Josh Wieder

UPDATE (7/27/2015): I created a Google CSE instead of using the miserable and useless utility described below. Unlike the Blogger tool, the CSE works. Hazaa! I actually got around to using Google's little search tool for Blogger. And you know what? It sucks. I searched for articles using the name of the article, nothing found. I searched for articles using keywords that I had used repeatedly as Blogger "Labels" - nothing found. With actual production projects I have been vehement about removing search tools from Google. Sometimes I've lost, and I've worked with companies that have bought those outrageously priced yellow servers running Googles cute, branded version of BSD. A $30,000 back door to your intranet for regulators and competitors. Brilliant. Better to do the responsible thing and buy yourself a Lexus with petty cash. Anyway, this was different, I thought. The site is hosted on Blogspot, so my users have already been sucked into the freakishly-plas...

After 2 years I have a new template. The old template was but ugly, contained pointless functions like dynamically changing look & feel to ensure that no matter what option was chosen, everything was always broken. Other, necessary functions like contact information it hid deep within the code, never to be seen by mere humans. I've watched my readership dwindle from thousands a day to a few dozen, as presumably they escaped to more sanely-coded pastures. I had come to accept all of this until today, when I found myself extending some custom rich snippets. Over the years, you see, I've been fighting something of a crazed Google war with a dermatologist from California. A dermatologist who by happenstance is named Joshua Wieder. For some time a detente had been reached, the good doctor opting for the more formal Joshua while I controlled the top results for the more casual Josh. Then, a year passed in which I was focused on actual work. My domain name lapsed and was claimed...

Hi everyone. My sincerest apologies for what has amounted to a year-long delay in publication. The break was due to a combination of factors - my job making it tough for me to write about tech matters away from the office and a failure to update payment information with my DNS provider. Im sad to say that as of this moment "joshwieder.com" is being held ransom by bulk domain purchasers. Best of luck to them; I can't speak for any of the other Josh Wieders out there but this one has about ten bucks he is willing to spend for the privilege of not using a subdomain. What this means is that we will be stuck using joshwieder.blogspot.com for the time being, unfortunately. Ill try to update the search engines and broken links to the best of my ability to do so. FYI every other part of the URL structure remains the same, so joshwieder.com/pagename would become joshwieder.blogspot.com/pagename and not joshwieder.blogspot.com/crazy/new-path.php or something. I'll have some n...

Some site that calls itself "The Secret Tool" (without a hint of irony) has started linking to my site and sending junk traffic my way. Its maintained on Blogger and apparently I'm not the only one to be dismayed by the sudden rush of hits being had by these Spam-holes. While I was reading through the reports of others who have found their web traffic sullied by The Secret Tool, I found a recurring theme - folks are having difficulty finding where they can report naughty behavior like this to Google. Here is the link. Just type in the name of the blaaaag in question to produce an alert that will be delivered directly to the Trash Bin of a Google administrator: http://support.google.com/blogger/bin/request.py?contact_type=spam&blog_ID=&blog_URL=

Blogging tips aren't really the focus of my website. However, I recently signed up for Bing's Webmaster Tools and encountered some difficulty in submitting the sitemap for my Blogger website, joshwieder.blogspot.com. It took me a bit of head banging before I figured out how to resolve it, thanks in no small part to the amount of guides on this issue that are just wrong on their face. So, for regular blog readers, this isn't as advanced as a lot of the articles here are, but it turned out to be such a nuisance and so ill-documented that I felt something had to be done . This guide will assume that you have already added your site to Bing Webmaster Tools and verified domain ownership, both of which work as advertised. At the time of this writing, Blogger primarily uses Atom 1.0 to publish site feeds - Blogger also relies on Atom for a dynamically generated sitemap. For Google's webmaster tools, I registered the following link, which populates an XML file that contains...