Just a note....
We are #1 some place. And that place is the google search results for "Harbor Freight Magnesium Fire Starter" AND "Harbor Freight Magnesium Fire Starter Review." Not that anyone should care to any great deal. I just thought it nice to show up in a search not involving the phrase "randomland."
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=Rw&q=Harbor+Freight+Magnesium+Fire+starter+Review&btnG=Search&aq=f&oq=&aqi=
I'm sure you know, but I added a YouTube account for Randomland (username randomnets). There are a few little things up there like playing with fire, go kart videos, and some Blazer action. The Blazer stuff seems to get a few extra hits. I have a lot more video lying around that I could upload, but just haven't found the time yet. Is there any videos you would suggest? Do we have anything worth watching which may increase (legitimate) traffic?
Also, just about every site these days has a whole warehouse of little boxes with these "web 2.0" links. What of these services haves you ever used? A flickr page, reddit, delicious, stumbleupon, technorati, etc. I guess someone must use them, or they wouldn't be so prolific. If it helps us to be known, I'll sign us up.
I personally have never used one of those little web 2.0 things. I have used the results of some of those though, namely digg. Its not often but I do find things one use there sometimes (but that only because google but those results higher then the page that was being 'dugg' for whatever reason.) News by popularity is all that is though.
I recently installed a Drupal module to allow you to enter [pagebreak] in a story to split it up into pages. Nick and I were discussing how auto-paged stories get indexed by Google (and the like). While looking through some Drupal forums, I come across a suggestion that I enter into the robots.txt a line to ignore anything ending in ?page=0,0 (subsequent page URLs).
What is not clear, however, is if this will keep these pages from being indexed properly. A quick google search (http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS243&=&q=randomland+drupal+module+regular+expression&aq=f&oq=&aqi=) makes me think they are not being index.
Some links, but no clean solutions that I can see...
http://groups.drupal.org/node/3472
http://groups.drupal.org/node/2348
http://drupal.org/project/cleanpager
http://gurpartap.com/node/19
I see that search engine optimization is the rousing topic I expected.
Oh! Was that sarcasm?!
Anyway, I installed a little doodle that throws in "social bookmarking links." Meh. It's a little obtrusive. I never use those services, but I often find myself scanning pages for them, just to see if they're into the scene. Everybody's doin' it, maaan. But it's nothing to go swamp diving over.
Remove it if you hate it.
I want to make it smaller. I combined it with the (useless?) trackback box. That crap seems to kind of go together. (Can be seen here (http://randomland.net/motors/beater-car-101), at the bottom of the page) And the styling on that trackback url thing is gaudy. I just haven't found where to change it yet.
Remove it if you hate it.
I never understood the trackbacks and who would use them. Its a little odd to have those links on every page, but I guess thats the only way to use them. We should try and make them a little more unobtrusive though.
Yeah, totally. To all that.
Well, not that anyone actually uses Bing, but we finally exist on a search for "randomland." A few weeks ago, we didn't even show up when searching for "randomland.net".
http://www.bing.com/search?q=randomland&go=&form=QBLH&qs=n
Cool. I guess the server has worked for long enough to get noticed. Lets see if I can break it again.
Oh, in regards to the uglybar thing I installed:
I was thinking a little collapsable div or removing all of the text around those icons and killing the trackback-url guy. I just don't know where do change that stuff.
Since the move to Drupal registration, we have become much more popular!
...with spam bots. Brad already removed a junk post about a 1/2 hour ago. What kind of registration authentication did you end up using? It seems we need to tighten it down.
Just the default. It sends an email with a random password to the provided email. I guess they have scripts that can parse that out now. I will add a captcha to the login process. That should stop the rest of them. They have some interesting one. Ones that use fill in the blank type questions and the like.
Ok. Is that implemented now? Hopefully we can keep the Russian gibberish off the site now...
Yep it is in place. I went with the image captcha, its works like I expected (more hoped) it would. It adds a image of messed up looking (but hopefully readable) letters for people to squint a little and try to type. I hope it not so easy that computers can read it. Another option is to make people do simple math problems, but I figured that would be as easy as anything else to have bots break. There are other options that we can add, at the moment we have the most basic option available. No more gibberish I hope.
Thankfully, our spammer popularity has subsided. Does anyone every stumble across our site anymore? I know there was one dead link to an old wordpress page. I fixed that, just putting up a "I don't speak Korean" note and said for anyone to comment if they wanted the content back up (it is lost).
I have no idea what your talking about :) I don't speak Korean either, ummm sure put the content back! And what page was that?
I don't know. It was some page about how to do some simple theming thing in WordPress. The links coming in were from the WordPress forum and someone made the comment, "she might as well have been speaking Korean." Apparently, I was not very clear. I'm good at that, but usually use a lot of words to do it.
Now I understand :)
# Hits Search String
1 6 8.22% how to make a toy lightsaber
2 4 5.48% wooden lightsaber
3 3 4.11% harbor freight magnesium fire starter review
4 3 4.11% randomland
5 2 2.74% foam lightsaber
6 2 2.74% how to make a small toy lightsaber
7 2 2.74% how to make toy lightsaber
8 2 2.74% lightsaber wooden stick
9 2 2.74% magnesium fire starter review
10 2 2.74% random land
11 2 2.74% randomland drupal filter
12 2 2.74% randomland forum
13 2 2.74% removable parts of a toy lightsaber
14 1 1.37% 2000 nissan maxima
15 1 1.37% @words.txt
16 1 1.37% beater car
17 1 1.37% break a lightsaber
18 1 1.37% build a toy lightsaber
19 1 1.37% coast606
20 1 1.37% crap truck
Last months top search strings for those interested :)
Interesting, but I half wonder how many of those were my fault. With hits in the single digits, it's kind of hard to tell what's going on :(
Thin months might be more enlightening. Just use the magic number:812 to access randomland and you can see for yourself.
Google seems to be indexing test.randomland.net. How did it even find it?! I guess I will have to robots it out.
Yeah, we shouldn't let it index that. That's a no-no.
Does anyone have any tip on making google return a useful descriptive text when you search for 'randomland?' It always gves a useless snippet from old front page posts...months-old usually.
Thats a good question.
Also, is the forum in the robots.txt file or something? According to google (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS243&q=randomland.net+forum&aq=f&oq=&aqi=), it does not exist.
If you search randomland.net/forums (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS243&q=randomland.net%2Fforums&aq=f&oq=&aqi=) you get one result that points to the forums. Perhaps they need included in the sitemap, or add forums.randomland.net to the google webmaster thing.
In addition to the fact that a search for 'randomland forum (http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS243&=&q=randomland+forum&aq=f&oq=&aqi=)' turn up nothing of use, I have come across another visibility annoyance.
I was curious if my Bike Tree (http://randomland.net/rec/bike-tree) article was anywhere to be found on the Googlenets. Well, it is not. Not even close -- search link (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS243&num=30&q=randomland.net+bike+tree&aq=f&oq=&aqi=). It seems that our image, file, and blog nodes are getting precedence over legitimate text article nodes. I found the actual article nowhere! It should be at http://randomland.net/rec/bike-tree. What the dealy, yo?
I was going to look and see if the cron job is still running regularly, but I forget where that is.
Cron is still running. The XML sitemap (for google to use) was broken somehow. It had only two entries. I am trying to fix it but I don't have much time (going to go put insulation in my grandmas garage.)
I guess the sitemap is fine. It just got automatically split into two files (I am guessing do to size.)
Google did forget we had a sitemap for some reason. Fixing that.
And as freaking always: http://www.randomland.com/ They think they can trademark that huh? Not for less then $$$$$$ they cant. We have so much prior possession or whatever its not funny. So sad. Too many people out there defiling the randomland name. How do we protect it (without spending lots of moneies.) I guess we just need to be so awesome that we dominate the search results for anything random related!
I guess we need to learn how to work with google as it seems google isn't able to work with us (we are a simple drupal site with some SMF forums, that combination exists in thousands of instances all over the web. Why cant they just spider us properly!?)
I don't know. It's kind of frustrating because we just have a simple site with about 50 text articles and a like 1500 forum posts. That's not abnormal at all!
And is it just me, or does that randomland.com logo look way too much like the Enron logo (http://images.google.com/images?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS243&=&q=enron%20logo&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi)?
It does in deed. Its also backwards. And I don't like it :( Jerks
Maybe that a little too harsh :)
Messing around with the google webmaster tools I found an option to make it display the site URL with or without the www in search results. I set it to not use the www. Its just as easy to make it add the www to links without it.
What one should we use?
I've been setting up all manually created links without the www. It's cleaner, in my opinion. It's shorter and the 'www' has no real purpose and adds no useful information, in my opinion. I say we stick with 'randomland.net'
It is done. Google says it might take a while for it to show up in the search results that way.
A quick search (http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=randomland+francine&aq=f&aqi=&oq=&fp=cbc2f75bf9d43a8f) indicates that google is now spidering in a very obnoxious fashion -- appending senseless (http://opinion.randomland.net/index.php/gallery/pages/francine/Francine+202.jpg.html?q=gallery) or unused (http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=6&ved=0CBcQFjAF&url=http%3A%2F%2Ftest.randomland.net%2Findex.php%2Fgallery%2Fpages%2Ffrancine%2FFrancine%2B193.jpg.html%3Fq%3Dgallery&rct=j&q=randomland+francine&ei=4pcrS5O-KJCasgP2xaC5BA&usg=AFQjCNGwwRI0W-N2wdLhcHpfJyHTx2PHWQ) subdomains and using both randomland.net and randomland . gotdns.com* domain names. Also, the old gallery is now, very clearly getting spidered. We should probably remove all links to that unless we plan to use it...
* sorry about the random spaces. I made the forum think that 'randomland . gotdns.com' is a bad word. It auto-replaces it with 'randomland.net'
Haha. Ok. We should set the googlebots to ignore the other URLs. And since we have had randomland.net working reliably I think we can 86 the other domains. I don't know where google would be finding them. I don't know of anyplace that links to them.
Update: randomland.net now has its own virtual server. It points to a page telling people to go to randomland.net. I am sure there is a better solution. A DNS level redirect would do the trick, but dyndns.com does not offer that ability short of paying them more then I want to spend. They also removed the option to use domain wildcards (*.whatever.com) on free accounts, but rl.gotdns seems to be grandfathered in.
Somehow, we have totally slipped off Google's radar for even a direct search for 'randomland.' It doesn't appear that there is any new contenders...we just disappeared. Did our sitemap die? Or could it be something else entirely? I'm not too familiar with our setup.
There is something wrong with the drupal portion of the site. It gives google (and anything that uses a wget type browser) a 500 server error. Not the forums though. I am not sure what the issue is but the time that it started roughly corresponds to to the last time I updated the drupal install.
:(
Hmm, that does suck. Not that Randomland was ever some "great internet haven for the masses," or anything. But still...
That sounds like an problem that a lot of people would want to fix quickly. If indeed we are not the only ones having this issue.
Fixed. We can now be indexed by google. I also updated the site map module so Google will stop rejecting out site map (it refuses to use site maps with duplicate entries... and it sees randomland.net/ and randomland.net/index.php as the same thing... I think) So hopefully we will be back on the charts. For a while 'raptor egg' was a bit of a 'hit'.
This is somewhat related to the topic at hand...
Let's shut down randomland.net@gmail.com. We now have the Google Apps account, so let's pipe everything through, say webmaster@randomland.net under the moniker randomnets? I have attempted to do this with the YouTube account. In the process, I hosed it...but it might (http://www.google.hu/support/forum/p/youtube/thread?tid=2452022304fb2d76&hl=en) be (http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=183819) recoverable (http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=183819) (I'm trying to re-open randomnets on YouTube at the moment).
Update: YouTube account successfully linked with webmaster@randomland.net account. What (if any) other accounts utilize the randomland.net@gmail.com email address?
Here, here!
Um...ok!
So, since Cody has been uploading vidoes which were actually viewed :o I was thinking again about making a little "made by Randomland" clip to toss at the end of our videos. Something in the 2-5 length, probably. Back in the day (though it seems so recent), we filmed the ridiculous OH NO! video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fo6JJTG3tms), but I did a terrible job green-screening it.
We could just flash a big Three Trees and "randomland.net" or something, too.
Any thoughts?
Look up 'Bad robot' (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l848eXy634I) for a good example of one of those. Cody should be familiar with that animation :)
Ah yes. Eve and I are well acquainted wit the Bad Robot as well. And yeah! Something like that :)
Randomland.com will soon be back into the public domain.
Do we want to pay $20 to put a 'backorder' on it? Or take our chances once its back into the open pool?
I think we have a good shot of getting it once its back in the pool.
Also, randomnets.com, .net, .org and dot whatever seem to be available if people think there is a good need to get them.
Sadly, upperarm.com is not available :( It is for sale though. For $1200. :-\
(.net is, and so are many others. Not that just making upperarm a subdomain wouldn't be adequate if ever we were inclined.)
Man, why are there so many top level doamins? Was there really a big need for creating 50+ of them? All it does is create confusion when some guy has a site with the same name as a .com (everyone just assumes the .com address is the one they want anyway)
It just makes it so you can go broke trying to defend your namesake.
Incidently, GoDaddy suggested that 'gunmanwounds.com' is available :) Just as a side note.
Lol, gunmanwounds eh? Of all the things, I wonder how it came up with that!
Anyway, I'm comfortable sitting of my hands (figuratively speaking) until .com is publicly available. And if/when it does, let's go for it!
I'm less sure on the the others...though I always thought it'd be fun to do stupid things like: randomland.net.randomland.com/, com.randomland.com/, etc. Of course, we could play such games already.
Oh yes, and "ICANN haz monopoly on tlds lolz"
So, sometime last night randomland.com went back on the open market. It was probably available to register for all of 200ms before getting snatched up by some automated system. So... another year without that most respected of TDls, the .com.
Google would respect us more more if we had it, but we don't really need it. It expires April 12 2012. It was registered at 11:53:11 last night. Had I had ANY way of knowing when it expired, I would have been on it. Not that it would have likely helped. The registrars all know the schedules of the others, so we didn't really have a change of beating out an automated system that spams the registration servers (I don't know why that is even legal, let alone tolerated by the registrars.)
So yeah. Why does anyone want it again? It was a low value domain that has never had anything on it of substance. Never, as far as I can tell, made anyone any cash. So why are they snatching it up like that? In the hopes that the .net or .org-ers will be willing to pay $600 for it? Crazyness.
Evil has stuck again, and another injustice has been purveyed onto the commoners by the modern day snake-oil salesmen; Domain squatters and highjackers. Taking by brute force what they have no stake in, and extorting those who have legitimate stake in the name for thousands of dollars. Or setting on it for a year for no good reason.
If we could show in court that they only bought it for the intent of selling, and their for had no good-faith reason to own it, we might be able to take it. Its been done before. But that was for corporations, where we are nought but lowly peasants. But legal battles are work, and it really does not matter that much.
So. Pooooot.
Edit:
Alternatively, we could abandon the name. And go with a whole set of TDLs under the randomnets monicker. .com, net and org. Thought there is already a randomnet.com.
As a humorous aside, KillerChickens.com is available for $500, but the .net and .org counter parts are free.
If you are looking for good available domain names to snap up the following are currently available in the .com variety:
ChickensRevenge
thesearenotmypants
Robotzilla
Cannibalhobos
So is AngryNewts.com and KillerNewts.com. But I think I kinda like CanibalHobo...
You could spring for a few of these, too!
- pootermobile.com
- fiveironyfrenzy.com
- thecakeisaliewasalreadytaken.com
- seymorewasmyfriend.com
- hobobmobile.net (the .com is taken :()
- httpwwwdotcom.com
- raptorsbiteback.com
- youatemydonut.com
Sady,
iwasthefirsttoregisterthisdomainandalligotwasthislousydnsentry.com is too long. But you can still snatch up
leftfender.com (for when you start your country band) and
atomicdrummachine.com (for...whatever that's for!).
There, now I just gave the squatters some fodder
1 (http://www.godaddy.com/domains/searchresults2.aspx?ci=16811).
This would be an edit: on the slightly less ridiculous topic of registering up the randomnets, I think that might be a good idea (since that's the username I've been registering things under).
We've been awfully popular with the spambots lately on the main site. I seem to get 1-3 new account requests per day. I cleared out a bunch of this junk recently. Just FYI, I guess.
Can we turn off the automatic CYK Image Gallery creation? There were a lot of those...
Yeah. We should definitely add better captcha. Perhaps get rid of the gallery stuff. Also move to sevens.