I hope this switch to a new theme did not impact my search engine results that much and it is just a temporary issue. Especially for the Icybox 4220 I had quite good positions.

UPDATE I: Of course the theme has an impact on the visits, at least if you have the google analytics code hard coded into your theme... I guess the problem was, that I did not have the Google Analytics tracking code on the page anymore. We will see what tomorrow brings.

UPDATE II: The installation of the Wordpress Plugin for Google Analytics didn't help either. There is something wrong with that WP-Polaroid theme when it comes to web analytics. None of the tools that I was testing was working anymore, so I switched back to freicurv for now. It's too late to figure out what is wrong with the theme.

Anyway, as my blog wasn't working any more after this attack, I had to reinstall everything, uploaded my back-ups, etc. And today the guys at Wordpress.org release the new version. Basically 2 days too late!

I guess I will wait a few days to install Wordpress 2.5. I can't be bothered to do the same stuff again tonight.

First I will install all the important plug-ins. I give them a few weeks to fix the little problems that might appear in the next few days.

The lack of a good desktop blogging tool for Linux seems not to be only an issue for me. Just while I was searching for new tools I stumbled upon the following posts:

• Five Desktop Blog Editors for GNU/Linux Users
• Five More Desktop Blog Editors for GNU/Linux Users
• Linux Blogging Sucks

During my short period with Windows Vista on my Siemens Amilo si1520 I had the chance to try Windows Live Writer, which I hate to say, was the best desktop blogging software I have used so far. It worked well with my blog and even showed me the blog posts within the layout of my blog while writing them.

However, I do not really need this gimmick (but would be nice), but I have a few requirements for a desktop blogging software:

• Offline support: I want to be able to write my blog posts, while I am not connected to the web and save the drafts. Once I am online I want to be able to publish them to the server.
• It MUST support categories and syncronize them with the server. The software must be able to create new categories.
• It should support the possibility to publish a post at a specific time.

I am writing I have tried to writ this blog post with a software called QTM. It looks promising, but there are a lot of things to improve. Most important issue: I was not able to publish my post to the server (!?). Additionally, there is no WYSIWYG-Editing, which is not a major problem. However, the code view is very basic (no highlighting), etc. The preview does not display unordered lists, too. Unfortunately it is also not possible to add new categories, which makes the software not very convenient. At least I can work on the articles off-line. The interface looks pretty improvised, too. Especially the icons are not very selfexplanatory, e.g. the symbol for setting a link.

My previous post "Bidirectional syncronization between Google Calendar and Mozilla Thunderbird" was written with a Firefox-Plugin called "Deepest Sender". From the first test I prefer Deepest Sender over Scribefire. However, as I did not manage to publish this post with QTM I have used Scribefire for this post. You can add new categories (called tags), you can see older posts and you can save your post as a note. Not sure if this will totally convince me. I am missing for example the possibility to upload an article which should be published only later (at a specified time).

During the next few weeks I will test many different tools, just to decide which one fits best for me.

I could exclude those feeds by including

disallow */feed/

but the as I have learned the robots.txt just prevents the search robots to spider a file, but it does not prevent it from showing up in the SERPs, when someone is linking to you. Therefore a

noindex

can help. I finally found the Wordpress plugin "Don't index my feed" which adds code to each feed to prevent the robots from indexing the files. Let's see how this works.

There are many blogs out there that just display other peoples content via RSS and put some Google Adsense on it to make money with the stolen content. Not that I consider my content that important, but I just can not accept that someone uses my content for spam websites and additionally makes money with that.

So I found this nice plugin and thought I might give it a try. It inserts a unique fingerprint in the RSS feeds which can be searched for by any search engine. You have to pick a unique fingerprint (no matches in Google & Co so far) and when it appears somewhere on the web you can be almost sure that someone is including your content on his website via RSS.

To avoid unnecessary appearance of my fingerprint in the search indices I have substituted it above by xxxxxxxxxx (You can see my fingerprint in the RSS feeds if you really need to).

Creating and maintaining such a sitemap for a blog can be quite time consuming, especially if you are writing posts quite frequently. That is where this wordpress plugin comes into the game. It helps you to create the files sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz. On the adminstration page you can choose between many options and customize the sitemap to your needs.

If you are interested in using sitemaps download the Wordpress plugin "Google Sitemap" by Arne Brachold. It does not only inform the search engines about the structure of your website, the changes to the website and how often the different pages and posts should be visited by the crawlers. On http://www.google.com/webmasters/ you can see the crawl status of your pages, where the crawlers run into trouble, etc.