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!

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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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!