Personal Blogs and Privacy

How does one make a blog in which NO ONE but you and a selected few can have access to the information? If you're a corporation with sensitive information the only answer is in a password-protected directory in a secure-hosted environment.

How about if you're a smaller entity or private individual and would like a more cost effective solution. For instance you want to have photos of your trips, or your children but you don't want these photos and private moments available to the world at large for this year and next. Blogger, for instance allows you to limit viewers but you must enter each and every accepted email address. This can be a time-consuming and irritating task if names are constantly added.

The best solution would be to have your blog in a password protected directory. Unfortunately some services, such as Blogger, doesn't allow that anymore as they have suspended their FTP service.

Your best solution is limited to finding blogging software that will store the photos and the blog posts on YOUR domain. You will then need to password protect those directories. At that point you will be completely safe from the Search Engines prying eyes.

There is another solution. It's not perfect but it should suffice for all but the most paranoid and that is to add tags telling search engines not to index the pages. The reason this is not perfect is that the tags are merely a suggestion. The search engines can still index and display the pages if they want. Chances are high that they will not index and never display these pages. But, it is not assured.

Excel, Sorting Date - Sometimes retyping is the answer

Had a brain dead moment. I was trying to sort an Excel file by date but some of the rows were not sorted with the rest.

I checked to see that the cells were indeed dates:

(select column > format cells > number >date). That worked for some of the lines.

Some of the dates had a leading space or some other non-alphanumeric character, that happens sometimes when you’re copying and pasting data from different files. That’s easy to solve as well:

Select the date cells with a problem.
Go to Find and Replace (CTRL+F)>Replace and remove the space

That left several cells with a problem. Couldn’t figure it out, this was the brain dead moment. Spent 15 minutes on 15 or 16 lines in which I couldn’t figure out the problem.

I tried retyping the date and – lo and behold – it worked. Same thing with HTML code sometimes retyping simply works.

Improving Blogger Search Engine Rankings

You may have heard of all the meta-tags that can help with your Google ranking. Of course there aren't any. But there are some tips and tricks that you can use to maximize your SEO.

One means by which Google and other Search Engines rank pages is by the use of the Heading Tag. Heading Tags There are 5 heading tags but only the H1 is truly meaningful in SEO searches.

For some reason Blogger Templates use either a H2 or H3 for the post title. So, assuming you are optimizing your post titles, you should change the Heading Tag associated with your post title to H1.

Go to Layout > Edit Layout and
do a search for "data:post:title" and change the H2, or H3 if you're using one of the Minima Templates, to H1.

Don't forget to change your style sheets. Do a search for H2 or H3 and change them to H1. Make certain you change only the ones with "post."

EDIT: May 6, 2010

I've been told that Google doesn't like it when there are more than one H1 per page. If that's true then changing H3s to H1 is not a good idea. I'm researching this to see if this is true.

Is your site infected by malware?

A few sites I'm associate with have been infected with malware. It appears as if one of the site owner's FTP application was infected and all affiliated sites were infected with the same malware.

I was directed to blog.unmaskparasites.com and it seems to have a tremendous amount of information on just this problem.

From Hidden Iframes to Obfuscated Scripts
10 FTP Clients Malware Steals Credentials From

People are only spending 0 seconds on my site

I'm often asked by clients who look through their Log Stats, such as Statcounter and Google Analytics, why people are "only spending 0 seconds" on their site. "How is it possible for so many people to spend less than a second on the site?" they ask.

"0 seconds" does not indicate that your visitor came to your site by mistake or spent only a fraction of a second there. It indicates that the visitor looked at only that one page. The analytics program can only measure time spent on your site if the visitor clicks on another page on your site.

While you need at least 2 points in time -- 2 pageloads -- to compute a visit length even that may not be completely accurate. AOL users, for example, will generate 0 second visits because their IP changes constantly.

Google Changes Privacy Settings on Search History

I've become more than a little unsettled by Google. The latest news from Google only exacerbates that feeling.

Google wants to provide YOU with more accurate searches and wants to do so based upon YOUR search history. That's great. Or is it? Will this search data become integrated with other Google products? This data helps Google know more about YOU. But do we really give our permission to Google (the corporate entity) to use our data throughout its subsidiaries when we use one of these subsidiaries? For example does participation in Google Search mean that YouTube (owned by Google) can share in the use of this data?

Right now Google seems to be limiting their search data collection to Google the search engine. Good. Let's keep it that way. But even here - users MUST have the ability to see what is collected and to be able to remove data from the database - for whatever reason it may be.

Previously, we only offered Personalized Search for signed-in users, and only when they had Web History enabled on their Google Accounts. What we're doing today is expanding Personalized Search so that we can provide it to signed-out users as well. This addition enables us to customize search results for you based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser.
Personalized Search for everyone

Facebook's Privacy Policy Changes

I haven’t been happy with Facebook for a while now. My concerns can be placed into two categories: one is usability and the second is privacy. The usability issues have not improved and now, I fear, that the privacy issues have worsened. I have to thank EFF for reviewing Facebook’s Privacy Settings.

Although sold as a "privacy" revamp, Facebook's new changes are obviously intended to get people to open up even more of their Facebook data to the public. The privacy "transition tool" that guides users through the configuration will "recommend" — preselect by default — the setting to share the content they post to Facebook, such as status messages and wall posts, with everyone on the Internet, even though the default privacy level that those users had accepted previously was limited to "Your Networks and Friends"

At this point there's no "if" about it: the Facebook privacy transition tool is clearly designed to push users to share much more of their Facebook info with everyone, a worrisome development that will likely cause a major shift in privacy level for most of Facebook's users

Looking even closer at the new Facebook privacy changes, things get downright ugly when it comes to controlling who gets to see personal information such as your list of friends. Under the new regime, Facebook treats that information — along with your name, profile picture, current city, gender, networks, and the pages that you are a "fan" of — as "publicly available information" or "PAI." Before, users were allowed to restrict access to much of that information. Now, however, those privacy options have been eliminated. For example, although you used to have the ability to prevent everyone but your friends from seeing your friends list, that old privacy setting — shown below — has now been removed completely from the privacy settings page.

Mr. Zuckerberg whatever happened to: ”Our philosophy is that people own their information and control whom they share it with..."