Goodbye Tags!
Posted on August 15, 2008 at 13:31 Down the Drain
And so I did it. I finally deleted all the tags I accumulated in this blog ever since I started using WordPress as a CMS last September. They seem to have become a mess and I’m starting to dislike seeing them again and again. I “tweeted” about the importance of such tags last month and surprisingly got a reply from someone.
Yes, they are used for SEO and can help with navigation. You can use your tags in tag clouds which shows at a glace which subject your write more about. You can have more of them without having to organization mess that occurs if you do the same with category. You don’t have to keep track of them
I’m actually quite familiar that tags are helpful for SEO. But do I really need to require myself to use them? No. I even asked Euri if she uses them and she told me that she doesn’t — that her list of tags in the database is completely empty — because her blog is a personal one. She’s right. This one that I have is also personal and I write almost anything under the sun in this turf. I think her statement was one of the factors that finally provoked me to delete 600+ tags. I have to say that I somehow feel light right now. Even so, I do hope to own a different blog/site someday which is targeted to a bigger audience and will definitely need some serious tagging.
Forbidden No More
Posted on August 11, 2008 at 13:49 Down the Drain
For the past weeks/days/month I have suffered from “Forbidden” error messages all throughout my domain initially in the subdomains of my hostees and then to various folders. It bothered me a whole lot and it was so frustrating searching for appropriate answers. Even my host couldn’t tell me directly but they did pointed out that it has to do with .htaccess files. Since I did messed with such files before, focusing on it would be the intelligent thing to do. With the old backup I have in my local drive I looked for differences in the said files with those that are currently residing in my (web) folders. It fatefully came to me that I did enabled HotLinking Protection (disabling direct linking, that is, enabling only select websites to access certain files externally) for all files instead of just images. So, basically, what happened was, when any of the sites/folders under my domain is accessed via a different webpage, an error is thrown because HTML and PHP files have been included in the blockage (I suppose), whereas when you input the URL in the address bar and hit enter, the page loads smoothly (though there are cases that a refresh of the page helps). This is another lesson learned and I think I really have to set up a small blog for such issues now. 😎
To Rashid, Sae, and Shan, my apologies for this very delayed fix. And to all those who thought that the site has already been buried six feet under, well, think again.
