Closing up Modest Opinions
After failing to find a real focus and a lack of time to maintain two very similar sites, I’ve decided to close Modest Opinions and fold the existing content into this site. Once the search engines catch up and index the content here, I will be putting the domain, www.modestopinions.com, up for sale.
My original idea was for a site called Gotta Be Kidding, which was to be a blog about the inane things that we humans do on a pretty regularly basis. As I worked on it though, I realized that I was getting increasingly negative in my commentary. I decided to transform that into Modest Opinions, which could have both positive and negative opinions about things and incorporate media and product reviews. The site lasted 18 months.
Site Updates
The site will be up and down pretty frequently over the next few days as I move from one Wordpress theme to another. Normally, it wouldn’t require much work, just tweaking the new theme a bit, but the theme I’m moving away from was… different. Instead of putting page content in the page, the content went in the template files. This allowed for heavy customization on a per-page basis, but it also means that I have to manually get that content back out and put it into the normal Wordpress system. Believe me, that’s the last time I’ll make that mistake.
So, you might notice that some (all, as I write this) of my pages are blank. Please bear with me.
Moving the Weekly Art Review
Based on some recommendations from webmasters whose opinions I value, I’ve decided to split off my weekly art reviews to their own site: Artistic Opinions.
I’m still wrapping up the layout of the new site, but the reviews are live and will continue uninterrupted every Friday. Come on by!
The NoFollow Tag
Back in May, I wrote an entry describing the anti-NoFollow movement and my involvement in that area. I installed a WordPress plugin that was supposed to remove the rel="nofollow" code from the links in my comments. I discovered recently that it was not working the way it should have been.
I have replaced that plugin with another, the DoFollow plugin. This looks to work perfectly, but if you do see any links that the rel="nofollow" code is showing up on, please let me know.
Link Love - Removing the No-Follow Tag
You’re going to see this image in the comments area of all my articles here at Modest Opinions. WordPress, among other blogging software packages and websites, institutes a "no follow" policy in any area where a user can enter information. The major search engines see this attribute in a link code:
rel="nofollow"
and they won’t follow the link to the destination. It’s supposed to help stop "comment spam" on blogs and other websites. In reality, it doesn’t work very well, and is viewed by many as a failed experiment.
I’ve got other anti-spam measures here, and I’m into sharing the link love, so I’ve installed a WordPress plugin that removes the ‘no-follow’ attribute from my comment links. What’s most bizarre is that I actually had to install a plugin to change the default behavior… you would think something like this would be an option you could set in the default Wordpress setup.
For more information, visit Randa, the creator of the "U Comment / I Follow" graphic and Loren Baker on his blog, Search Engine Journal.
I’m working on it
Just relax, chicken little. I’m working on it. Check back every five minutes until it’s ready. In no time at all you’ll be wondering how you ever got along without me.
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