The effects of moving a wordpress.com blog with little traffic to a new domain

 offbeat  No Responses »
Mar 072010
 

As you may know, I’ve bought some epic hosting from asmallorange and with it I’ve put up this blog in the domain that I’ve had for years.  Unfortunately this domain had little to no traffic throughout its time as there was no content! In addition, this blog is sitting on a subdomain that’s completely new.

Note: I’m basing this completely on WordPress’s blog stats which only indicate visitors and not avid readers…

At my old blog, I used to get a regular flow of about 6-13 visitors per day and I could see they were mostly looking at my posts on Sub-Pixel Rendering (Hinting) In Chrome Is Inferior To That Of Firefox and my long gone implementation of a twitter clone in django.  So far so good, people were using Google to find information and my blog was quite high in the results. My old blog post comes in at #2 and #3 when you search for “django twitter clone”.  Maybe this was because of the wordpress.com domain, perhaps it’s held in high regard in Google as all blogs are kept under tight control.  But then it all changed; I moved to a different domain.

It was all the same content, same blogging platform, same publishing dates, but obviously I had lost my rank in Google.  As my old blog was hosted on wordpress.com there was no way of me redirecting all my traffic to my new domain (well, without paying), and no way of stopping google from indexing my posts.  So now my steady stream of low traffic suddenly landed to 0. No visitors whatsoever.  I was thinking how I would recover, seeing as how my old blog had little to no visitors anyway I am now going to endeavour to get back up the ranks in Google.

Getting up high in Google will be difficult though, I’m thinking I should delete en-mass my posts on wordpress.com and that will prevent google from indexing them.  I have written a short note on my old blog posts informing visitors that I’ve moved, but why would they click the new link when the information they want is right there on that page anyway?

Anyway, I guess the only way to get back up on the results is to post high quality posts that are understandable and get people commenting!  And that I shall do…

Laters all,

The government's bad grammar

 offbeat  No Responses »
Jan 292010
 

The government has bad grammar as evidenced by this act on co2 advert. At the end it shows the words ‘Driving 5 miles less’ and this is bad grammar. It should be ‘Driving 5 miles fewer’ as miles can be counted.  However, it’s not public knowledge that fewer is the most appropriate word, as proven by the (admittedly less common nowadays) “10 items or less” signs above the basket checkouts at supermarkets.

You should always use the word fewer when talking about things that can be counted such as: miles, trees, lemons.  For cases where you would use the word less is for objects that can’t be directly counted such as: distance, forest, fruit.

I walked 5 fewer miles to get to the moon.
I walked less distance to interstellar space.

There are a gajillion fewer trees everyday thanks to deforestation.
There is less forest now that we have paper.

People eat lemons everyday, there are fewer lemons in the world today than yesterday.
When all these lemons get eaten, there is less fruit.

10 Reasons Why I Didn’t Like Avatar

 offbeat  No Responses »
Jan 032010
 

This post does contain spoilers. Avatar is meant to be THE film to watch.  Unfortunately I didn’t enjoy it as much as I had hoped.  Here’s why:

The Colonel

1) Could Colonel Miles Quaritch look any more like Major Chip Hazard? This alone annoys the hell out of me- couldn’t they think of any other look for him?

2) In the scene near the end with the big battle, The Colonel sacrifices his men and his ship to attempt to chase after his vendetta with Jake Sully. Ugh! Seriously, does this kind of Good vs. Evil thing have to be everywhere? Why is there always a boss battle between the lead character and his arch nemesis?

Jake Sully is King Dufus Of The Dufai

3) Jake is a dufus.  When he first meets the king of the tribe, Click-Tuck Toon or whatever his name is, Jake is all like “He’s your father? [Reaches out his hand] Nice to meet you sir…” What a tool.  You are surrounded by a tribe of what seem at this moment to be showing complete inane aggression toward you for encroaching on their land and you go and be a dufus and all like, “Nice to meet you sir…” UGH!

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