Some Brisbane Guy

Today somebody sent me a link to MIS Australia’s article about some ridiculous filters the ever-paternalistic Australian government is trying to foist on the Australian public for our own protection. Like, thanks you guys.

Anyway I got feisty when I realised that you can’t cut and paste from the Australian Financial Review’s MISAustralia website. As soon as you highlight text on the site, it becomes all garbled. My first, knee-jerk reaction when somebody does something on their website to make it less useful for users (like disabling right-click) is along the lines of “Errr you MORONS! WHY would you BOTHER DOING THIS?” Which is not exactly constructive criticism, but I really can’t see how doing this kind of dumb stuff on your website is a good idea.

If you don’t want your content on the web, don’t publish it there!

I can somewhat understand the mindset of fear at work here. Site owners feel that their content is sitting out there on the web ready to be copied and exploited by anyone. But here are a bunch of reasons why it’s dumb to use lame “DRM” or “copy protection” methods on your website:

You’re making it HARDER for people to share your stuff with their friends

In my case with this article, a guy at work tried to send me the link and a relevant quote from the article — but couldn’t! He could only send me the link. If a busy person can’t just quickly cut and paste the written equivalent of a soundbite to somebody else, they might not bother at all — it’s annoying and confusing. Not only that, but I might not visit your site because it’s just a boring link - there’s no snippet to pique my interest. This means less traffic for your website.

Your site will be LESS POPULAR because it’s HARDER TO FIND

Having garbled content is bad for search engine rankings. Don’t believe me? Try this search — it’s searching for the phrase “opponents of isp-level filtering” on Google — but restricted to ONLY on the MIS Australia website. Whaddya know, it returns ZERO results! That’s because the “protected” content makes NO SENSE to search engines. Not being searchable means missing out on A LOT of potential search traffic.

Your site will be LESS POPULAR because it’s not SHARING INFORMATION - what the web is built on

The most successful websites actively share their content to attract more users/readers using something called RSS. What RSS does is lets you share your content so freely that computers can find new stuff on your site and do the job of spreading it around for you! The only way people are going to know that your site has great content is by showing it to them. Hiding your content away is going to help nobody — not readers, because they can’t find you, and not you, because you’ll have no readers.

I can appreciate that people may be fearful about their content being stolen by web scraping. But this is actually not that big of a problem. Google knows how to deal with web scraping and has methods of determining who should be rewarded as the original publisher of content. Some kid stealing your articles and posting them on his own site isn’t going to take away all of your traffic!

You’re making your website WORSE TO USE.

So many sites that prevent me from right-clicking an image make me angry, because usually I’m just trying to see a higher-resolution version of the picture that they’ve scaled down to fit their page using HTML, but the pic is really a big, colourful picture with lots of detail that I’m missing out on. That sucks. Or maybe I want to send the picture to a friend, saying “Hey, look at this great site, they have heaps more cool pics like this one!” — just saying “hey check out this site they have cool pics” is way less powerful.

And that’s just disabling right-click. MIS Australia’s effort actually makes the site look TERRIBLE -- they have to use a fixed width font because their lame content “DRM” just uses two layers of content, one beneath the other! If you used a variable-width font the text on the two layers would never line up, and you would just get a jumble of letters. So that’s why MIS Australia’s articles look like they were typed out in the 1940s, even on a beautiful screen with font smoothing.

Speaking of a jumble of letters, that’s also what any visually-impaired person’s screen reader is going to see when it tries to read out the page. Way to discriminate against the disabled, yeah!

Your lame system can be easily circumvented ANYWAY - so why bother?

Especially the sites that deny the ability to right-click. There’s so many ways around this that it’s just pointless and makes your site annoying. If you really don’t want people to steal your images, use low-resolution pics with a watermark, because your right-click prevention just won’t work. If you really don’t want people to steal your website code, the best you can do is to obfuscate it — or don’t publish it at all! Web programmers are crafty — and often still in high-school, so they have lots of time to work around your tricks!
In the case of the MIS Australia website, to get the text of any of their articles is as easy as using /g,’\n\n’).replace(/< [^>]*>/g,”));})();”>this link and choose “Bookmark this link” or “Add to Favorites” and save the link to your bookmarks/favorites.

Now read an article on MISAustralia.com and if you like it, click your bookmark/favorite you have just added.

Presto! The article contents will be pasted into the comments box at the bottom of the page for you to cut and paste at your leisure.

I’ll say it again. If you’re going to go to the trouble of putting your content on the web, why hamstring your efforts? Put it out there and SHARE IT, and more importantly, LET OTHER PEOPLE SHARE IT — that’s what your website is for, and that’s how you get popular!

Adding meta tags to your WordPress blog is a fantastic idea and one that I have overlooked until now. But a bit of a nudge from this scruffy little fella woke me up to the lack of meta tags on my blog — it seems like WordPress isn’t into meta tags out of the box, and I wasn’t happy.

Me, googling and coding up my meta tag change!

Matt’s nudge was actually that I should add a meta description tag so that the search engines show an alluring chunk of text beneath my link, instead of the current crap excerpt from that ridiculous post about Brisbane finally getting rain.

So I decided that I need to have my meta description text to be the same as my blog subtitle, known as the “description” to the WordPress application itself. I decided, for now, to go for this:

“Or, 101 ways to improve your social life! And that’s ironclad!”

Who’s not going to click when they read that?

Naturally I was doing a task, so the first step is to google how to do it. I googled for WordPress meta tags and found this Codex article about how to add meta tags to WordPress. It’s pretty easy really. You just need to edit the header.php file of your WordPress theme to include a meta description tag that has the value you want, in my case the text above.

So here’s the code I inserted into the header.php file of my WordPress theme. It uses the bloginfo template tag to display the blog’s description, as you may peruse below:


<meta name="description" content="<?php bloginfo('description'); ?>" />


So, now I just need to wait for the search engines to update their listings and I will be swimming amongst a traffic bonanza. Booya, thanks Matty!

WebProNews are now doing video, to my surprise as a long-time email newsletter deleter of theirs. They’re good videos, too, with interviews with successful web marketing gurus and plenty of advice. At least, the two I’ve watched so far have been.

Matt Bailey of sitelogic.com is interviewed in this video, he talks about the wonders of using Youtube as viral marketing and has first-hand experience with a pre-release product. He also talks about why Digg is great for getting lots of traffic and exposure in a big hit, but the traffic is generally low-quality in terms of customers ready to buy products — they’ll read your content and then leave.

The other vid I’ve watched so far is with Eric Ward on “link baiting”, a term he doesn’t like because it sounds a bit dubious. He really advocates just creating quality content that people will want to link to. But I think it’s a mix of art and science to get people to actually link to you; a clever headline or title tag or a catchy video clip makes a world of difference.

Check out my del.icio.us linkbaiting tag for some more info on link baiting ideas — what it is and how to do it. It works if you do it right — I like this quote from the seomoz blog:

Every so often, one of our employees will roll into the office and announce, “I’m going to get on Digg today.” Said employee will sit down, write something and then nervously monitor the server as predicted Digg occurs. I can only remember one instance in which this tactic has failed.