ActiveBob.....It's always Raining!

If you don't care to read about all the technical details below, just set up your Outside Blog on a custom domain (ie, jonwashburn.com), not just a sub-domain (jon.activerain.com) and trust us that it's going to kick SEO butt. For those of you who like first hand info, here you go.

In case you haven't heard, we launched outside blogs yesterday, June 25th, 2008. We are really excited to have a platform that our members can utilize to seamlessly syndicate their content across multiple domains, allows for individual branding and at the same time exposes their content to high volumes of traffic. A common question surrounding the release of Outside Blogs centers on the issue of duplicate content, how the search engines handle duplicate content (specifically Google), and how we will structure both your ActiveRain blogs and your outside blogs to provide you the most exposure.

First, let's clear up a little bit of terminology. There are four seperate places that your blog post can show up.

1. Your ActiveRain blog (activerain.com/blogs/arbob)
   
2. Localism
   
3. Sub-domain blog (activebob.activerain.com)
   
4. Outside Blog (jonwashburn.com)

This part is VERY IMPORTANT and will take care of duplicate content for one of the four. We will be adding no-index tags to all sub-domain blogs. Considering the SEO power of ActiveRain.com, sub-domains will not perform as well as your primary domain for the purposes of search engine placement. With that in mind, it makes little sense to have the content showing up on a sub-domain (i.e., activebob.activerain.com) and have the sub-domain indexed, rather than the content be indexed on the primary domain (activerain.com/arbob). Therefore, the primary purpose of a sub-domain will be strictly for offline branding. But in all cases, a custom, member-owned domain will serve that purpose even better. As such, we really encourage our members to invest the $8 to get your own custom domain set up.

Now we are left with three places that your blog post will show up. There is lots of information about how google handles duplicate content and what it will look at to determine what will show up in the search results. As it relates to what will be happening on ActiveRain/Localism/Outside Blogs we want to look at what Google identifies as the originating source. Here is an excerpt from the Google Webmaster Blog from June 9th of 2008:

In cases when you are syndicating your content but also want to make sure your site is identified as the original source,it's useful to ask your syndication partners to include a link back to your original content.

(There is also a great article written by Vanessa Fox, formerly of Google, about ranking as the original source for content you syndicate.)

We can tell Google what the originating source is. What do you want to be the originating source and what do you want Google to index? It will be up to you. Here is how it will work:

Originating Source is:

ActiveRain: If you don't syndicate your post to your outside blog, and you don't geo-target it so that it shows up on Localism, ActiveRain will get credit as the originating source, because the post won't show up anywhere else.

Outside Blog: If you syndicate your post to your outside blog and you do not geo-target it, your outside blog will show up as the originating source. (since the post is not geo-targeted, it will not appear on Localism). Your syndication partner (your ActiveRain blog) will have a link back to your original content (outside blog)

Localism: If you Geo-tag your post, Localism will be credited as the original source; your ActiveRain blog and your outside blog will link back to the post on Localism, indicating to Google that Localism is the original source. (If you've made it this far, you're probably wondering why the heck you would want the current version of Localism as your original source. If you can keep a secret...the new Localism might be coming out the second week in July...but I'll deny it if you tell anyone)

You control it!

 

There is a pretty wicked game of blog post meme resonating from the halls of RE.net. Rich Jacobson, Barry Cunningham and Ian Anderson all threw the gauntlett in my direction. I'm really not that exciting so I'm glad this game has rules so that I don't have to just come up with 5 'things' about me off the cuff (like the last time I was meme'd). So without further ado, and because you could probably care less about my ramblings than about what you are about to learn, here goes......

1. Who is your favorite musical artist?

This one isn't easy. The first concert I ever attended was Paula Abdul. Way before she was passing out onstage at American Idol she was fresh off being a Laker Dancer and really put on a show (especially for a fifth grade pubescent boy). I had a country phase, George Straight and Garth Brooks got me to buy a pair of cowboy boots. Being from the Seattle area Pearl Jam and Nirvana were in the rotation quite frequently in the early 90's as I listened on with teen angst. I had a long love affair with Rap music as well. Tupac, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Dr. Dre, Eminem. I just love the way they crafted their words. To me, it was art. If I could only listen to one song the rest of my life, it would be Dylan's Hurricane.

Of course, My all time favorite would be Rich Jacobson. Man, have you ever heard that guy wail? He's like the next John Mayer!

2. Who is your favorite artist?

Say what? I failed an art history class in college. It was the only class I ever failed in my life. It probably has more to do with the fact that it started at 7am, but art is one area where I need some serious cultural enhancement. However, living in the Pacific Northwest I have had multiple occassions to come across the work of Dale Chihuly. What this man can do with glass is nothing short of amazing.

Of course, I saw some pretty good macaroni art hanging on the fridge at Rich Jacobson's house, I'm pretty sure he did it since his kids are all out of elementary school by now, it was really good.

3. Who is your favorite blogger?

I have a lot of people that I subscribe to from all different walks of life. I get even more fed to me reading Jon's favorite posts. I am going to go with Marc Davison. I love the passion that he has for making real estate better for the consumer. The stories he tells of growing up in NY always make me feel like I'm there. The way he relates those stories back to the consumer's experience in real estate always makes me want to do something re-marc-able.

But then, of course, there's Rich Jacobson. The guy is just an amazing writer, and shares such incredible insights concerning real estate and wisdom about life in general.

4. If you could meet anyone (alive or dead), who would it be and what is the most interesting thing about them?

I have never met either of my biological grandfathers. I was raised by my grandpa's but they weren't my biological ones. I'm sure I would learn a lot about myself if I got the chance to meet my biological grandfathers. Before I tried to answer this question, I'd never ONCE in my life thought I wanted to meet them. But now, right as I sit here writing this, I have this really overpowering desire to meet them.........ok, this is weird, I need to move on..........

Of course, had I not met Rich Jacobson already I would have surely answered this question in four words.......Rich Jacobson, nuff said!

5. What did you want to be when you grew up?

I wanted to be a great father and husband. I still want to be a great father and husband. My parents were divorced when I was 8. My mom will be the first one to tell you that my Dad was a really good dad but a horrible husband. I didn't get to have my Dad around for most of my formative years. I want to make sure that I am there for my son. I don't want him to have to learn how to shave on his own. I don't want him to have to learn about girls on his own. I don't want him to ever feel like I am not in the next room so that he can come to me with whatever he needs to talk about. I am lucky, I'm going to get to be what I wanted to be when I grow up (whenever that is).

Of course, if I have to grow up someday, I want to be just like my hero, Rich Jacobson.

6. What is the most interesting piece of trivia you know?

Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history: Spades - King David, Clubs - Alexander the Great, Hearts - Charlemagne, Diamonds - Julius Caesar.

Of course, Hoyle, the popular playing card maker has introduced a new line of cards where all the Kings are modeled after Rich Jacobson.....I have a whole case.

7. If you could live in any point in history what would it be and why?

I could see myself living in the time of Western expansion across the US. What is that, early to mid 1800's. The idea of packing up everything you own in a wagon and heading west to make a new life for your family seems strangely alluring to me. I'm sure after a few days I would be longing for my comfy bed, but then again, I wouldn't know what my comfy bed felt like.......

Of course, the leader of our fearless wagon train would have to be Rich Jacobson or we would surely get swept away by the Missouri or high centered on the Rockies.

8. What is the most interesting job you have ever held?

Community builder for ActiveRain. Never a dull day here, that's for sure!! Also, it's kind of surreal to think that my job is watching over an online social network. When I was little if you had given me a million guesses as to what I would be doing at age 30, I guarantee this wouldn't be on the list.

Of course, working along side Rich Jacobson is the best job I've ever had........even though no one asked.

I pick: Jon and Matt and Glin and Claire (yep, she's new) and Nicole and Jerry and Rich and Brad. You know who you are so I won't link. (how many was I suppose to pick?)

Contrary to some rumors that may be out there I'm still alive, just popping my head up to see what's going on.  As many know, ActiveRain had some, uh, pretty serious "technical issues" for a while which I've been helping to battle. Luckily things have stabilized quite a bit in the last week.  I'll try to give you the post mortem on this one, warning tech talk ahead.

Traffic to ActiveRain's site has been steadily increasing month over month, I think we're averaging somewhere north of 80k visitors a day and 15M page views a month.  Our servers were able to handle the human traffic fine, but then we started getting absolutely pounded by various bots and spiders trying to crawl the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pages on the site.  For some reason they liked to all choose the exact same time to hit us too.  Some of the RSS feed readers were particularly hideous, as unlike the major search engines that would throttle their requests and only try to say load a page a send, they would trying hitting every RSS feed on the site at the same time.  This was causing traffic spikes that were large enough to start taking down our web servers periodically or at least make them so slow for periods of time they were nearly unusable.

About two months ago we ordered upgraded hardware doubling our number of web servers.  Our managed hosting company built out this environment, but in the process upgraded almost all the software and operating system versions to the latest ones.  As most computer users know, while upgrading software theoretically should help reduce problems it often has the opposite effect.  The new environment went through our testing no problem, and seemed to function fine when we put it up.  However, when we switched over, every couple hours our servers would just blow up (not litererally), almost at random.  We spent many, many hours going line by line through log files, and doing everything we could to diagnose the issue.  Not being able to find any reason for the random self destruction we began rolling software versions back methodically trying to find if one of those caused it.

None of the usual suspects seemed to help, finally we ended up rolling the version of linux we're running on back a minor version and the problem disappeared.  Almost two weeks after the roll out of our new environent we had a fix.  That was about a week ago, and things have greatly stabilized since then.  We've got one more major hardware upgrade coming in the next day or two, as we're going to much more powerful database servers (4 core/4 GB of RAM to 16 core/32 GB ram)  This should further speed up the site and give us a lot of buffer for future growth, and yes we are making sure they are all running the same software versions this time.

So that's what I've been up to and while all of my hair finally fell out :)  No I'm not Jeff Turner's long lost twin...