Recently in Weblogs Category

From my last post, you know that I am slowly migrating this blog from Typepad over to an independent Movable Type installation.  The problem is that Typepad does not want to promote moving off their service (completely understandable) and therefore has little incentive to allow users to create 301 redirects.  Some research suggests that a zero-second meta refresh will be treated by search engines as a 301 redirect, so I set out to test this.

First I had to play with MT template code to see if I can generate the permalinks as they would be on the new blog site, and I have succeeded.  The hardest part was importing the old posts over on this installation such that the basename could have the same 15 character cut off point as does my Typepad account. That solved, I could put a link on each Typepad page to its corresponding page here.  After about a month, I see that a couple pages here are starting to get a tiny amount of search traffic. Nothing huge, but the important part is that the engines see this site and begin listing it.

After patiently waiting until I saw that result, I have now implemented the zero second meta refresh on each individual post page over at my old Typepad blog.  I will be watching my search engine traffic via Hittail in order to see the cutover occur in real-time, if it works at all.

In the meantime, I will be posting here from now on rather than on Typepad, at least for this blog.  Stay tuned to see if the 301 experiment works out!  In any other scenario, I suppose such a test would be crazy, but in this particular case, there is no other way to do a migration off Typepad than to create a meta refresh, so even if I don't get the search results transferred over, we will have learned something useful.

This thread seems to think so!  Therefore, I intend to implement a meta refresh of zero seconds on at least some of the pages of this blog, in order to test the theory and to ultimately move this blog, meager traffic and all, to its new domain which I mentioned a few days ago.

Typepad Support assured me that just by setting up and activating the new domain here at Typepad, search engines would recognize the new domain and it would start ranking, but I am not so sure it's that easy. So what if the site begins responding to DNS in a new way? The search engines will likely see this as duplicate content.

If this meta refresh approach works, perhaps I can keep a little bit of traffic while moving to the new domain. Unfortunately, this blog would probably have to have the second (target) set of files living on another Typepad instance or on another host entirely to prevent a circular redirect.

Doing so on a sitewide basis will only require a quick template change.... I may need to sleep on this as it's a pretty big step, yet it will be very interesting to see if the engines really do look at meta refreshing as the same as a 301 redirect.

A quick announcement - this blog is moving! I found a couple of minutes to set it up as a subdirectory on my personal domain. Hopefully as a result of this move, I will be able to give the blog more of the attention it needs. I'm leaving it hosted on Typepad for the time being, so as to maintain traffic, so the new domain is simply pointing to this location. Once I've worked out all the details, I may move the entire blog to another host. I'm undecided on that aspect for now because there are many considerations to take into account such as broken links and search engine traffic.

The new home will ultimately be http://www.stephenelsner.com/connect2400/

The blog will respond at that address now, so please update any links in anticipation of Connect 2400's internal linking being updated.

... ... Powered by ThinkFree Office Online Testing the ThinkFree blog integration. It looks like this will be posting the Write doc as an attachment, not really what I had in mind, as in using ThinkFree as the editor. More testing is in order.

I'm far from being a pro blogger and I don't play one on TV as I have a day job that I'm very happy with, but this new  site is going right into my RSS list: Performancing.com

Straight from the horse's mouth:

Performancing.com is a group weblog written by professional bloggers, for professional bloggers. The emphasis at Performancing is commercial blogging.

Launched by  Nick Wilson of Threadwatch and Patrick Gavin of Text Link Ads Inc., Performancing was launched already loaded up with content (there's a meta-hint for pro blogging right there, I'm sure) and it's very promising. I find that Threadwatch is a singularly indispensable site to keep up with technology and marketing; I have no doubts that this will come into the top ranking as well.

Just got an interesting announcement email from SixApart. They are developing a comprehensive upgrade to the Typepad service, to be launched in 2006, which appears to be centered around adding social features.

From the announcement:

Community Aggregation: Gives you the ability to create individual blogs and share sections of them with other users in an elegant and customizable way.

Multiple Streams: Provides a single place to keep everything that is important to you. A record of your life is created by incorporating streams from various media, like music, photos, videos and other blogs into a single customized blog with an identity of its own.

From this language, it seems like they are going to be using more RSS technology, along with some kind of content management and aggregation features. Additional information gleaned from their site alludes to their learnings from LiveJournal and will include permissions-based content management of some sort.

I've always wanted some aggregation features built into Typepad. It would be nice to be able to hit your own site, see outside content that perhaps you want to comment upon, and begin writing. So your site becomes more than a publishing medium; it's a resource for yourself. Kind of like what's going on with the Backpack site.