Today is the first annual Blog Action Day. I think it’s an interesting concept and as an SEO I’m particularly interested to see what happens.

Now I don’t endorse the ideas that air can have a hole or that humans are responsible for a condition where one volcano erupting for one hour does millions of times more damage than the whole human race over the course of a year (where do people come up with these ideas?) but I am a fan of the environment.

I like camping and going for hikes (not so much on hunting and fishing but that’s a personal choice). And I don’t see any reason to overburden an already shabby system like waste management.

Part of this is just keeping my own home clean and part of it is economics. My money pays for waste disposal so the less waste there is to dispose of the less I have to pay. Same with you.

Here are a few things my wife and I do around the home:

• Recycle cans and bottles. Because we live in California, the recycling fee is charged at the time of purchase so we have started saving this waste to later recoup that fee. Since I drink 6-12 Dr. Peppers per day this really adds up.
• Give bad food to the pig. Yes, my wife has a pig. I don’t get along with the pig but as long as it’s around it gets the left-overs that have been sitting in the fridge too long. This cuts food costs down for us and prevents waste.
• Compost grass clippings and other organic waste. I started this out of curiosity more than anything. When I mow the lawn I dump the clippings into a compost box that I made with instructions found on the internet. It takes about a year for everything to break down but once it does I’ll add it to the new lawn I’m planting in the back yard. Again, there is an economic factor at work here. It doesn’t make sense to buy compost from Home Depot when everything I need to make it happen is right here at home.
• Turn monitors and other equipment off when not in use. This saves on the energy bill. I’ve read that businesses that turn off their monitors for off-hours save 6-12% on their energy bill over the course of a year. That’s a lot of money to be saved!

So there it is. My small contributions to the environment. All of these things combined take just a few minutes per day and the accumulated financial savings is in the thousands of dollars each year. Plus, they are good for the environment so there’s a “feel good” in it as well.

Were you expecting to land on Linker’s Union? Or maybe you were expecting the classic 14th Colony layout. Either way, things have been changing!

Linker’s Union has been absorbed into 14th Colony. All your favorite posts and people that were there are now here. You can get the whole story at Linker’s Union Rollup.

The much anticipated 14th Colony Redesign was officially launched October 14. It was not a smooth transition. If you are encountering missing pages or 404 errors, please contact us.

After 8 years of website design and development I thought I had the hang of moving a website over. It seems I was wrong! The transition to the new layout has been a disaster with missing pages, an .htaccess file that won’t cooperate and the WordPress theme falling out for no apparent reason. This has been a frustrating process and way more time-consuming than expected.

I’d like to say “at least I learned that before you move a WordPress site over you need to…” but alas, no such lesson. I’ve moved other WP sites in the recent past without any of the problems I’m experiencing today.

I do have the original site backed up *just in case* but I really want to get this now layout working so please bear with me!

And as long as I’m writing I will give you one tip that I hope helps: when pages fall out, use a 302 redirect to repoint that URL to the home page. That way the link credit for that page stays with the site and when you get that page back up you can remove the 302 redirect. This also redirects any viewers that may have the URL bookmarked to the temporary page to reduce the confusion of a 404 Page Not Found Error.

A 302 redirect lets the search engines know the page has been moved temporarily and to please come back later to find it. The format is:

Redirect 302 /page-being-moved http://www.your-domain.com/

You just replace the info as appropriate and place this line in your .htaccess file.

As of now, every page should either have a 301 (permanent) or 302 (temporary) redirect. If you get a 404 please let me know.

It took a lot longer than I hoped and not everything is flat but the new site design is finally up. If you encounter any strangeness, please let me know. I am scrambling to find broken links and some of the strangest data errors that have occurred with the WordPress transfer. I know I lost some comments (and some were moved!) so if that’s you just know I hold your input as valuable and encourage you to keep posting here!

Here are some changes (besides the obvious) you may want to look at:

Despite my best efforts, I have reactivated Google Adsense. Bidvertiser just wasn’t delivering the relevancy needed.

“Related posts” are at the end of each page. Thanks to Mark Ghosh of the Weblog Tools Collection.

Avatars for members appear next to your comments or if you write an article. Just another good reason to become a member. This comes from Dan of Cheese Master Dan.

Link love aka “dofollow” for anyone that posts 10 comments with the same user name and email (or membership login) brought by All Passion Marketing.

Inexpensive advertising is available.

Writers are wanted.

More to come…

I have made the switch from Google to Yahoo! as my default search engine. You may notice I have changed the site search function on this blog over as well.

While I think Google offers great products their ethics are wanting and I just don’t want to support them any more than I have to. There’s a good list of Google alternatives at Gevil.org if you are interested in reducing your reliance on Google.

You will notice that I have left Google Adsense up. While I take issue with some of Google’s policies I am still a businessman first. Until I find a service that comes close to pulling the same revenue I get with Adsense I won’t change that over. There’s a difference between making a protest and being stupid. Unfortunately YPN does not stack up in this arena.

However, I am happy to report that Yahoo! Search is proving to be much more reliable than Google’s. I’ve been hearing reports that Yahoo! has a higher satisfaction rate and can now see why - it just works!

While this was a personal choice for me I’d like to encourage you to try some other search engines as well. Here’s the big ones to look at:

• Yahoo!
• Live (Formerly MSN)
• Ask

There are some smaller and niche search engines you may want to try out as well:

• Clusty
• Icerocket
• Technorati
• Bloglines

The real issue at heart here for me is building the free internet I want instead of capitulating to the demands of a monopolistic empire. With more than 50% of the market share for search alone, Google is using its size to bully websites into falling in line with ‘policy’ - no matter how hypocritical the new policies are when stacked against Google’s mission statement, webmaster guidelines and public image.

My protest is a small one. I’m hopeful that this message will reach you and inspire you to try something different. If Google’s market share gets affected they will have to address their policies. I’m hopeful Google will go back to being a great service provider and their attempt to architect, engineer or police what the masses want online will stop.

Thank you for your support!

Update: Thanks to this great post by Ben, I have checked out a couple Adsense alternatives and settled on BidVertiser for now. That makes this site one big step closer to being Google-free!