blocking – Climb to the Stars

[fr] Mise à jour de WordPress. Installation de Jetpack et de Robots Meta. Comme toujours, faites signe en cas de comportement inhabituel du site!

Sorry for the neologisms in the title. I’ve upgraded CTTS to WordPress 3.1 (you should do it too if you haven’t done it yet, lest you fall prey to hackers as I did earlier this year). While I was at it, I also installed Jetpack, the plugin that brings to WordPress.org blogs goodness from WordPress.com.

I use WordPress.com for almost all my projects, and all my clients. For most of the people I work with, it’s just not worth the hassle to have to deal with upgrades, technical issues, and potential hackings. For CTTS, however, I do depend on plugins like Basic Bilingual which are not (yet?!) a part of the WordPress.com offering. Also, I admit the geek in me likes having her own installation and code to tinker with.

Finally, I installed the Robots Meta plugin. You know me, I’m always a bit wary of the fancy SEO stuff (specially as many people who write about it seem completely obsessed with it, rather than obsessing on doing and saying interesting things). I’m really unimpressed with all the panic over duplicate content for example, especially as it didn’t seem to sound like a huge issue in blogs when I heard Matt Cutts giving us SEO tips in 2007 — I happily cross-post a lot of my writing “elsewhere” back here and I don’t think I’ve suffered unreasonably from it.

Anyway: lately, I’ve read a few analytics/SEO articles that seemed sensible to me and I’m starting to take a tiny (tiny!) bit of interest in the subject.

I’ve been using the Google Sitemap Generator plugin for some time now, and hanging out in my Google Webmaster Central — particularly since my hacking incident.

Also, it was brought to my attention today that there are old articles lying around on CTTS which are ranked very highly for certain searches even though they are really not that relevant anymore. Though I’m loathe to remove them altogether, I could very well remove them from search engine listings — and the Robots Meta plugin allows me to do just that.

So, I’ve taken the plunge and am now only allowing search engines to index my home page (of course) and single article pages, blocking them from date, category and tag archives as well as comment feeds.

We’ll see what happens — I’m a bit worried I may have gone overboard and I wonder what the consequences of those settings can be to other crawlers like BackType and IceRocket. If you have any intel to give me on that topic, I’m happy to take it. I feel a bit like I’ve been giving orders to my robot blocker without really understanding all the consequences.

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[fr] Sur Twitter (voir mon guide si vous êtes perdus!), je laisse en principe qui le désire me "suivre". Par contre, je bloque sans merci ceux qui n'ont rien capté et qui utilisent Twitter pour envoyer des messages ressemblant à du spam, et ceux qui collectionnent les gens à suivre comme des trophées (à moins que ce soit des gens de "mon monde" que je connais). Donc, oui -- non seulement je ne m'amuse pas à suivre ces gens foncièrement inintéressants, mais en plus, je ne désire pas figurer dans leur tableau de chasse.

I’m approaching 500 followers [on Twitter](http://twitter.com/stephtara). That means that nearly 500 people have asked to be able to track my updates — and I haven’t blocked them.

I’ve blocked many people from following me, even though my updates are public, and anybody can read my tweets/twitters on the web.

Who do I block? Blatant advertisers and friend collectors.

When I get a notice that somebody is following me on twitter, I quickly go to check out their stream (sometimes a backlog builds up, but that doesn’t change much to the process).

If I know/recognize the person and I want to keep track of them, I’ll follow them back (I’m pretty loose about who I follow on Twitter, though I do stick to people I know in a way, people I’d like to know more, or people that seem very interesting in what they tweet).

If I don’t recognize the person, the first thing I do is check how many people they’re following. If they’re following 500+ or 1000+ people and their name doesn’t ring a bell (ie, they aren’t one of the 2.0 mass-networkers gravitating around my world), I block them. I see no interest in being part of their faceroll collection. None at all. So yeah, of course, I get less followers, like that (but I’m not in any race or anything).

If they don’t get busted because of my “friends limit”, I take a quick glance at their twitter stream. If it’s tweet after tweet of self-promotional crap or ad-linking, I block them too. Why anybody would use Twitter to try to convince people to follow their spam is beyond me — probably, they haven’t got a clue what Twitter is about, and are trying their same old spammy techniques there without realising they’re mostly useless. Anyway, I’m not interested in being associated with people like that, so I block them too.

Who is left? Well, normal human beings. If you’re reading this and you have a clue (ie, you don’t believe in spamming people or making collections of people/links/whatevers to win the contest), then you run very little chance of being blocked :-). Feel free to [follow me on Twitter](http://twitter.com/stephtara)!

*PS: [Robert](http://twitter.com/scobleizer), [Loïc](http://twitter.com/loiclemeur/), [Jeff](http://twitter.com/jeffpulver), and other authentic super-networkers out there: you’re part of my world, I don’t mind being in your collection ;-).*