Dylan Greene dot com

I'm constantly tweaking the code for my site, getting it ready for mass consumption from friends hungry to use this for their own blogging desires:

Here's some changes I made over the last week:

• Blog paging (Previous/Next Page) . This is needed on more blogs. If you look at most blogs, when you get to the bottom of the page there is no way to easily see the next set of entries. Users expect Next Page, so that's what I added. I've also seen sites that use "Previous Page" because you're going "back in time" - I felt that was just semantically confusing.
• New photoblog, captionsblog, categories, and archive pages, all with better URLs and paging.
• Google Adsense ads - I've had Google ads for a couple years, but I typically kept them hidden at the bottom of some pages. By changing the size, placement, frequency of the ads, and some other tweaks, I went from making $0.03 a day to about $15/day. I also blocked sites advertising Bob Dylan merchandise. Not that I have anything against him, but pretty much all of my ads were for him, and that doesn't target my audience well.
• Finally, I changed the URL schema. Those reading via RSS might have seen duplicate entries because of that. Sorry, nothing I could easily do to prevent that.
  • URL 1.0: \blogs.asp?blogID=1234
    This was ugly and exposed variables and page names that users didn't need to see.
  • URL 2.0: \posts\1234
    This was shorter, but didn't give any context to the page. The word "posts" caused many Google Ads for fencing and other uses for wood posts. Another problem was that every comment, photo, caption, and anything else with a unique ID had it's own url (\posts\1234\5678). I thought this would be helpful, but it just filled Google up with lots of pages with the same content. I don't want to be thought of as a Google index spammer, so I made further URL changes bring us to version 3....
  • URL 3.0: \1\1234_Lots_of_software_updates
    The 1 is for posts, then the ID of the post, then the blog title for easy reference and to make Google happy. Since post titles can change, that part of the URL is actually ignored behind the scenes. If I need to jump to specific comment or photo I use #value in the URL.

I wrote my own URLRewrite code that fast and efficient for my needs, so old URLs never break. Some search engines still look for URLs from the Windows 95 site I ran until 1996. I'll be making more changes as I have time in the evenings.