As mentioned a few weeks back, I recently had the pleasure of staying with Jeremy and Jessica in their home in Brighton. On one of my last days in town Jeremy told me he was adding me to his “Bedroll” which is his blog roll (editors note for mom: set of links to other people’s sites you like) for people who have stayed in his home while visiting Brighton. It can be found on the lower right hand of his blog at http://adactio.com/journal/

That got me thinking, I’ve played around with having a blogroll here before but I’ve always wound up removing them. I’ve typically decided I didn’t feel there was a good semantic reason for me to include people on them, it always felt like a form of favoritism and I’d feel guilty not including some people over others. Jeremy’s solution hit me as a fair and fun way to handle it.

Sadly though, I don’t host a lot of travelers. It’s not that I’m opposed. It’s that usually I seem to do more traveling myself.

With that in mind I’ve stolen Jeremy’s idea, but flipped it. Instead of having a blog roll for people who have stayed with me, I am now going to have a blog roll for people whom I’ve stayed with while traveling or have traveled with me. I figure if you can tolerate me for any significant length of time there should be some form of badge of honor.

So check out these excellent people listed on the left, it’s the very least they deserve for all of there generosity.

Now if only I could figure out how to add “link category descriptions” in WordPress…

Today I am pleased to say that I smoothly and transparently switched from 1and1.com to Bluehost as my hosting provider for Subism.com and VampiresTheMovie.com

By the end of today Shotspan.com will be moved over.

By the end of the week MediaRebellion.com will be moved.

By the end of the month LongPork.com will be moved as well.

In short, I’m moving all domains I either own or run to Bluehost, be they active or inactive.

This of course begs the question: Why?

The answer: Because 1and1 let me down.

I have been a loyal 1and1 customer since the company’s launch and have been a happy advocate for them the whole time. However in the last year or so I’ve tried, and failed, at doing more sophisticated things with my WordPress install.

Turns out 1and1 didn’t like that. Automatic updates wouldn’t work. Image uploads would fail, my database would crash, plugins would cause my whole backend to freeze up. It was exhausting. There were features of my blog that I was simply unable to use and just accepted it. Sure enough as I researched and troubleshot the issues, I’d always find someone else having the same problem, and interestingly enough they were always on 1and1.

It wasn’t until a few weeks ago when I caught my friends Mindy and Leyla tweeting back and forth about WordPress issues. Turns out Mindy was experiencing many, if not all, of the same issues I was, and Leyla was advocating she switch to Bluehost.

Needless to say due to these constant frustrations I decided that I was fed up with both WordPress and 1and1 and that it was time to switch both out. (something I swore I’d never do again after leaving MovableType) I finally decided to take a look at ExpressionEngine which Jeffrey had suggested to me long ago.

Yesterday, I purchased a license to ExpressionEngine and signed up for a free two week trial of Dreamhost (which Abe and Jesse have both suggested in the past).

Immediately after signing up I was not impressed with Dreamhost. The package of unlimited everything was very nice but the lack of phone support (which I’ve rarely used anyway) seemed to me to be kinda cheap on their end. To top that off, as soon as I got my test domain configured I was greeted by this:

error id: “bad_httpd_conf”

Off the bat, a fresh configuration and I was getting an error. Really Dreamhost? A quick Google search led me to understand that this is a common thing for them and has been since at least 2008. Extremely easy to fix but extremely common. My line of thinking was this: if it’s a known issue that many users experience and they’ve had it since 2008… their priorities aren’t right. I don’t want a host that expects me to live with issues common enough that they should have already worked out.

I trudged on anyway, fixed the issue and installed ExpressionEngine. From there I did some reading and poked around at the back end enough to realize I am in over my head. ExpressionEngine is more of what I want (less blog centric) but less of what I know (easy templating systems). I am still curious about what I can do with EE but it’s too much for right now. Luckily they have a 30 day trial so I am going to return my license for a full refund and look at it another day.

I also wasn’t pleased at the Control Panel options on Dreamhost and maybe it’s just me but the whole thing felt kinda sluggish and cumbersome.I decided to cancel my two week trial after only one day.

But this brought me back to square one.

Today I got up and registered an account with Bluehost, I was able to discover a $3.99 monthly unlimited plan and signed up for two years (with phone support thank you!). I was going in mostly blind and without a trial option but I read some comparison blogs that people had written and I generally had a good feeling.

So far I couldn’t be happier.

My biggest gripe about 1and1 was that it had specific incompatibilities and problems with WordPress and I was delighted to find that Bluehost offered one click installs of popular CMS systems, WordPress included. I immediately tested it and set it up with all the things I wanted to do before: file uploading, caching, twitter and url shortening plugins. Everything worked like a charm, as did the update system.

From there I set up Google Apps for my domain and I am pleased to say I am up and running smoother than ever. I can’t wait to push it further.

What gets me the most out of all of this is the benefit of smaller companies. The fact that 1and1 has so many issues with what is by far and away the most popular CMS used by bloggers is a disgrace and really is inexcusable. Bluehost is tiny compared to 1and1 but Bluehost immediately knew their user base, they offered me every thing I needed to get setup right from their Control Panel. Their support site is clear and easy to navigate and even offers video tutorials of how to set things up so that you don’t have to call support. I’m excited to move my business to them and I have really high hopes.

When Google announced it would support the “nofollow” HTML attribute back in 2005 I was pleased. Blog spam was (and still is) a major problem. The invention of “nofollow” took a lot of bite out of the usefulness of comments for spammers. It really seemed like the right move at the time and looking at it now it still makes a lot of sense. I can’t image how bad things would be without it.

For the uninformed, “nofollow” is an attribute that can be assigned to links on websites. This is recognized by Google and then subsequently ignored in Google’s index, thus not allowing sites to raise their “PageRank” on Google. Therefore, in theory, leading to more relevant search results.

Here is my gripe, when Google announced this feature they did so under the stated guise of “Preventing Comment Spam” but it’s turned out to be abused. There are those who would argue that “nofollow” has become a tool that creates an unfair balance where higher trafficked sites don’t share traffic with lower ranked ones. Now I’m not saying that “nofollow” should go away but that it should be used less. Why am I complaining? Because three of the sites I use most often implement “nofollow” in places that, while well intentioned, work out as unfair. These sites?

Twitter, Flickr and Facebook.

For starters, Facebook’s usage makes no sense. Facebook has several checks to prevent spammers from joining the service and multiple ways to report it when it happens. I am not saying they are perfect but they very much maintain a strong and effective walled garden. When you factor in that the site has pushed its users to make more of their content public and had major issues with privacy. It’s downright unfair that if they are going to push me to make my content public that they aren’t going to allow me to get a PageRank incentive for this.

At first glance however, the inclusion of “no follow” does seem logical for Flickr and Twitter. The ease of access to these sites makes them obvious targets for spammers. In the case of Twitter, it’s no secret that they have a large spam problem, so in the short term “nofollow” seems like a practical solution to de-incentivise spamming.

Despite this reasoning I still believe it to be the wrong solution.

Flickr is a publishing system and there are those who use their Flickr accounts as blogs with very long written posts to accompany their photography. Yet Flickr automatically attaches “nofollow” to any link posted anywhere on their site, even on the user’s own written content.

With every photograph I post on my Flickr account I include a link to a related blog entry whenever possible. These things directly relate and semantically should be linked. My analytics also clearly show this is an effective tool for increasing my readership and traffic as a significant portion of my traffic comes from these Flickr links. Yet, Google ignores them because of the “nofollow” attribute. The same with Twitter.

Doesn’t this go against the whole spirit of “nofollow”? If you ask me it’s lazy and unfair. Especially in Flickr’s case when you consider that many users are “Pro” users like myself who pay for a Flickr account. I’m paying for a service that is going out of its way to prevent me from getting PageRank from it. That’s a bunch of crap.

There is another way to look at this though. One could argue that PageRank is actually doing the opposite of it’s intention and hurting Google’s relevance. The three biggest traffic sources to this site are Twitter, Facebook and Flickr, in fact these account for almost 50% of my traffic, however Google’s mysterious PageRank algorithm ignores these sources, thus making it harder for my site to gain relevance in search results. Isn’t this leading to an inaccuracy in what’s “relevant?”

“nofollow” is used almost ubiquitously by any service that has an easy sign up system, therefore it is creating a tiered system on the web that takes away power from user generated content and gives more strength to those who have a greater technical knowhow. There are many out there who will never understand how to setup a blogging platform such as WordPress or MovableType but can easily get a Twitter, Flickr or Facebook account. Why should their voice matter less to PageRank? And on the flip-side, why should a major media outlet matter more? Isn’t this working against the democracy of the web?

How do we decide what is signal and what is noise? Surely just because something is easier to do doesn’t make it less relevant, does it? Can’t we come up with a better technological solution that empowers users not punishes them for their lack of tech savvy?