juust ~ php oddities

Pagerank sculpting session

juust — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 14:24:00 +0000

In the series ‘how to manipulate google‘ : pagerank sculpting 101.

If I build a site about “LCD television” and want to promote three specific brands/offers, I want Google to index the product/offer-pages as most important in the site, and not the index page.

How do I achieve that ?

Some basic theory : I have two rings of pages, one with four pages (B), and one with three (A), linked over one page (AB),

…after running that through a pagerank simulation, I get these results :

item	importance
b	0.97
ab	1.60
a	0.73

…the linking page (AB) sheds its juice to two rings, 3/5 vs 2/5, and by doing so drains the smaller ring. Being the only page that gets links and juice from all other pages, the ab-page itself scores the highest ‘importance’ in the website.

Conclusion : adding some subpages in a smaller ring to a page makes it relatively more important in the website.

item	importance
home, prod1, prod3	0.97
prod2	1.60
sub	0.73

Let’s add some more subrings :

item	importance
I, Prod1	0.96
Prod2, 3	1.58
sub	0.72

item	importance
home	0.94
Prod 1,2,3	1.56
sub	0.72

The importance of the product pages seems to drop, but the ratio prod-n/home improves, so it works out better.

Home-links

By not linking back to the index page from the subpages, the product pages end up with a higher rank within the site.

If I do link from each subpage (S) to the index page (home) (what wordpress themes generally do)

…I get these results…

item	importance
home	1.91
Prod 1,2,3	1.54
Sub	0.57

…the home page is indicated as most important in the site, which isn’t what I wanted, so I omit the home-link on subpages.

End of the sculpting session.

(note: this is, of course, all theoretic)

wish you were here

juust — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 22:34:06 +0000

Here is some shot from my new job (’sailor’) : basically what we do is sail around all day with guests.

When we are done sailing we go party with Heidi and Heino and the local clergy

…or we enjoy the serene peace and beauty of nature and stuff…

…all summer…

interesting : seo panel

juust — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 01:19:24 +0000

That seems fun, an open source seo toolkit. It is a five second install multi-user package offering simple stats, but more interesting, a semi automated website directory submitter in a clean interface, and could be a valuable service offer if you run an seo community site.

It is PHP MVC and, what sparked my interest, it has a plugin interface.
I love that, It could be going somewhere over the next few years.

availability test

juust — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:39:01 +0000

I was writing an availability test with starttime-endtime, on a database with ICS schedule data from Google Calendar (userid, eventid, starttime, endtime), and i came up with this one :

get all user id’s
a get id’s for test.start between table.start and table.end
b get id’s for test.end between table.start and table.end
c get id’s for test.start < table.start and test.end > table.end
merge the three overlapping sets (a b c)
available = the difference between all id’s and the merged set

It works but it takes four queries on the entire table.

Isn’t there a more intelligent way of doing that ?

function maat_agenda_check_available($start, $end) {
global $wpdb;
//get all id's
$sql = "SELECT userid FROM ".$wpdb->prefix."maat_agenda GROUP BY userid";
$all = $wpdb->get_results($sql, ARRAY_A);
//get ids with overlaps
$a = "SELECT userid FROM ".$wpdb->prefix."maat_agenda WHERE endtime > ".$start." AND starttime < ".$start." GROUP BY userid";
$b = "SELECT userid FROM ".$wpdb->prefix."maat_agenda WHERE endtime > ".$end." AND starttime < ".$end." GROUP BY userid";
$c = "SELECT userid FROM ".$wpdb->prefix."maat_agenda WHERE endtime < ".$end." AND starttime > ".$start." GROUP BY userid";
$rsta = $wpdb->get_results($a, ARRAY_A);
$rstb = $wpdb->get_results($b, ARRAY_A);
$rstc = $wpdb->get_results($c, ARRAY_A);
//merge arrays
if(!is_array($rsta)) $rsta = array();
if(!is_array($rstb)) $rstb = array();
if(!is_array($rstc)) $rstc = array();
$rst = array_merge($rsta, $rstb, $rstc);
//get uniques
array_unique($rst);
return array_diff($all, $rst);
}

Mayday

juust — Sun, 30 May 2010 20:13:24 +0000

Should I write a post about Mayday ? It half reminds me of the fairytale of the princess on the pea. Mayday is when Matt moved the pea slightly to the conservative right and all white hooded princesses made their bid for Drama Queen.

Personally I hope one day Google split social and business search, deprecate the entire web2.0 social linking and switch to real time traffic data as ranking algorithm for social search, and restore the peer reviewed web for business search with a stronger focus on local and regional delivery and consumer reviews as an alternative ranking mechanism.

Current rankings are most decided on the seo-sem effort of companies and don’t offer end user review on an efficient product list or regional index (aren’t we lucky we have Google Adwords to help our customers find our offers !). Sites like 4Square are closing in on delivering search results on local area venues
using the mobile web, which is an interesting development.

[added 3-6-10] is that just me or did I suddenly notice Google doing a Beta for Social Search yesterday ? basically based on its own profile data, and sites and linkdata from my webmaster tools account (I am not unconditionally happy about that).

Wazzup

juust — Fri, 07 May 2010 17:41:10 +0000

I haven’t touched a website since october.

p2p with wordpress xml-rpc

juust — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:49:54 +0000

Simple fun with Wordpress xml-rpc. I want a way to return a welcome message to interested blog owners.

To get that done, I make a new plugin that adds a new method to the xml-rpc server.

The method ‘p2p.welcome’ is mapped to the plugin function ‘p2p_welcome’, which returns the “about yourself” description of the admin profile.

/*
Plugin Name: P2P rpc
Description: RPC Peer to Peer stuff
Version: 1.0.0
Author: Juust
Author URI: http://www.juust.org/
*/
/* xmlrpc_methods hooks into IXR_Server */
add_filter( 'xmlrpc_methods', 'p2p_xmlrpc_methods' );
/* pass the $methods array and add a new one */
function p2p_xmlrpc_methods( $methods ) {
$methods['p2p.whoami'] = 'p2p_whoami';
return $methods;
}
/* the function that returns the profile description of user 1 (admin) */
function p2p_whoami() {
return get_the_author_meta( 'user_description', 1 );
}

I plug that into the wordpress blog.

Then I can make a small test program :

include class-IXR.php which has the IXR_Client class
extend IXR_Client as P2PClient
add a function P2PClient->whoareyou()
…that calls the new method p2p.whoami on the blog
echo the returned data : the admin profile description

include_once('/absolute/path/to/class-IXR.php');
Class P2PClient extends IXR_Client {
var $MyPeerConnection;
var $response;
var $url;
function __construct($url="") {
$this->url = $url;
if(!$this->connect($url)) return false;
}
//see if there is an xml rpc endpoint
function connect($url)
{
if(!$this->MyPeerConnection = new IXR_Client($this->url)) return false;
}
//query 'p2p.whoami', store the response
function whoareyou() {
$this->MyPeerConnection->query('p2p.whoami');
$this->response = $this->MyPeerConnection->getResponse();
}
}
//init the client, query, echo response
$p2p = new P2PClient('http://loaneys.com/xmlrpc.php');
$p2p->whoareyou();
echo "resp ". $p2p->response;

That returns :

Hi I am juust, admin of loaneys.com. I worked as business economist at project control and proces automation in engineering and utilities. These days, I do some scripting as a hobby and stick to painting as job.

That is a basic way to exchange blog data by extending the xml-rpc endpoint.