>devblog_

Some customers are afraid of buying online. Afraid that your company isn’t real. And a 3-year old copyright notice at the bottom of the page won’t raise their spirits. So do yourself a favor and keep it up to date. And while you’re at it, insert a time period like “Copyright (c) 2003-2008” to show how long you’re already in business.

If you’re lazy (just like me, I admit it), automate that with a tiny piece of PHP:

Copyright &copy; 2003-<?php print date("Y")?>

To make sure you’re always “alive and kicking”… 😉

The nofollow attribute was introduced by Google to cope with the problem of spam links, for example comment spam in blogs. Links in comments should be marked as nofollow, thus won’t count for Google’s rating and thus would be worthless for the spammer.  That was the idea.

But it might backfire for Google. Nowadays you can find the nofollow attribute not only in blog comments, but also social networks, forum postings and in Wikipedia articles. (It’s ironic: With Web 2.0 finally everybody could have his say – Too bad that it doesn’t count any more.) And with the spammers focusing on the sites that don’t use nofollow yet, these sites are likely to use it, too, soon.

So what’s the consequence?

By effectively abolishing the opinions of the small users only the website owners and journalists remain. Most website owners have their very own ideas about links: Their own products & services. And considering the journalists an interesting trend has evolved: Whenever they want to spice up their text with a few links for credibility, they link to Wikipedia. That’s easy and safe because they don’t have to check their sources for spam, fraud, etc.

The result?

Less diversity and less competition probably. The big fishes in the pond are bound to be the winners under these conditions. And Google is going to loose, too, because they’re missing the small, upcoming sites and trends. And just linking to Wikipedia instead.

When trying to run this blog with the same installation as my “Outlook and Sync blog“, I found out that this was more difficult than expected. WordPress doesn’t have a readymade feature for this, you have to do some tricks. And most of the tricks that I found were pretty difficult or involved several steps.

Here’s a trick that is easier. It requires that:

• The different blogs should be on different domains or subdomains
• The blogs should take up the entire (sub)domain (so they shouldn’t start in a subfolder)

Then it’s quite easy. Simply configure all the blog’s domains to point to the same WordPress installation folder. You can probably do this in the configuration panel of your webspace provider.

Now edit the wp-config.php:

Before:

$table_prefix  = 'yourblog_';

After:

$domain  = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];
if (stristr($domain, 'yourblogname1'))
�  $table_prefix  = 'yourblog1_';
else if (stristr($domain, 'yourblogname2'))
�  $table_prefix  = 'yourblog2_';
else
�  $table_prefix  = 'yourblog_';

As a nice side effect you’re only needing one database instance for this (they’re often limited in rented webspace) and just have more tables in the same database. All blogs use the same installed files, but have different content and can have different layouts and activated plugins.

Happy Blogging!

The default wordpress theme really is boring. So I’m using my Faro Rasca theme for a start. It’s a photo from a lighthouse on Teneriffe, Spain.

Are you out there?