da’s juust

Some universities like Southern California, Harvard and Michigan State have their web-guru’s explain to us how rss feeds work with the elegant Magpie parser demo :

Some example on how to use Magpie:

* magpie_simple.php *
Simple example of fetching and parsing an RSS file. Expects to be
called with a query param ‘rss_url=http://‘
….

* magpie_debug.php *
Displays all the information available from a parsed feed.

Note : magpie_debug.php is the one to watch for, you can do a google search on :

site:.edu magpie_debug.php
and you get a number of educational facilities that kindly demonstrate the use of the magpie rss parser.

These demo pages have a textbox where you can enter an rss feed url, the magpie demo parses your feed and outputs it as an html-page.

You have to be careful with these programs, though : I actually found one domain with this remark under the ‘parse rss’ button :

Security Note:
This is a simple example script. If this was a real script we probably wouldn’t allow strangers to submit random URLs, and we certainly wouldn’t simply echo anything passed in the URL. Additionally its a bad idea to leave this example script lying around.

Thank you, you are surely wise like the buddha, I shall try to remember your insight !

More Magpie demo features : I noticed if I put a link on a blog page with my rss feed [.../magpie_debug.php?url=myfeed] in it, I can click on the link and it opens their page with any rss-feed i want.

That is because they use the php $_GET array. Then you can call their parser program from outside their domain with your feed-url added to it and the parser retrieves the rss-feed found at the url you add to that link and displays it.

It seems Google also find these demo’s very interesting because I noticed every time Googlebot comes crawl my new magpie fan blog it goes follow that link and then next day I see my whole feed in the search engine, displayed on their domain. Sort of like a page-generator that also gives links back of the page indexed by Google, to all the posts in the feed.

Thanks for your examples, educational persons, I sure learned a valuable lesson about magpie parsers.

Next month more seo tips and tricks.

Get some pagerank : this trick would require tedious boring link checking, but since SeoLinx (an extension of SeoQuake) that has become a lot easier. SeoLinx shows the stats of a links target url so you don’t have to go to every page to retrieve the stats. Cool plugin. Let’s put it to some practical use.

the trick : comment on old forum threads

Once you have SeoLinx installed find an ‘old’ forum, register if you haven’t already and make sure you get a signature link. Sometimes you first have to be a member for a week or write ten posts, but once you have a sig-link you get backlinks off the forum.

Then go comment on really old forum threads.

With SeoLinx you can easily spot the juicy old threads. Old threads on for instance DigitalPoint or Webmasterworld are sometimes pagerank 3. In case of the DP post, PR2 with 8 posts at the time of writing.

Pick a forum, and browse to the last page of the threads. Hover over the thread anchor and SeoLinx shows you the pagerank of the thread page. As long as the number of posts is below (10, 16 depending on the forum settings) you can put your comments in and they will appear on the first page of that thread, that has that nice pagerank and juice.

Old wine in new bags can be a sweet thing.

the benefit

A pagerank 3 ‘targetted’ anchor is worth about $9,- a month, $100,- per year. It can take an hour to find a juicy one, but hey, $100,- value for an hours work is well worth the trouble.

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I might make this a blog feature, seo tips and tricks of the month.

Pressmark :
a 5 minute install social bookmarking website : go check it out on the authors site, or my new subdomain pressmark install).

Why Pressmark ? Because its a social bookmarking fork on Wordpress.

I tried Pligg and I just sat there thinking “this is horrible, I want my Wordpress backend!”. And after scouting around what do I find : Pressmark, a wordpress fork. With Pressmark I get the Wordpress backend and all my favorite plugins and all these thingies I love about Wordpress as CMS, just now for a social bookmarking site.

The strong point is the use of OpenId, where a URL pointing to either a blog or website is your ‘identity’ on the net. If sites use an OpenID plugin your entire profile is readily available (name, email, etc.) on every blog or form you care to place your comments.

OpenID lowers user frustration by letting users have control of their login.

For geeks, OpenId is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. OpenID takes advantage of already existing internet technology (URI, HTTP, SSL, Diffie-Hellman) and realizes that people are already creating identities for themselves whether it be at their blog, photostream, profile page, etc. With OpenID you can easily transform one of these existing URIs into an account which can be used at sites which support OpenID logins.

OpenID is still in the adoption phase and is becoming more and more popular, as large organizations like AOL, Microsoft, Sun, Novell, etc. begin to accept and provide OpenIDs. Today it is estimated that there are over 160-million OpenID enabled URIs with nearly ten-thousand sites supporting OpenID logins.

In Pressmark, by using a ’submit’ bookmarklet to drag on your browser bar, you can enter any site bookmark into your author’s page with 2 clicks.

Fast, sweet.

Sadly in the current pressmark download there is one function missing which causes a code break in the index.php (I hope the author fixes it in the download), causing it to show only an entry form for bookmarks as front-page and leaves you to figure out what the hell the package is about. If you downloaded it and get the “prologue_get_avatar() is missing” error on your front page, add this function in the themes ‘function.php’ file :

…or sooner grab it from automattic svn, bottom of the file.
(cutting and pasting code from blogs can cause problems with quotes and html markup in php code fragments).

After that it renders a proper index page.

Ofcourse the main advantage : wordpress is a seo killer, nothing performs in google as wordpress does, so a social bookmarking site with a wordpress frame is gonna be a strong competitor for the smaller site segment. It won’t outperform Technorati, but normal people don’t usually want to start Technorati-II, a small well performing easy to maintain bookmarking site will do for most of us :)