Nothing really special about this post; just giving a little inter-blog SEO juice to a couple of clients. You might want to follow the links and check them out if you are in the Northern Michigan area.
Extreme Clean exterior cleaning and power washing in West Branch, MI
And some props to the people who host me. They do a good job, for a good price:
I hate spam. I’m not a big fan of marketing in general, though I understand it is a necessary part of getting business. This may sound odd coming from someone who wants to help small to mid-sized businesses get online, but one does not automatically preclude the other. Online marketing and “SEO” can be effective and non-spammy; it just takes some work. I’ll be posting an article on this in a couple of days, but I want to refer you to this article by ZDNet SEO Whistleblower Stephen Chapman that really captures how I feel about spam and evil marketing in a manner far more eloquent that I ever could:
The guru facade: Internet marketing shams, flimflams and other BS.
Enjoy!
For some time I’ve been wanting to move my blogging efforts over a desktop app, to be able to control multiple blogs from one place, and to search through and manage the content more easily.
The 2 main contenders that I could find for the Mac platform were Ecto and MarsEdit. The latter seems to be considerably more actively maintained, has a slicker interface and was available for download on the Mac AppStore so I went with that.
The main feature I was missing in MarsEdit was the fairly comprehensive tag handling offered by WordPress. The fact you can type only a few letters of the tag you need and it auto-completes is something you can’t do without once you get used to it. The Delicious website and similar desktop tools all offer this functionality.
The first challenge was to get my data out of Delicious, not the links/bookmarks that are offered as their only export option but the actual tags. Not surprisingly there’s a WP plugin for that, enter EG-Delicious Tags.
Once your tags are copied over to your WP installation you can access the data as a serialized array from the WP database, it’s in the options table under the key _transient_egdel_tags.
Then the data needs to be integrated with MarsEdit. The app’s author, Daniel Jalkut, kindly explained which plist file within the app needs to be updated to enable the search auto-completion feature.
A simple PHP script was sufficient to deserialize the data and wrap it in XML tags:
<?php
$data = <<<DATA
a:773:{s:7:”_blogit”; …
DATA;
$struct = (unserialize($data));
$keys = array_keys($struct);
$out = ”;
$out .=”\n”;
foreach ($keys as $tag) { $out .=”<string>$tag</string>\n”;}
print $out;
?>
Add the XML to the relevant key and save out the DataSources.plist file and you’re done.
