Webpit.com - A Coder's Blog

The year was 1997. I was contracted by Tabnet, Inc. to write a piece of software that would automatically submit sites to thousands of “link farms” and search engines. The software worked so well, or I so impressed the CEO that I was offered a job. We used the software to sell a service to our web hosting customers. A year or so passed by and search engines began changing their algorithms. Link farms were no longer a viable means of getting your site noticed. Then the king was born. Google enters the arena with its plain-faced home page. It was all the rave back then. Oh, how I can remember the days. The days of yesteryear, when cloaked pages worked. When Search Engine Optimization was a sure thing.

They say that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Here it is, 2008, and if Google is King, then “Social Bookmarking” sites like Digg, Deli.cio.us, etc are most certainly his most trusted advisors. Last year, I didn’t put much stock into these sites. I didn’t understand them, and didn’t care to. I wasn’t blogging at the time and I only really knew of Digg because our web designer insisted on having a button that linked our pages to Digg.com. Since then, and especially since starting this blog, I have come to realize, things really haven’t changed. The names have changed. Instead of Link Farm, we call it “Social Bookmarking.” The method’s haven’t changed either.

In all its prowess as a search engine, Google trusts human submitted content more than its own algorithms. Case in point: Just a few short years ago, you would have had to be superman to get your site on the first page of search results for your desired keywords. Now today, its really not that hard. Is it too easy? I mean, if I can do it, certainly those silk suite wearing SEO gurus with the Porsche’s paid for by SEO-hungry companies should have no difficulty achieving the same thing right?

Rumor has it that Google despises Search Engine Optimization. Maybe they call it cheating, who knows. But to be honest, those who call themselves SEOs have their own greed to blame. In the never ending quest to be first on the list, companies resort to hiring SEOs to implement sketchy tactics and fooling both the search engine and the internet user at large into clicking links to what seemed like legitimate content, only to be led down an unrelated path.

I’m still unclear as to why Google trusts Social Bookmarking (cough, linkfarms, cough) now when just a couple of years ago, heck maybe not even that long ago, they openly stated they would avoid them. Volumes of blog articles attest to the suspicion that listing your site in link farms was the equivalent of search engine suicide. So it seems we have gone full circle and it took only about 10 years to do it. So what’s next, we start cloaking pages again? Are we just in a cyclic paradox that we are incapable of escaping? Is this really Web 2.0? What would Jean Luc Picard do?

I’ve been looking a lot lately at “open source” applications to build a social networking site. I’ve read quite a few reviews on Drupal, Elgg, Pligg, etc. My time is limited so I couldn’t possibly install and test them all. I have used Drupal in the past and was less than ecstatic about it. Elgg looks promising as a pure Free as in Free Beer application. I decided to avoid Pligg for the politics involved (Read the comments on pligg.com vs pligg.net and you’ll see what I mean). Although not Free as in Free Beer, Dolphin by boonex.com offers some compelling features such as photo, video, music, dating, classifieds and user blogging.

It was a snap to install, although you need control over permissions as the installer is adamant about them. It is a CSS oriented system so changing colors etc is easy. However, doing anything more than basic color scheme changing requires a lot of nut-cracking. HTML is buried in PHP code so deep you’ll need a ladder to climb back out. This is one element of software design which I deplore. Seems PHP developers just cannot get out of that mindset of putting HTML inside their PHP code. I mean, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Ok, off the soapbox now.

After using Dolphin for about a week in a vanilla install, my natural need for hacking toko over. First up was to get rid of the “dating” focus that Dolphin has and make it a more generic social networking system. I’ll admit, my tendency to dive right into the code is sometimes a bad thing. What I discovered about Dolphin: a lot of customization is available without actually editing code. Case in point. I wanted to remove the “I am a man seeking a woman” default search box and replace it with Google search. I dived right into the code trying to find the search form template. To my amusement, all I really needed to do was use Dolphin’s drag and drop interface to remove the box from the home page, and create my own, custom content block for Search. Yes, I know. RTFM. Like I said, it’s my nature to hack.

So once I laughed that off, I was on to bigger and better hacking. Next up: Replace the Ray video player which displays dating ads on my site. Caveat here folks. Dolphin is adware. Payware. Whatever-ware. The price is cheap enough. $39 for the base ad-free license. Then they get $39 (per year) license for all the cool modules like Video player, Video chat, etc. All told you could spend about $900+ per year in full licenses. That is not bad considering what you get. But I’m all about baking my own cake.

After I conquered the video player hack, I moved on to my next target. Blog feeds. There are no RSS or Atom feeds in Dolphin’s blogs, which I thought a huge shortcoming. So I managed to get Atom feeds up, human and SEO friendly permalinks , as well as feed autodiscovery (this is the part the browsers detect and display a Subscribe to… icon). So now when a user lands on the list of blogs page, they also get a list of feeds they can subscribe to. Of an important side note, Google loves blogs. And blog feeds are the juiciest of content for search engine spiders.

Next on my list of Dolphin hacks are to fix page titles so they reflect the focus of the page content. Case in point, when viewing an article, the title of the page should be the title of the article, not “Articles”. This same problem is displayed in classifieds, blogs, etc. Lots of hacking to do.

Now I come to my quagmire. If I hack Dolphin in its current release, what happens when they release a new version? Well, I’m glad you asked! I use a tool that compares two directories and I can merge their changes into my code, and vice-a-versa. This should help me keep up to date with their changes without losing my own. Now if they had a subversion repository, it would be even easier

All in all, Dolphin is proving to be one social app worth using. Can you recommend any others?