I am making a website which allows people to discuss news topics. I was looking to make like a news feed which shows the most talked about topics and topics followed by users however I am not sure how to do this? As in I can't think of a process to do this and I don't think Rss feed's are the answer, help would be appreciated.
Same here. I am developing a website too and learning how to develop an RSS engine of my own.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/help/rss/default.stm#mysite
http://www.wikihow.com/Create-an-RSS-Feed
But I need more information. What I know is- RSS feeder itself searches for latest content on the news websites or blogs (by looking at their dates perhaps) and it places the latest post on top. Now the problem is that I am not able to create that. I need to know a lot about RSS and specially XML.
But your problem is different I think. You want to show the trending post on the top. Then, I think you will need to create an algorithm to rank your pages/posts. And this algorithm should evaluate the real hotness of the content. For example a 20 days old post on your website might still be hotter than latest trending news and it might be searched in the top news.
But now the question is how would this algorithm decide whether a post hot or not? Well this can be done on the basis of likes or hearts give to it by users, comments on the page, links in the comments on the page, shares (you can track that), and external links to your post etc etc. Now it's up to you what you will prefer to make your post trending. You can give more weightage to external links or maybe comments or you could set limits to all of these which when reach gives a sign of full success of the post.
Sorry If you don't get it. I was just thinking of the solutions. I really don't know the solution to it already.
Related
I can code, but don't know much about WordPress internals, so would appreciate any advice or instructions. I am looking for a solution to present the posts on my site in the order of popularity. I am thinking of the following signals:
- number of views
- number of times a download link inside the post was clicked
- number of likes on FB (currently using Monarch plugin)
Please help me to figure out how to get those inputs recorded with WP. When available a no-code solution like plugin will be more preferred unless it has some considerable issues. Examples or tutorials would also be great.
Thank you
You've got a couple of options, first you could use a plugin which would be the easiest way to solve your issue:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-popular-posts/
Or you can take a no-plugin approach and do something similar to this:
http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-track-popular-posts-by-views-in-wordpress-without-a-plugin/
I'm not sure how you'll go finding a solution that will integrate page views with social sharing, that would require popularity being abstracted from page views themselves and another counter being created and incremented via a callback from your social API's.
I have just been checking the yearly stats for a blog I manage, and there is one post from 2008 that is getting a LOT of views, which doesn't make any sense as the info in it is outdated.
I pulled the access_log entries for this post and am finding a lot of referrers from cials-pills-online.info and sites like that. Not a lot of entries for any one of these sites, but say 20-30 a month.
I have looked around the site and can't see anything obvious amiss. Can anyone tell me where to look and what to look for to see if there's any monkey business related to this post?
Well there is a rather simple way to see if it is really monkey business or not if you dont need it delete the post and resubmit it it really depends on the post what is it on maybe you just did some great SEO or are ranking for a relative keyword. If they are leaving comments maybe its just for backlinks this happens when you have a post that is for example my site is on planes and i make a post on cars so I get people that want backlinks from a site on cars
There are also a lot of great security plugins just search in plugins
I never needed to play a lot with RSS, but now I have a project to do, and I wonder if it is possible to pull an RSS feed of all the posts for a certain blog...
I'm not talking about creating a feed generator. I'm just curious why most of the blogspot.com etc websites have available only the last 5 or last 20 posts, but never the complete list... is it a performance/security reason? I guess it is the user's right to decide how many posts go in the feed, right?
How many entries you want to have in your RSS-Feed depends on the goals you want to achieve with the RSS-Feed. Usually you want to provide information about the current articles on your site. That's why you usually have only the most recent articles in the feed.
Performance is of course an issue. A popular RSS-Feed with many followers does not want to send a huge XML file all the time. That can be addressed with enough ressources, but as long as it does not really help your goal, why do it?
I do not see a real security issue. If someone wants to steal your content, he can simple iteratate over the articles on your website directly. RSS would make it a little easier, but if someone wants to steal the content, he will steal it anyway, with or without a full RSS feed. If you take Denial of Service into consideration - we are back at performance issues - there might be a threat to availability. But that's already quite speculative.
I was looking at amazon.com and noticed for a product like: "Really Really Really Long Book Title," they will have a URL like: "amazon.com/Really-Long-Book-Title/ref?id=1&anotherId=2,"
and for a short title like: "Success," they will add other words, like the author name: "amazon.com/Success-John-Smith/ref?id=1&anotherId=2." If I remove these words, like so: "amazon.com/ref?id=1&anotherId=2," the URL still resolves.
Does it hurt SEO to have multiple URLs that resolve to the same page?
How are these words even added to the URL? Is it done programmatically, or do they have someone hand-pick words and store them in a database for each product?
I've been trying to expand my knowledge about SEO so I'd really like to learn how this is being done as thoroughly as possible. I'd greatly appreciate the recommendation of any resources, and also advice based on person experience so that if I implement URLs like this, I can do it correctly. I know I can Google this stuff, but there always seems to be 1,000 ways to do something and I'd just to hear some personal recommendations.
For what it's worth, I use asp.net 4.0 (c#) and the IIS7 URL rewrite toolkit.
Thanks a lot!
IIS7 URL rewrite toolkit is a best tool to use in your case. Here are my answers to your questions.
Does it hurt SEO to have multiple URLs that resolve to the same page?
It does not, as long as you show search engines which URL is a primary one. You can do this by adding rel="canonical"in the primary link page. The best example of this is StackOverflow, which is doing very well in terms of SEO. Now, if you use http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5392137/ you will be pointed to this page, if you use http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5392137/url-rewrite-adding-keywords you will be on this page as well. Obviously the second ULR has more keywords, which is great for SEO, and it is more user friendly as well, since users know what the URL is all about.
How are these words even added to the
URL? Is it done programmatically, or
do they have someone hand-pick words
and store them in a database for each
product?
If you are a developer, then it is not your responsibility any more. SEO is 20% technical, 80% marketing(it is my rough calculation, you know the point.:-)). Those marketing folks should handle that after you give them an access to write or rewrite ULRs. They may find some keywords and add some of them in URL based on their tactics. Elad Lachmi gave a good answer on this question. StackOverflow is using question titles as a URL,which is reasonable. Hiring lots of SEOers to find keywords based on different questions and then manually add to URLs is not a good option for SO. But for commercial web sites, it is worthwhile to hire someone to manually do it. The answer is based on what kind of web site yours is.
Hope this helps
I love the rewrite toolkit because you can do ANYTHING!
From my experience, letting the content editor set whatever URL they like is the best option. Computer are not big on semantics. You can create set rules, and they might be ok (It`s not that hard to tell a computer "if the title is not long enough, add the author name"), but since a human adds the products anyway, a little SEO tutorial for the content editors can go a long way. You would be surprised what people who know thier products can come up with. I have seen great titles and URLs done by our content editors, that I would never think of in a million years from my position as a developer.
I have started developing a webpage and recently hired someone to write code to display a customized feed (powered by API) in the middle panel on http://farmball.com/. Note that this is not the RSS feed tied to the site blog. The feed ties to my account on another site. There is no RSS link for an average user to subscribe to the feed. I've taken the site out of maintenance mode to ask anyone here with scraping/hacking experience how someone would most easily go about 'taking' the feed and displaying it on their own site. More importantly, what can I do to prevent it?
^Updated for re-wording
You can't.
If you are going to expose an RSS feed which you don't want others to be able to display on their site then you are completely missing the point of RSS. The entire reason for Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is to make your content externally consumable- whether that's in an RSS Reader or through someone simply printing its content on their own website.
Why are you including an RSS feed if you do not want someone to be able to consume it?
what can I do to prevent...'taking' the feed and displaying it on their own site?
Nothing. Preventing reuse goes against the basic concept of RSS, which is to make it as easy as possible for anyone to do anything they want with it. It was designed from the ground up to be Really Simple to Syndicate, not Really Hard to Retransmit Without Permission.
You could restrict access to the feed itself to trusted users only by making them provide some credentials or pass in a key to the feed (e.g. yoursite.rss?mykey=abc123). But you cannot control use. Only access.
Be explicit about your license. It isn't a technology solution, as others have mentioned, the technology is an open technology-- this isn't DRM! But if you ask in each post that people who use this feed to not repost/fail to give credit/etc then some people will respond to the request.
Otherwise, you're better off putting your content behind a password and using a paid subscription model for distributing your content.
This is a DRM problem essentially. If you had some technique that you could put content on the web without having it redistributable, the music industry would love you.
It is possible to try to prevent redistribution. One technique you could try is embedding a signature of some sort into the feed for each user who you require to sign up. If the content is found on the web, you can identify and ban the user who redistributed your content.
This is avoidable too, by getting multiple accounts and normalizing the content to remove fingerprints. For the would-be pirate, this requires more effort than they may be willing to put in. Your signature could be a unique whitespace pattern, tiny variances in the timestamps on posts, misplaced pixels in videos, or any other thing you can vary slightly without end users noticing.
use .htpassword
better yet, don't put something private in a public place where it's likely to get picked up by software automatically. Like others have said, it's a pretty odd question, if you're trying to figure something else out, you're better off being explicit with what you want to know.