cool dude cool you just reblog, loser

Not exactly, these posts are generated from my Google Reader Shared items - that I comment on. I'm also blockquoting and linking back.

Reblogging (IMO) is strictly pulling in posts, without linking back and without any additional commentary or insight.

So...cool dude cool you just have ignorant comments.

Yeah, this is why I don't do that for when I pull my Google Reader shared stuff into my blog. Well, not *this* guy exactly, but potential complaints about reposting as well as potential dings from Google from their splog detector algorithms.

At first, I had it set up to copy the whole thing in, but then I changed it to only pull in whatever comments I make + the link itself. It's a tradeoff, because it is useful to have a copy in there in the event that the original goes away (which I've seen happen at least once since I started doing this).

I was just thinking the other day about pulling it in anyway and not showing it by default, putting it behind a no-follow link that would then show the content but not get caught up in Google.

no-follow is for links, but you could (or I could) setup these pages (based on category) to have a no-index tag in the header.

I think that's why I might do, even though I don't care too much about getting dinged from Google - anymore than I already am.

? I'm pretty familiar with what no-follow does; that's why I said "behind a no-follow link". If the content is only displayed when you click on that link (and you can't get there any other way), then that would work fine. There are other ways to tell it not to index certain content (headers, robots.txt, etc.) but those require more of a customization to your theme. The way I'm thinking of would not require theme changes.

Oops, that last one didn't go in as a reply - probably because I was blocking the script at first.

Anyway, what are you using to pull the items in from GR. Is it still that feedwordpress (or whatever it's called) plugin, or something else?

I'm using the feedwordpress plugin to pull in the content.

No-follow, would be pretty hard to accomplish because every link on your site, including archives, rss and plain listings on the homepage.

Modifying the template was easy, I updated the theme minutes after your comment, I just didn't post about it.
<?php wp_title(); ?></title>
<?php
if (in_category(3))
{
echo '<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">';
}
?>
This way even the category pages have the no-index since they have excerpts. And when I create my archives that statement doesn't pass.

Sounds like that will work for you, but I'm wanting something slightly different.

I don't want the noindex header for the normal view of the items (which will just contain the links to the items and my comments, as they do now) for a couple reasons:

1. I still want the linked item to get the "link credit" for me linking to them

2. I still want Google to index those parts (the title and my comments), since I use Google for search on my blog rather than an internally based search system (because WP search generally sucks, but that's another subject).

Anyway, the way I will do mine won't require any theme modifications, which is valuable to me for a couple reasons. One is that I want to be able to change themes (or the basis of my theme) without having a core part of my content organization and display logic tied into the theme and having to duplicate that effort on any new theme I may want to move to. Another would be the ability to eventually release this system I build for pulling in these various items and having it have no dependencies on any particular theme (and not requiring any theme mods) so that others could use it more easily.

It will be pretty easy to do with a link, since this link will only appear in the post content itself, and it will be consistently reflected in all views (archives, feeds, etc.). Since the stored copy of the original feed content will not be a part of the actual post content, and will only ever be displayed after a user clicks on that link, it will be effectively hidden from search engines if they don't follow that link.

I still don't understand.

I'm guessing here:
Are you saying you would post the entire content but some of the content would be hidden behind a no-follow link?
If so, I think Google will see just about everything unless you're running an request to the db to pull the additional information. Because the robots may not follow the link but most robots still spider hidden content.

Or are you talking about posting the full content but having all of your links to that post with a no-follow?
Doesn't make sense to me, how would you put a no-follow on a title URL in WP without adjusting your template. And you'll be hiding the entire page from robots anyways since the robots couldn't find the content.

The real issue is duplicate content from another source and since SEs don't allow for wrapping content with a no-index, I'm not sure if there is any great resolution.

I'm probably going to take the no-index off the site, I'm just doubt the re-posting will be noticed because of the slight differences (i.e. my "note" and the blockquote).

Your first scenario is closer than the second. Here is a summary of how it will work:

These particular posts will appear on my blog just like they do now (fully available and indexable). The actual post content will contain (as it does now) a direct link to the shared item, a link to the source of the shared item (person or site whose feed I shared it from) and my comments / notes from GR, if any. See my GR category for how this currently looks / works, because that will all be the same.

The one addition will be a no-follow link in that post content (after my comments) to "show original content" (or something to that affect). Clicking this link will redraw that page, triggering a plugin that will load the original feed content (probably stored as postmeta data associated with this post) and insert it into the page for that load only (and any subsequent posts back to that same page, like adding a comment).

The primary reason I left out the original content in my first version (other than just consideration for people who may not like their stuff being re-posted) is the concern regarding duplicate content. Since the duplicated content concern is driven by the idea that it's not kosher to lure traffic (search results, etc.) to your own site by simply always republishing other people's work, I think indicating to the SE's that I don't mean for this content to be indexed (by making it inaccessible without following a no-follow link) should alleviate that issue.

In the end, these SE algorithms are a black box, so it may very well be true that they'll crawl it anyway, but from hearing guys like Matt Cutts talk, I think they're smart enough to recognize this method as a technique that's designed to avoid doing uncool things related to manipulating search rankings.

Maybe I should just go ahead and write this tonight as a proof of concept, and to avoid confusion. :-)

Back to this side conversation, (and on the subject of me being wrong), it appears that we're both right/wrong on the nofollow issue.

You are right in that the "official" intent of the nofollow attribute for links is only related to page rank calculations, not indexing, so the name is actually a bit confusing in that respect, because it doesn't actually mean "don't follow", but rather "don't give credit / juice / etc."

That being said, Google and others also do not index the content of a page that's arrived at via a nofollow link, which is what I had suspected, so I believe my original plan will still work. However, I'll probably take other measures to prevent indexing (only when the hidden content is shown) to try to keep that hidden content from being indexed by the other minor SE players, while still allowing the stuff I show now (title, link and my comments) to be indexed since they will be included in the default view.

Now, to derail this conversation back to the original topic... :-)

I'm a big fan of VMWare, although it's unfortunate that the "Workstation" product is not available on the Mac. The huge feature that VMWare workstation has is what it calls "linked clones". I believe this is actually exclusive to VMWare (probably due to patents) and the Workstation product specifically (as far as I know).

Snapshots are definitely nice for testing, but linked clones adds a whole other layer of benefits, especially on laptops, since they usually don't have enormous hard drives.

In case anyone is unfamiliar with the linked clone concept, and how it's different than the snapshot feature offered by most VM products, I'll briefly break down the differences:

Snapshots allow you to save a particular state of a given virtual machine installation, which you can then load and / or revert to at a future date. If you picture it as a timeline, you can install the guest OS and then set markers at points on the timeline that you can later revert back to, in the event that something goes wrong, or you just want to get back to that "clean" state.

What "linked clones" adds is the ability to "branch" off that timeline and have parallel lines that are all based off of a single underlying guest image, yet they can be independently updated, etc. without affecting the other branches.

An example is if you want to have XP VMs for testing using IE6 and IE7, but you want to allow both "copies" to keep up to date with the latest Windows Updates (other than updating IE on the IE6 VM of course). Since snapshot-only products don't allow you to make (and save) changes to a "snapshoted" state without screwing up future snapshots farther ahead in the timeline, you would need to make a full copy of the VM image and have two full-size VMs on your drive, one for 6 and one for 7.

With linked clones, you can start with your single base install (an up-to-date IE6 system, in this example), and then create a linked clone to a new VM and update that to IE 7. Now you effectively have two "branches" sharing the same underlying several-gigabyte XP image, and you can update and save changes to both branches as much as you need. Using this technique, you could theoretically have dozens of "different" XP installs on a fairly small hard drive, since each copy only takes up the disk space used by their differences.

The snapshot functionality isn't exactly a timeline, since I have snapshots of IE6, IE7 and IE8 with different dates and such. I'm able to move back and forth but I can't run them at the same time (not sure if linked clones allows for that).

Fusion does take an extra minute or two at most getting the snapshot ready for start up.

Do linked clones allow you to update the base install, then the branches will be updated? Seems crazy cool if so, right now I have to update each branch/snapshot if new OS updates come out.

And no, it's not copying the entire system for a new snapshot, only the changed files so it's fairly similar.

No, I think neither snapshots nor linked clones allow changing the base install with those changes being reflected in the linked clones or snapshots.

Perhaps they've made snapshots in Fusion behave more like linked clones in Workstation, but the snapshots I've seen do not allow you to save changes to "past" snapshots without screwing up future ones.

So, to clarify, if you have one base XP image, and 3 snapshots for each of the browser versions, and you made them sequentially (IE6 snapshot, update to IE7, snapshot, update to IE8), can you apply updates and save changes to the IE6 snapshot without trashing the IE7 & IE8 snapshots and redoing them?

If so, (and if the IE7 & IE8 snapshots are not full copies), then it sounds like they've incorporated the linked clone feature into Fusion's version of snapshots, although I don't think so. I think they would market that feature better, if it were there, since they tout that it heavily on their Workstation product pages and don't seem to mention it at all on the Fusion ones.