outside once it gets a little warmer -- and perhaps once I've harvested some snow peas. I may need to cut down some peas to make room for the peppers.

I also snuck a couple of green bean seeds into the planters last night. They're basically the warm-weather alternatives to snow peas. By the time they're big enough to start competing with the snow peas for space, it should be time to remove the peas anyway.

My goal is to grow peppers in two large planters and beans in the other two, while keeping some onions going in the middle for as long as they're happy.

Oh yeah, here's the small planter with strawberries I set up a few weeks ago. I don't have high hopes for a crop this year, but I'm hoping to get them settled so that we can get some berries next year. Once I really know what I'm doing I'm hoping to set up a potted blueberry bush as well -- but I might wait until we've got a deck on the roof before doing that, since a bush is likely to grow as high as 4 feet tall.

How to add a "nofollow" attribute to all affiliate links on your WordPress blog

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Sat, 14 May 2011 20:14:00 +0000

Google recently updates the algorithm it uses to rank web sites. One possible solution for this is to add the "nofollow" attribute to all paid or affiliate links on your web site. If you're using WordPress there's an easy way and a hard way to do this. I'll show you both below.

Background

In theory, the change is good news for honest web publishers and readers alike, since the stated goal of the project is to filter out paid links and "content farms" with high quantity, low quality articles.

Unfortunately a number of web sites got caught in the cross fire, despite publishing gobs of original content and staying away from paid links. It looks like there might be a relatively simple explanation for this: affiliate links.

There's a difference between a web site trying to game Google's search results by purchasing paid links on web sites and bloggers posting a little affiliate code when linking to a product on Amazon or another web site -- especially if it's a link they probably would have posted anyway. After all, why not earn a small commission when someone clicks your link to Amazon and makes a purchase if you were writing an article explaining that a new laptop is available or deeply discounted from the web store anyway?

The problem is that Google's algorithm isn't really able to tell the difference between these two types of links -- not without a little help. That's where the "nofollow" attribute comes in. Basically, by adding rel="nofollow" to a link, you're telling Google to ignore a link when making decisions regarding search results ranking.

In other words, one of the things Google looks for when determining which sites are the most trusted is the number of links to that web site from other web sites. If thousands of sites link to Amazon.com, then Amazon must be a relatively well trusted site. But if your web site is filled with links to Amazon and most of those links include affiliate code, Google might get the idea that you're being paid to promote Amazon and you're linking to the site for that reason, rather than because you trust it. Google might also decide that since you take money to post links, your site might not be all that trustworthy, and you can wave goodbye to traffic from Google.

By adding the nofollow attribute to any paid or affiliate links, you're telling Google to just go ahead and ignore those links, which means you're not being paid to goose anybody's search engine traffic.

How to add the nofollow attribute manually

To add a nofollow attribute, you'll want to take a look at the HTML view for your web site. Odds are your links will look something like this:

In order to add the nofollow, just insert rel="nofollow" so that the link now looks like this:

Seems easy enough, right? It is... if you only want to do this on all new links. But things get a lot more complicated if you already have hundreds, or even thousands of links that Google may be counting against you.

You could try to find each post on your site with affiliate links and edit them one by one, but there is an easier way.

How to add nofollow links to every WordPress post in a category using [de77] No-Follower

There's a free plugin for WordPress called [de77] No-Follower which lets you add a nofollow attribute to every link in every article in a certain category.

All you have to do is install the plugin, then go to the No Follower plugin settings, choose a category, and hit "save changes"

What I did was set up a new category in WordPress called "nofollow." You can do this by clicking the Posts menu, then the Category submenu and then simply filling out the add new category box.

Editing links this way is actually a good idea because most WordPress plugins you use to perform a batch job only work so long as the plugin is installed and functioning properly. But it could take weeks to identify and manually edit every link on the site, so I figured there had to be an easier way. I was right.

Putting it all together - Searching for affiliate links and adding "nofollow" attributes in batch edits

OK, so if you have hundreds of articles with affiliate links, it might be tricky finding them all. I had a head start because I've been running a series called "Deals of the Day" for the past few years, and every post was tagged "bargains," which made those posts easy to find. But it turns out there were hundreds of posts with affiliate links that weren't in the daily bargains articles. So here's the system I came up with to find and edit all affiliate links as quickly as possible.

First you'll want to identify words that show up regularly in your affiliate links. For instance, most of my Amazon affiliate links include "bradlindsdigi-20" in the URL. If you performed a search for that term in Google you wouldn't get very many results. But using my internal WordPress search, hundreds of articles showed up. If you use Commission Junction, LinkShare, or other popular affiliate networks you can do the same thing by searching for your publisher ID. Most LinkShare URLs, for instance, include the word "linksynergy."

You can also manually search for the names of stores you know you sometimes link to. Note that sites such as J&R and B&H are easiest to search for in WordPress if you change the ampersand so that instead you search for B&H and J&R.

Once you have [de77] No-Follower installed and have a list of affiliate link terms to search for, it's time to get started.

From the WordPress admin menu, select Posts.
Enter your first search term in the search box and then hit "Search Posts."
You're now looking at a page that should contain posts with your affiliate link code. You might want to double check a few posts to make sure though.

By default, WordPress will probably display 20 results. If you want to increase the results listed on each page, hit the "Screen Options" button near the top right side of the screen and change the number of posts. You probably won't want to set the number too high or you might run out of memory, but 30 or 40 should be safe.

Click the box next to "Date" to select every article shown on the page.
From the "Bulk Actions" drop-down box, choose "Edit" and then hit the "Apply" button.

You should see a list of posts to be edited and a number of options -- but the only one we care about right now is the category.
Check the box next to the category you want to add. In my case, I chose "nofollow."

Click the blue "update button."
It will take a moment for the page to refresh since you just asked WordPress to process 20 or more posts at once.
When it's done you should see a yellow bar with a message letting you know the posts have been updated.

If there are more than 20 posts, you should see navigation menus near the top right letting you move to the next page.
Repeat as necessary.

I identified about half a dozen affiliate link keywords for my web site and added every post I could find using those terms to the "nofollow" category. In the end, 852 of the 6982 posts published on Liliputing are now in the "nofollow" category which means that every link from each of those articles has been updated to include the "nofollow" tag.

Some of those articles include links that aren't affiliate links, so this method isn't perfect. But it takes a lot less time to perform batch jobs than to individually adjust the links on 852 different articles.

There are also WordPress plugins that would simply allow you to mark every single link on your entire web site as "nofollow," but that's not a very neighborly thing to do. Odds are if you publish a popular blog, you got where you did because people linked to your site regularly. How would you like it if every one of those web publishers told Google to ignore their links to your site?

I think identifying articles with affiliate links and marking just those articles as nofollow is a better approach.

First harvest

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Sat, 14 May 2011 16:55:00 +0000

The spinach I planted in March never got quite as big as I would have hoped, and this week the plants started to flower so I went ahead and started snipping before things got too far. What you're looking at is a very tiny bunch of baby spinach. It might be enough for one meal.

I have much higher hopes for the bok choy which is starting to come in nice and strong right now. The snow peas are also starting to flower so I should be able to start harvesting peas in the next week or two.

I've put out a few sweet pepper plants, even though the soil might still be a bit cold for them at night. Two plans are doing pretty well and one is struggling. I've got a few more plants indoors which I might put out after it gets a little warmer outside.

Last weekend we went out in search of strawberries to transplant, only to learn that it's actually quite late in the season to get strawberries started. Still, I did find two plants at the Home Depot which seemed reasonably healthy.They didn't come from an organic nursery, but I transplanted them into a container with pesticide-free soil and I'll be treating them as organic from here on out, so hopefully anything they went through early in life won't affect the crop too much. I just figured I'd like try to get some strawberries into the garden this year, although I might not harvest any fruit until next summer if the little guys look like they need more time to get settled. I might also add some new plants next spring.

Finally, today I started soaking some green beans in hopes of pre-sprouting them. I probably should have started that a little while ago, but I'm hopeful that I can get some sprouts quickly so I can direct seed a few plants outdoors in the same planters as the snow peas (so they should be coming up as the peas are starting to come down) and keep a few indoors in case the outdoor seedlings don't fare so well right away.

Snow peas are so clingy... who knew?

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 18:28:00 +0000

The weather is warming up and so are the plants on my rooftop. The snow peas are finally starting to show some spirit and I wandered out to pick up a couple of tomato cages last weekend to give them something to latch onto as they grow. They weren't quite starting to fall over yet, but snow peas are a bit vine-like, and I knew that they would do better with some sort of trellis system.

What I didn't realize until I checked in on them a few days later (it was rainy for a few days after I stuck the cages in the soil so I didn't need to go outside to water the little guys) was just how clingy they were. In no time at all, the snow peas had extended little tendrils and started wrapping them around the wires of the cage!

The green onions, spinach, and bok choy are also making some serious progress. The spinach is starting to look like real spinach -- although I clearly planted some seeds too close together. Fortunately the spinach seems to be happy enough to be transplanted, so I dug up a few plants this weekend and dropped them into the snow pea planters.

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how big the spinach will get, and odds are the plants are still too close together, but I can always cull some later if necessary. I'd rather have too much spinach than too little.

I had started some green onions and bok choy indoors in March, but they didn't come out that well. Either I should have moved them outdoors sooner, or the windowsill conditions just weren't good enough. Whatever the cause, I eventually gave up and direct sowed some of each outside. The onions are coming up like nobody's business.

The bok choy is still off to a slow start, but I'm holding out hope that I'll get at least a couple of good plants this season.

My biggest concern is that since almost everything that's doing well had to be direct sown outside, I may have some problems when I try to move the red peppers I'm starting indoors to the rooftop. Peppers like hot weather, so they won't go out until May or June, and they take a while to get started, so it's usually a good idea to start them indoors. But I'm not sure how hardy they'll be.

I'm also not entirely certain the snow peas will start giving me... well, snow peas before late May. My original plan had been to pull out the snow peas and put in peppers and green bush beans in May/June, but I hope I'll be able to actually harvest some veggies before that happens.

RIP Download Squad (2005 - 2011)

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 14:30:00 +0000

AOL has decided to shut down popular tech blog Download Squad. The site was launched by Weblogs Inc in 2005. It's the second time an AOL web site I wrote for has been shuttered, although this time it happened after I left the fold. My first paid blogging gig was with PVR Wire, another Weblogs Inc site. At the time PVR was shut down there was a bit of outcry, but to be honest, the site was a tiny little speck compared to Download Squad which has consistently been one of the top sources for news about desktop apps, web apps, and mobile apps over the past 6 years.

Like PVR Wire, Download Squad will likely live on in corpse form for a while. As far as I can tell, AOL never figured out a great strategy for monetizing a blog that largely covered free software, even though millions of people visited the site every month. But it will continue to bring in revenue for months and maybe years to come as long as nobody goes and changes the URL structure (again). There just won't be any new posts.

It's a shame, because Download Squad regularly attracted talented writers who were enthusiastic about discovering new apps and sharing their knowledge with the community. I learned a lot about software, writing, and working with a team of bloggers across the globe during the three years I wrote for the site.

It's also a shame because on paper, AOL's acquisition of The Huffington Post could lead to great things. While AOL was much criticized recently for "The AOL Way," and the company's Seed project for attracting freelance contributions never really took off, Arianna Huffington has stated that her goal is to move away from a model based on freelance bloggers and to hire full time bloggers and journalists who can commit more energy to their sites. Unfortunately someone must have decided that Download Squad wasn't pulling in enough traffic or revenue to justify full time staff, which is ridiculous for a site as popular as Download Squad.

While I'm not particularly interested in taking a salaried position at this point in my career, I wish AOL would have hired full time bloggers for Download Squad and many of its other properties years ago. It's always felt strange to expect bloggers to pour their heart and soul into their work for $10 or $15 per post. Writing for Download Squad was one of the most difficult blogging gigs around, because it required not just coming up with an on-the-spot opinion about some article you read, but downloading and installing software, testing it out to see if it lives up to its promise, and writing a mini-review in roughly 150 to 500 words (with occasional room for longer feature reports).But Download Squad bloggers worked remarkably hard at their jobs despite the relatively poor pay right up until they received a letter yesterday letting them know that their services were no longer required.

I eventually left Download Squad because I wanted to start my own software blog at Mobiputing.com, and it looks like I got out at the right time. But it's still sad to see the web site go. Working with the team at Download Squad was probably the best freelance gig I've ever had.

Fortunately my friend and colleague Lee Mathews, who has been an editor for Download Squad for the last few years as well as a contributor to Liliputing for the past few years has agreed to begin posting more regularly at Liliputing as well as Mobiputing.

Update: Hey look! Lee, Seb, Erez, Vlad, and Mathew have already put together a new site called Browser Scene! While you might not think there'd be all that much to say about web browsers day after day, you'd be surprised. Browsers are our portal to this thing called the web and new developments are taking place all the time. I also wouldn't be surprised to see the guys branch out into covering web apps, which honestly made up more of Download Squad's coverage than actual downloads for the last few years.

There's definitely an important lesson about choosing a name for your web sit in there somewhere. While DLS staffers have been covering web apps, mobile apps, and internet news as well as downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux computers over the past few years, I think a fair number of people got the wrong idea about the site based on the name. Anyway, check out Browser Scene. It's pretty cool!

It's not easy being green

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 19:43:00 +0000

So it turns out that growing food on the roof of a Philadelphia rowhouse in March may be tougher than I thought. while all the experts agreed that it was time to put out the snow peas, spinach, and some other cold weather seeds and seedlings in March, things got off to a rough start on the rooftop.

The spinach was supposed to take 5-10 days to germinate, but it was nearly three weeks before I started to see any growth. And while the snow peas peeked up through the soil rather quickly, all they did was peek. The plants seemed to hold steady for a few weeks with little to no growth.

My best guess is that it's awfully cold and windy on the rooftop and there's not a lot of protection. I moved the plants closer to a wall, which may or may not be helping. This week has been very warm, which I'm pretty sure is the biggest reason things are starting to look a bit greener on the rooftop. The snow pea plants are starting to open up and show their leaves, and I now have a handful of spinach saplings starting to say hello.

I also tried covering the plants at night on colder evenings, but I don't think I did this regularly enough to tell if it made much difference.

The seeds I started indoors, are another story. Fearing that the outdoor snow peas might not make it, I started a couple of plants in seed trays and then took them outside where each one promptly died. That's not surprising, since snow peas are known to dislike transplanting. But I think the bigger problem is that I let them grow too large indoors. They were all stem and few leaves thanks to not enough light, nutrition, and other factors.

I had also been growing garlic chives, bunching onions, and bok choy indoors. The first time I tried transplanting some onions outdoors, they died almost instantly. So I let the plants hang out in the seed trays for a few more weeks... which I'm pretty sure was way too long.

Yesterday I went to transplant some of the onions into larger pots, and I noticed that almost all of the roots had dug through the bottom of the tray searching desperately for space. I don't have a lot of hope for their survival now.

The bok choy had similar problems. I think I may have successfully salvaged a few plants by putting them in larger pots -- but I think my best chance at getting bok choy to grow properly is just to seed it directly outside.

It may be that I just need to resign myself to the idea that the growing season on my rooftop starts in April, not March. But practice makes perfect, and I'll probably try starting some other plants in seed trays as the season progresses. Hopefully by the time next year comes around I'll have a firm enough grasp on how to get plants started indoors to at least get started in mid-March if not early in the month.

I still have high hopes for the sweet peppers I started in a seed tray recently. These guys are younger than the doomed onions and bok choy plants, and so I think I moved them into larger plants at just the right time. I just hope they don't grow too big indoors, because I won't be putting them out on the roof until mid-May.

Practice makes perfect and I haven't given up on starting some items indoors and moving them outdoors. But while the weather was in the 70s yesterday afternoon I took some time to throw some onion and bok choy

Groupon vs. LivingSocial

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 17:32:00 +0000

After spending the past 10+ years as a radio and online journalist, I'm about to have my work published in print for the first time. Laptop Magazine asked me to research and write an article comparing Groupon and LivingSocial, the two largest daily deals sites. The article will hit newsstands next month, but it's already available to read online.

I spoke with representatives from each company and tracked the deals each company offered in Philadelphia and other regions for a couple of weeks and tried to write up a fair comparison of the services including mobile apps, customer protection, group buying incentives and other features. What's nice is that you don't actually have to choose one or the other, because bargain hunters can register for as many sites of this type as they like. But if you've been wondering what sets Groupon and LivingSocial apart from one another, I'm pretty sure we've come up with a more comprehensive comparison than you'll find anywhere else.

Sure, I've written close to 3 million words on Liliputing and Mobiputing alone, not to mention all the writing I've done at Download Squad, TV Squad, PVR Wire, WHYY, NPR, and elsewhere. But there's something special about actually seeing your name on a printed piece of paper that still feels special. Unfortunately I still have to wait until mid-May to see that happen. I guess there's still something special about the web too: It's a lot easier to publish things quickly online.

Green roof

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 20:54:00 +0000

I was starting to get worried that my entire rooftop garden was going to end up living in a third floor windowsill. While there's been an awful lot of greenery popping up in indoor seed trays over the past few weeks, up until this morning I hadn't actually seen anything pop through the soil in my 6 rooftop containers.

And then this morning I went out and found at least one tiny bit of green in every planter. I seeded three snow pea plants in each of the 18 and 20 inch pots. I've spotted signs that at least 6 plants have decided to climb there way up to sunlight. I'm not sure these planters can actually sustain as many plants as I've put in them, but I figured there's a chance that not all the seeds will germinate, and I can cull some plants to make room for the faster growers.

I also noticed the first signs of green in the window boxes where I planted a few rows of spinach. Right now there's not a whole lot going on in this area -- just two tiny, tiny plants. But I suspect that one day I'll blink and there'll be a dozen full sized plants hanging out on the rooftop. Once these little guys get going, not much stops them.

The biggest challenge I'm facing right now is figuring out how best to harden off the bunching onions and garlic chives growing in my seed trays. They're getting rather large and I think it's time to put them in the dirt on the rooftop soon -- but it's pretty windy up on the roof, and every time I set the seed tray outside for a few hours, when I bring it back inside the plants have been blown over sideways. A few hours in the windowsill usually sets things straight again, but I might need to provide some sort of wind protection on the rooftop for plants that don't have thick stems.

Good morning bok choy!

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 12:03:00 +0000

It's only been a few days since I planted bok choy in a seed tray, but today I found my first three sprouts poking their way through the soil.

Of course, when you zoom out, things aren't quite as exciting. It'll take a little while before these little guys end up in the stir fry pan. But everybody has to start somewhere.

I'm not seeing a lot of movement in the planters on the rooftop yet, but just in case the snow pea seedlings I dropped in the planters don't make it, I've got a few extras starting out indoors. From what I understand, snow peas don't like to be transplanted, but I picked up a small peat seed tray that allows you to actually break off the entire cube and just plant it in the soil, allowing the tray to become part of the plant food. I bought it before learning that peat is a non-renewable resource, so I don't expect to use this kind of tray again next year, but not using it now would be even more wasteful.

I'll probably give the snow peas on the roof another week or so to make their move before taking any of the indoor kids outdoors. It's a bit cold outside on the rooftop, and quite windy, which could be part of the problem. I might have to look for some sort of material that can be used as a wind break.

Peppers, spinach and bok choy... oh my!

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 23:05:00 +0000

It may not look like much now, but just you wait.

I started a new seed tray with peppers and bok choy today, and seeded some spinach in two long window box style planters on the rooftop. So far I don't see any movement in the planters with snow peas on the roof, but just in case those don't pop up I have a few going indoors. But peas apparently don't like to be transplanted, so I'm hoping to see some growth in the rooftop planters soon. I planted more seeds in each pot than I need, because I can always cull extra plants, but it's tough to get started too late in the season.

I also plan to start hardening off the onions ans chives in the next few days by putting their seed tray outdoors for a few hours at a time. This will also allow me to move the peppers and bok choy into their coveted windowsill spot once the new kids start to sprout.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

It's been one week since you planted me...

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 15:00:00 +0000

It's amazing how quickly some plants sprout. It's been just over a week since I planted scallion and garlic chives in my seed tray, and the onion side is choc full of healthy green sprouts.

The garlic chives side of the tray, on the other hand, is a bit of a wasteland. It's a bit early for me to decide if this is because it just takes chives longer to sprout than scallions, or if the conditions aren't as good for the little guys. My guess is it's at least partially the former, because every day I see a little more growth from the chives, but just a little.

The biggest problem I'm going to face if this keeps up is that the scallions may be ready to plant outdoors before the garlic chives. If I were just going to pull them out of the tray and plant them in containers on the rooftop, that would be fine. But I want to spend at least a few days hardening them off instead, which means setting the tray outside for a few hours at a time to get the onions used to outdoor conditions gradually.

Next time I'll have to think about making sure all the plants I pop into a seed tray together have similar germination periods so that everybody's ready to go outside at the same time.

Traffic

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Linder) — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 15:21:00 +0000

Google changed its algorithm last month in an effort to provide search results that are more useful. Generally the move has been reported as an effort to reduce the number of so-called "content farm" posts that you'll find in the first page of Google search results. Content farms are basically the sweat shops of the blogosphere, cranking out hundreds or thousands of articles per day to try to grab some search traffic -- often with pretty funny results.

I can't be too hard on content farms though, because they were the inspiration for one of the funniest parody sites on the net. And to be honest, some of the content on sites that are widely considered to be content farms isn't all that bad. You might not find the most in-depth tutorials at sites such as eHow or Mahalo, but you might find exactly what you're looking for -- a place to get started.

Unfortunately when Google changes its algorithm, there are often ripples felt throughout the internet and a number of web sites producing original, informative content experienced a dip in search engine traffic. My sites haven't been exempt.

Liliputing and Mobiputing both experienced a dip in traffic in February when the new algorithm took effect. It's extraordinarily hard to figure out exactly what kind of dip though, because traffic tends to go up and down throughout the year, and Mobiputing is just over a year old -- which means it's hard to compare historic data. I'd say Liliputing might have taken a 10-15% hit though, which makes sense, since around half of that site's visitors come from search engines, primarily Google.

It's a strange business we're in. I'd like to think that I'm writing for my loyal readers, not for random folks who happen to be searching Google for keywords such as "xoom tablet" or "x220," both of which were top sources of traffic for Liliputing this week. But the truth is that I'm doing both. I'm writing for people who keep coming back day after day for news about the latest mobile technology and for people who are researching new computers, smartphone apps, or other topics that I happen to write about -- and who may only make a single visit to one of my sites this year. And the dirty little secret of making money online is that those not-quite-random visitors pay most of the billls.

After all, if you're searching for Dell laptops and you happen to come across my web site and find a review of the Dell Inspiron M101z as well as an add promising 15% off of Dell laptops, the ad is just as relevant as the article -- why wouldn't you click it? But if you keep coming back every day, you'll probably get a sense of where the ads appear on the page and start tuning them out.

So it's Google's world, and those of us who make a living writing on the web are just living in it, and if Google changes its algorithm in a way that causes a serious dip in traffic, so be it.

Fortunately I haven't seen a huge dip in traffic from the latest algorithm, and in general I think Google does a pretty good job of bringing the best results to the top -- so if the company's engineers feel that web pages on other sites deserve to rank more highly than mine, so be it.

That said, Google is clearly not perfect. I've tried copying and pasting lines directly taken from my web sites into Google -- and I often find that web sites that scrape content from my page without permission now rank more highly. For instance, every week I run a roundup of top stories from Mobiputing on Liliputing. Because I'm too lazy to think up a clever name, the weekly post is called "This week in Mobiputing."

A few weeks ago, if you typed "this week in mobiputing" into Google you would get a page filled with links to posts from Liliputing. Now most of the top results are from sites that are scraping my content. In fact, you can tell they're taking articles directly from my RSS feed, because there's a line only included in my feed that says "This week in Mobiputing is a post from Liliputing," It doesn't show up on my web site, but it certainly shows up on scraper sites.

I used to ignore scrapers, because Google did a pretty good job of making sure that nobody really profited from stealing my content and sending cease and desist notices would be a full time job. But it's pretty frustrating to see other sites show up first in Google search results for articles that were copied and pasted from my web sites. I tried sending a few complaints to Google using the company's webmaster tools and AdSense tools, but nothing's happened so I figure it's not worth the effort.

Instead, I'll just continue to try to produce high quality content and hope that readers continue to notice, with or without Google's help.

Incidentally, while overall Google traffic to my web sites is down, traffic from Google News appears to be up a little bit. That could be a sign that Google is doing things right, since much of what I publish on Liliputing and Mobiputing is topical content which might be more relevant today than it is six months from now.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a dip in traffic this time of year even if Google hadn't come out with a new search algorithm. While interest in mobile devices and apps continues to climb, traffic is always highest around the holidays, back to school shopping season, and around big tech events such as CES, Computex, or pretty much any major Apple announcement. I just wish Google weren't so obviously promoting content scrapers when the company's stated goal had been to penalize content farmers.