Youtube Unblocked in China

After a week hiatus, Youtube, a Google-owned video sharing network, is back online.

It seems that tonight(Mar 22) Chinese users could visit YouTube again since it was blocked on Mar 15. I can confirm China Telecom can access it. It was really terrible when YouTube was blocked a week ago. There is no official answer as to why Youtube was blocked for a week period by the Chinese internet regulators. Quite a lot of people considered that it was for the tibet riot on Mar 14.

It may be that Chinese authorities has brought the situation under control,  and Kuo Min Tang win the Taiwan Election too, so they unblocked youtube, but some of the special video in Youtube still can not access. The Chinese authorities constantly prevents access to sites that it finds content or ideas offensive. Chinese users should enjoy Youtube while it's available because we may never know when it will disappear.

YouTube Blocked in China Again

Internet users in China were blocked from seeing YouTube.com on Mar 15 after dozens of videos about protests in Tibet appeared on the popular online video Web site.

This is not the first time that Chinese authorities blocks YouTube. In October 18, 2007, YouTube is also blocked temporarily, two week later YouTub became available again in China, but now YouTube blocked again.

The current block is actually a bit more restrictive than the other block, since any mention of the string "www.youtube.com" in any URL seems to be blocked.For example: http://www.google.com/search?q=www.youtube.com (if you are out of China, you should use http://www.google.cn/search?q=www.youtube.com) will not go through, and will get you a "Connection reset" error.

China has blocked access to YouTube in an apparent attempt to stop the spread of video footage related the rioting going on in several cities in Tibet. There were no protest scenes posted on China-based video Web sites such as 56.com, youku.com and tudou.com. The only protest scenes video is on CCTV's website. Chinese media and international media have shown footage of buildings burning and crowds damaging store-fronts.

China has at least 210 million Internet users, according to the government, and is expected to overtake the United States soon to have the biggest population of Web surfers.

WordPress Excerpt Seo Tips

Wordpress blogs have duplicate content issues, and one of them is allowing reading the same content on both the posts, index page, archives and categories pages. To avoid search engine penalty it is important to optimize your Wordpress using Wordpress excerpt so that duplication will be avoided.

Instead of duplicating the whole content, you may use just an excerpt in the index, archives and categories pages. The WordPress displays the excerpt of the current post with [...] at the end, which is not a "read more" link. If you do not provide an explicit excerpt to a post (in the post editor's optional excerpt field), the first 55 words of the post's content are used.

To use Wordpress excerpt function, you may replace the_content() tag with the_excerpt() when on archive (tested by is_archive()) and category (is_category()) pages and index (is_home()) page in WordPress themes.

Now that you are in the correct section, locate the following piece of code:

<div class="entry">
<?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry &raquo;'); ?>
</div>

You are going to replace that entire piece of code with the following:

<div class="entry">
 <?php if(is_category() || is_archive() || is_home() ) {
  the_excerpt();
 } else {
  the_content('Read the rest of this entry &raquo;');
 } ?>
</div>

Of course, this example uses the WordPress default template, but the same code can be used on most any template if you find the index.php or main index page and the spot where <?php the_content(); ?> is in the code.

Top Ten WordPress SEO Tips

There is a lot of amazing SEO power built into WordPress. Unfortunately it does not all come by default, and you might not know what is best when it comes to templates and options. Follow these simple rules for search engine optimization and your blog will rank much higher in Search Engines.

1. Optimize WordPress Permalinks

The most search-engine friendly permalink MUST includes the post title (%postname%) in the link,having keywords in your URL is an absolute must, In your WP admin panel, click on the "Options" tab, then the "Permalinks" sub-tab, and choose the option just below the "Default" permalink option. My suggest permalink structure is /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ or /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html .

2. Optimize WordPress Post Titles

The post title is the most important part of the blog post for many reasons. From your reader's perspective, a descriptive and compelling title helps them decide if your post is worth reading or not. From an SEO perspective, think about the keywords or phrases people might type into a search box to find your post, and use those words or phrases in your post title.

3. Optimize WordPress Page Titles

According to most SEO experts, the page title tag is one of the most important tags on your page. In most WP themes, you'll find the page title tag in the Header Template, and the default version ususally looks very poor SEO. I suggest you to use a WordPress plugin so call "All in One SEO Pack" to fix that problem.

4. Optimize WordPress robots.txt

The robots.txt file is used to instruct search engine robots about what pages on your website should be crawled and consequently indexed. Most websites have files and folders that are not relevant for search engines (like images or admin files) therefore creating a robots.txt file can actually improve your website indexation. Here is an SEO optimized WordPress robots.txt file.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /comments/feed
Disallow: /trackback/

5. Use Google Sitemaps Plugin

Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google. WordPress user Arne Brachold has made the sitemap creation and submission process fairly simple with his Google Sitemap plugin. This plugin will create a sitemap for you and submit it to Google.

6. Use Wordpress Anti-SPAM Plugin

Akismet is the best automated spam killer that actually gets better as it learns from the whole community marking new spam comments as spam.

7. Use Related Posts

Amaury BALMER's Simple Tags plugin is a perfect tool to manage perfeclty your WP 2.3 tags, which can show related posts on your post and rss feed. Not only does it enhance your blog's usability, but it also helps create a dense link structure throughout your site, which makes it easier for the search engine spiders to find and index older blog posts.

8. Use Ping services

Use the Update service function, to inform tracking services that you have updated your weblog. By default, Wordpress pings rpc.pingomatic.com, which is good (if you don’t want to change this, you don’t have to).

9. Make your content searchable

Make sure your navigation bar is present on all pages of your blog. Your previous posts or atleast the popular ones should be linked to all pages so they get spidered easily.

10. Update your blog frequently

Update your blog frequently using all the rules mentioned above and your blog will surely get top rankings in a short time.

If you have further SEO tips for WordPress blogs, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Micro-blogging: Chinese Twitter Clone Site

Twitter is a social network micro-blogging services. The Twitter Clones (micro-blogging services) and it looks like one of the Chinese Twitters are gaining popularity quickly. Here is the most popular Twitter-clone sites in China what I known.

FanFou - FanFou is the biggest Twitter-like site in China. It seems FanFou copied almost everything of Twitter, you can use FanFou to update "what are you doing" in less than 140 characters, it supports updating and receiving notification via Gtalk, MSN, QQ, mobile phone and web, you can follow the updates of your friends, and turn on/off the notification of your friends. It already has a wordpress plugin, maxthon plug and other 3rd party add ons. It also has two Twittervision-like mashups that put Tweets on the 3D globe and a 2D map of China. Xing Wang is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of FanFou.

JiWai.de - JiWai.de is the first Chinese brother of twitter: an online service that enables user to broadcast short messages to your friends or "followers." It also lets you specify which JiWai.de users you want to follow so you can read their messages in one place. Just like twitter, Jiwai supports updating through sms and gtalk. Updating from mobile phones onto jiwai.de, however, compared with Twitter, saves considerable money for Chinese users who want to use twitter-like stuff. To meet the demand of more Chinese users, Jiwai.de also supports updating from some other IMs, including MSN, skype, and QQ. Zhuohuan Li is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of JiWai.de.

TaoTao - Tencent QQ is the most popular IM in China. While Tencent has realized the value of micro-blogging, they launched a stand-alone service called Taotao. Not like FanFou, TaoTao only support updating from QQ and Web. It have no widget support. Since Tencent has the most extensive im user base, and the characteristics of this kind of micro-blogging service also match with profile of QQ's users.

Other Micro-blogging Site in China:

zuosa - http://zuosa.com
ilaodao - http://ilaodao.cn
komoo - http://komoo.cn
byuu - http://byuu.com
wulog - http://wulog.com
fish - http://fish.sh
laigula - http://laigula.com

WordPress Mod Rewrite Make Subdirectory 404 Error

Last night, I getting lots of 404 error while using Google to search my own blog index page, I realized there is something wrong about my blog.

My user-created-outside-of-WP folder is throwing a 404 when trying to access it. Now for some details:

Blog www.moon-blog.com : normal WP blog. Permalinks "/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html" through mod_rewrite in the default .htaccess file WP created.

Subdirectory www.moon-blog.com/MySubdirectory/): normal PHP application. User defind permalinks. Located at directory "/MySubdirectory/".

The problem is that the WordPress thinks My Subdirectory is 404, and do not allow Google to index my files.

I Try add some of php code into my php application to resolve this problem:

header("Status: 200 OK");

After adding that code, my PHP application in the subdirectory do not return 404 error again.

WordPress 2.3.3 Urgent Security Release

Attention please! WordPress 2.3.3 has release, with an important security update. WordPress 2.3.3 is an urgent security release. If you have registration enabled a flaw was found in the XML-RPC implementation such that a specially crafted request would allow a user to edit posts of other users on that blog. Unless you want registered users to be able to edit your blog posts, you should update your WordPress installation to version 2.3.3. In addition to fixing this security flaw, 2.3.3 fixes a few minor bugs. If you are interested only in the security fix, download the fixed version of xmlrpc.php and copy it over your existing xmlrpc.php.

You can get the latest version of WordPress here. Download it today, upgrade your previous installation and continue blogging!