Menu

• Dictionary
• Hot Shots

Directory

• Sponsors
• Billing Options
• Content Providers
• Web Hosting
• Traffic Counters
• Website Designers
• Resource Sites

Well that was a very pleasant weekend and I hope you had a great one too. We took some time out to visit a few wineries in the district and we would have gone for a walk on the beach yesterday evening except for one slight problem ... it was high tide and there was no beach left to walk on.

We haven't yet reached the point where global warming will push sea levels so high that the beach will always be covered although I'm sure it will come one day. Right now though we're going through a seasonal period of very high tides and in a day or two high tide won't quite swallow the beach and we'll be back to our pleasant evening walks again.

WordPress
We also spent some time working on a couple of our WordPress sites. Steve has finally got his new theme installed and is slowly making the minor changes that will make it look really neat and I've spent some of the weekend playing with a shopping cart plugin for another client.

This plugin looks great for small shops and it's going to be ideal for this client but if you've got hundreds ... or even thousands ... of products to sell, as some of our other clients have, then this plugin and WordPress is probably not going to work very well for you.

Not so great was an image plugin that Steve needed for the theme that he had bought for his site. Now if something is called a 'plugin' you tend to get the impression that all you have to do is simply plug it in and it will work but that wasn't the case with this so-called plugin.

It required some programming to be done before it would even think of working ... but we got it running in the end.

Rumors
I love a good rumor don't you? There was a great one doing the rounds just as Pubcon finished up. It seems that Matt Cutts mentioned at Pubcon that preventing the search engines from caching or archiving a web page or site was possibly one of the signs that the site belonged to a scammer and ultimately it would lead to sites being removed from Google.

And preventing the search engines from caching or archiving a website could be something that scammers do but other legitimate webmasters prevent their sites being cached too.

However, someone obviously didn't use their brain to filter the information, they probably didn't quite hear what he said and suddenly thought that they had the scoop of a lifetime. Instantly they hit Twitter with the information because, to be first on Twitter with such a juicy bit of information would do wonders for their reputation.

From Twitter it spread to a number of blogs run by search engine wannabe gurus and it just seemed to take on a life of its own. A few of us who prevent the search engines from caching some of our sites quickly took another look at what Matt Cutts had said, did a little bit of exchanging information and then decided that we would just sit back and laugh.

We laughed even harder when the storm of garbage blog posts reached the point where Matt Cutts had to come out and make a clear and unequivocal statement on his blog and on Twitter about the no-cache issue. I'm sure his declaration that people had clearly misunderstood what he had so clearly said took the wind out of more than a few people's sails ... but not before they had made fools of themselves.

And the lesson to take away from that amusing little event is that you should never instantly believe everything that you hear on the Net ... even from sources that you might think are reliable.

When someone tells you something process it through a few of your own filters before you rush off to make wholesale changes to your sites, your business plan or your future stock options. Think things through for yourself and don't rely on other people's judgment. Assess the information you receive based on your own knowledge and on your own experiences and don't believe every person who wants to be a legend in their own lunchtime.

In fact when a rumor, such as the one I just mentioned, hits Twitter and the blogs that you read use it as a way of discovering all those people who really aren't worth following and cull them from your lists. For some time now Steve and I have been doing just that and it was interesting to see that not one of the people we follow on Twitter or whose blogs we read fell for that rumor.

It's almost a foolproof way of finding the best people to follow, chat with and learn from.