I just read David Airey’s post about eliminating “no-follow” tags from comment links and I’ve decided to give it a try. To explain further, a “no-follow” link means that when you leave your web address on a blog comment, it does not reward your site with a reciprocal link back. Search engines such as Google do not give credit to “no-follow” links when tabulating page rank for search results. Links into your site are a very valuable and the more you have, the easier it will be for people to find you in a search engine. For more information, check out 13 Reasons Why NoFollow Tags Suck.

Here’s the bottom line, I will reward comments buy giving a full, bona fide link to anyone who desires to comment here. I encourage and welcome all comments (that aren’t spam) since they add such a rich dimension to the discussion. So comment to your heart’s content and express your opinion!

If you would like to try the do-follow plugin for WordPress right click this link, and save as a file to your desktop. Upload it to your plugins directory and activate the plugin. It’s that easy.

Enjoy your valuable links you’ll receive in return for commenting and thanks again to David!

Since many of you have been enjoying my blog for awhile, especially Bryan, Gregg, Macoosh the top 3 commentators, I decided to ask a little favor of you readers out there. I’m running a contest through the end of April and it’s pretty simple. Add me to your Technorati favorites and each week I will choose one lucky person for a quick review of their site. I also plan to have a recap of each week’s entrants. I must admit I borrowed this idea from HMTK and some people say Technorati is a joke, but I’ll give it a shot. The best thing about Technorati is that it’s a great way to find blogs that you are interested in and create a community of like-minded users. Whether or not their ranking system is legit is up for debate. They rank a blog based on number of links from other sites which tends to be an incomplete picture of popularity and does not account for traffic such as unique visitors and hits.

Nevertheless, I’m excited about this contest since it will give all an opportunity to discover new blogs and for some lucky winners (chosen on merit of site judged by yours truly) it will yield a free review and a permanent link(s) from this blog. Bryan, you are still eligible even though you previously added me as a favorite.

Good luck, I look forward seeing the new fans of britton blog!

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Here’s a quick post of some of the things I’ve been doing this past weekend:

I spent Shutdown Day with my family and we took a nice long bike ride out to the beach to celebrate the coming of Spring. It was absolutely gorgeous this weekend! After frolicking at the beach, we rode out to Barna village and had lunch at a little pub that specialized in seafood; the chowder was great! (I’ll have more on this little trip later in the week, so stay tuned for stories and pictures)

I fixed the blog search function code, it was redirecting to a nonexistent page since I rearranged the page structure, oops! Enjoy the new-found search feature powered by Google. I mostly put it there for me so I can look through old posts, but if you’re looking for a topic it works great!

I’ve also signed up with AdVolcano to generate some money for this little project. Gotta pay the tuition and the dollar to euro exchange rate is terrible. Therefore, I’m running a special on 30 day text link ads. There is a limit of 5 slots and you can have your site featured just under the Feedburner section for just $10 for 30 days. That’s an excellent deal! I have had nearly 4000 pageviews this month from over 1800 visitors and there is still a week left in March. The graph shows a solid week to week increase in traffic for March. My visits have tripled and pageviews doubled since February (567, 1789 respectively) and I’m on track to double March visits and pageviews for April. Who’s going to be in the top ad spot for just 10 bucks?

Wow I’m on a roll with blog improvements! I have added a few more features that I’m sure will be very helpful. I found a WordPress plugin called Optimal Title that switches the positioning of the page title so that the blog post title is first followed by the blog title itself. Click on the title of this post to see what I mean and watch your browser’s title bar. This not only makes it much more intuitive for you as the reader, but it also helps me to be indexed much better by Google and the other guys. This way, more of you will find me here in Ireland.

The other improvement I’m most excited about is the Related Posts plugin. I have place three related posts you might be interested in at the bottom of each post. Have a look for yourself… You see? Isn’t that cool? I guess it looks at the tags and groups the posts with similar tags together. Whatever it’s doing, I like it! I encourage you to go through some of my recent posts and see what you’ve been missing. The Related Posts plugin is showing some of my really old and embarrassing posts, so go ahead and have a laugh!

One last minor thing I did was to move the Subscribe to Comments link to the bottom of each post following the comments section. This way you keep track of what others are saying and/or responding to your own comment. Give it a try!

Have a great day and enjoy the upgrades!

I wanted to let you all know that I have made some improvements here that I’m excited about. Thanks to all who have given me suggestions for my Everyone’s a critic project. The suggestions were very valuable. For those who haven’t, I challenge you to check it out for your own blog. I will help in any way I can.
For you subscribers out there, now’s the time to click on over to the site and check out the following improvements:

• Added a Google Custom Search tool at the upper right. I now have the power of Google on my blog. Woo hoo!
• Added a photo to the About me page. In case you’re wondering, I’m standing outside the Frank Lloyd Wright Studio in Scottsdale, AZ. This was taken the day before my first marathon
• Added a TOP POSTS section to give new readers a chance to see the democratic consensus of my most popular content. This is one of my favorite additions and if you mouse-over each link, you will see the number of visits to each page.
• Expanded the sponsors list and deleted the graphical ads on the sidebar. I think this was the biggest improvement in terms of cleaning things up. I may add graphical ads later on down the road, but for now this is how it will stay. Be sure to have a look at the SPONSORS list to the right as well as this one for great blogging tips. I personally use all of these services and will only put a link up here in which I believe to be worthy.

There you have it. It’s not perfect by any means but I’m very happy with the results. There are a few things I want to clean up, most notably the CATEGORY CLOUD. I just have too many categories to list, so I may end up moving it to a separate page and just featuring the top 20 or so.

I owe a million thanks to all who contributed their feedback. If you have your own blog, check out Everyone’s a critic and I’ll be happy to help out.

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I want to thank some of my readers for offering their critique of this blog. There were some great suggestions pointed out to me and few of them have already been implemented:

• I cleaned up the sidebar and eliminated some of the graphic ads. In the future these may return in a different form, but for now I think they were a bit unsightly.
• I have also eliminated the calendar and I’m working on something to make it easier to search the archives.
• The Top Commentators section (I also had to use the runPHP plugin) has been added and I am hoping it will improve the discussion activity here. The critique post certainly has helped! I encourage comments here, and the top commentators will be rewarded with a link to their site in the sidebar. This list will reset every 30 days. If I decide to change this time-frame, I will give notice.
• Some of the feed flare at the end of each post has been eliminated and I may make further changes as necessary

Again, thanks to all who have given me feedback. I encourage everyone to critique my blog and I will return the favor!

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I was out enjoying the beautiful spring weather we’ve been having here in Galway and took a few snapshots of the River Corrib and the Spanish Arch. I decided that my blog needed a more appropriate header image so here it is. I hope you enjoy it!

This photo was taken a few hours ago and what you see from left to right is the Spanish Arch, Nimmo’s Restaurant, and the pastel-colored row homes facing the River Corrib (bottom) which empties out into Galway Bay (far right). I see this image in person nearly every single day and decided it was time to capture it digitally. This is only about 3 minute’s walk from my apartment which is behind the image. Isn’t it amazing what we take for granted? I challenge all of you to enjoy your neighborhood or city and look at it in a different light, maybe take a few photos. Spring is already here in Galway, and I’m sure it is right around the corner for many others as well. Hope you like the new header image and happy spring to you all.

Let me know what you think in the comments below…

A very important security issue with WordPress 2.1.1 was just announced a few hours ago:

“If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately.”

Fortunately, yours truly was too busy working on his research project to upgrade to 2.1.1, so this blog is unaffected. If you were more efficient, then you better get the update!