Cshel Chicago SEO, PR and Web Development

Mod_rewrite doesn’t look at arguments? D’oh!

Posted on 09. Jun, 2009 by Carolyn Shelby.

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When I converted my old, kloodgy Web site into WordPress last year, one of the reasons I did so was because my restaurant review script was no longer supported and had some ginormous security holes. It was open to all kinds of cross-site script injection and it was becoming a one to two hour a day chore to keep it running.

The new solution (WordPress) is fabulous, but now I have a couple hundred inbound links that are broken. Trying to get all of the links updated by the other sites was a losing proposition, so my next step was to put some 301 redirects into my friendly neighborhood .htaccess file and transfer all the link love to the new pages.

Easy (normal) 301 redirects via .htaccess
Normally, a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file would look like this:
Redirect 301 /old/url.shtml http://domain.com/new/filename
or if we’re being fancy…
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^old/url.shtml$ new/filename [R=301,L]

Normally, the examples above are perfect for redirecting incoming links from old, defunct pages to the new, correct location of the file. The problem I ran into is that my pages were dynamically generated; i.e., they all shared the same URL, and which review was presented to the user was determined by an argument passed in the URL after the file extension.
http://www.domain.com/cgi-bin/script.cgi?review=bobs_shrimp_hut

To address this, I figured I would just [...]

Popularity: 33% [?]

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Question for WordPress Gurus…

Posted on 13. Jul, 2008 by Carolyn Shelby.

I’ve been spending all of my waking time lately getting a frankensteinishly complicated website all put into a single WordPress install, using it as both as CMS and for posts (as news items). So I’ve managed to combine all of the static pages into the new site, and imported two separate WordPress installs into the single uber-WP (and that included converting all of the posts from one of those smaller WPs into pages).

Btw, I should probably mention that I did all of this development on a completely different domain.

So anyway, as I’m dangerously close to the point where I can flip the switch and turn the new site on, it occured to me that I’m not entirely sure what the best way is to go about doing it… so I’m asking for advice from those of you who know WordPress far better than me.
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SEO 101: Starting Your Own Social Network

Posted on 31. Mar, 2008 by Carolyn Shelby.

Special guests Rhea Drysdale and Steve Bristol from LessEverything.com join me, Brian and Ne0 on SEO 101 to discuss the benefits and advantages of running your very own social network… Completely coincidentally, they’re also pimping LessEverything’s recently released open source social network platform, Lovd.

So why would you want to start a social network?
In addition to adding coolness and generating additional traffic for your site. Branded social networks help build your brand by creating a community for your users and fans. The users connect with other like-minded people and while bonding with each other… they emotionally bond with the brand… that turns users into fans and fans into brand evangelists.

Let’s not forget that a social network also creates additional ranking opportunities for your site. More content, more potential spots to occupy on the SERPs.

So why is Lovd so special?
Lovd is a) really cool looking and fully featured right out of the box, b) FREE, c) open source, and d) supposedly very easy to install and run — if you’re familiar with Ruby On Rails. I say supposedly only because I am absolutely NOT familiar with RoR, and will have to defer to Steve’s expert opinion on that topic.

If you’re interested in adding a unique facet to your site, and you (or a geek you love) are familiar with Ruby on Rails, go check out Lovd — check the system requirements, demo, features, etc — then download it and give it a spin. It’s open source and you can’t beat the price :)

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