As with real estate success in the garden often has a lot to do with location. In my garden I have noticed that some plants are thriving, yet sister plants in a different location are struggling to continue. So I have relocated several plants in the last few days. The reason is to encourage increased growth and to ensure the plants are all getting a fair share of the conditions.
On the chilli front I moved the producing mystery chilli forward slightly to an even more sun drenched location. I have also turned about 90 degress to hopefully encourage the jalapeno into action. I have also moved the ebony fire with these chilli’s. So now all my chilli plants are together and overseen by the Mexican Guitar Playing Burrow Rider looking from above.
I also clustered the grape tomatoes with the beefsteak and grosse lisse tomatoes. This just looks better to my mind, and has not changed the conditions the plant was already experiencing very much indeed.
My sisters lavendar has been moved to a more sunny position to encourage further growth. It is right next to our flowering dwarf lavendar that is thriving. Given that both lavendars require the same conditions it should really thrive in the new location.
Finally, I managed to repot our pink rosemary. The plant was seriously constrained in a little pot and was becoming root bound. It is now in a converted stainless steel cooking pot that was simply sitting near the barbecue for the past six to twelve months. I have now put it to a good productive use. In its new surrounds the pink rosemary should thrive.
Will keep you all posted.
The “U Comment, I Follow” Revolution
Recently I became aware that the default installation of WordPress marks all comment links with the rel=’nofollow’ tag. The effect of this tag is that search engine spiders such as GoogleBot will not follow the link to your site, thus the only effect of the comment is if a human follows the link.
The origins of the nofollow tag are steeped in the early days of blogging where spammers were common place, and spam control mechanisms were not. The nofollow thus presented the nefarious activities of the spammer resulting in a profit from the increased sales of whatever product they were pushing.
In the current day however there are multiple spam control options available to combat this disgraceful activity. In fact one is shipped with WordPress by default in akismet. They are very effective and constantly updated. They are not faultless so the blog administrator should review all comments. However, the amount of illegitimate spam is vastly reduced. As a result the nofollow tag is less a legitimate spam control mechanism.
Given the effects of the spam control mechanisms I believe that commenters should be rewarded for their commentary. So I thought I would check the WordPress Dashboard and look for a simple toggle option for enabling/disabling the tag. Unfortunately, it is not a natively user configurable option. I hope that makes it into WordPress 2.5.
As such I have over the previous few days been investigating ways to remove the nofollow tag from comments. After a brief Google search I found the dofollow plugin by Kimmo Suominen. The plugin is highly configurable, but as mentioned earlier an administrator should still check comments regularly to ensure they are relevant and are not some clever spam.
I also found a complimentary plugin called CommentLuv. This plugin will interrogate the supplied URL and if possible retrieve the commenters last blog and place a direct deep nofollow free backlink to it. In this way other blog commenters will see potentially interesting content and visit. Further, search robots will also follow the link to the post.
With these natural advantages I decided to display that SCHWOIT is a proud believer in the I Follow Movement. Again looking at the fiddyp site I found the fast friends follow fair comments post. I liked the design and so decided to integrate it with my design. It is displayed in the header floating over the Bird Of Paradise leaf.
I am a proud member of this movement and encourage all bloggers to embrace the movement.
Tags: akismet, backlink, blog, bloggers, comment, commentluv, dofollow, google, googlebot, i follow movement, nocomment, nofollow, robot, search engine, search engine robot, seo, serp, spam, spam control, spider, wordpress
201 Comments »