WordPress

Published on by matt Category: Mobile, WordPress

It had to happen sooner or later. I finally migrated an old blog I had over to WordPress. With some 75 million website powered by WordPress it must be worth something. About 19% of self-hosted websites are WordPress (like this one). More WordPress statistics are here, and here.

It’s not like I’ve never used WordPress before. I’ve been occasionally using and mostly configuring it for many years. But now I join the realm of regular users.

Most impressive so far is that the new default theme (twenty fifteen) is “responsive” right out of the box. So we should look good on mobile, tablet and desktop. I was also pretty easily able to import all my old blog posts. Sorry about the no-longer-relevant ones, but at least they are there.

So here’s to looking forward to further customizations and discovery of new features. Stay tuned….

ASP.NET 4.0 Custom Error Pages Very Slow to Load

Published on by Zachary Lyons Category: Server Setup

When I upgraded to ASP.NET 4.0, runtime errors suddenly became very slow. There was a consistent two-minute delay before my custom error page would appear. The rest of the website was lightning fast, so it was not related to compilation. I finally decided to tackle this problem, so I started copying blocks of code into a new, blank custom error page. The delay was not present until I copied this line of code:

Response.StatusCode = 500

I had been searching the web for terms like "asp.net error page very slow" with no success. One quick search on "asp.net statuscode slow" finally returned some helpful results:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3288797/page-not-rendered-when-sending-statuscode-500-to-the-client

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.httpresponse.tryskipiiscustomerrors.aspx

http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/2009/Apr/29/IIS-7-Error-Pages-taking-over-500-Errors

All I had to do was drop in one line of code where I set the status code.

Response.TrySkipIisCustomErrors = True

The delay is gone now, but I still have no idea what's going on inside the black box.

Google’s search results algorithm Panda

Published on by matt Category: SEO

I just came across this article that talks about changes to Google’s search results algorithm.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/beat-google-panda

The five “penalties” listed are:
1. Heavy Template Footprint
2. Empty Content
3. Overlapping and Redundant Articles
4. High Ad Ratio
5. Affiliate Links and Auto Generated Content

But the two significant points from this review are 1) how usable is the site from a human perspective and (more importantly) 2) what is the bounce rate? The bounce rate I’m finding is very important. It looks like search engines are monitoring how long a person is on a site. If the person hits the back button right away the search engine will catch this and change the ranking of this site in the search results.

Determine the image for the Facebook Like button

Published on by matt Category: Facebook

When adding the Facebook Like button to a page, be sure to add the image Property meta tag:

<meta property=”og:image” content=”<full path to image>”/>

Here are other tag that can be added:

<meta property=”og:title” content=”<Title of the page>”/>

<meta property=”og:site_name” content=”<Title of the site>”/>

Here is the Facebook Like button generator:

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/