Yesterday, I set out to make sure everything was running smoothly with my blog, which included minor changes to theme files as well as a little search engine indexing maintenance. Recently, I had switched over to WordPress and wasn’t really paying attention to what was going on in the search engines. Low and behold (as much as I should have figured this was going to happen), my sitemap was broken and needed to be fixed immediately so search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! can index my site better.

What is a sitemap?

Well, young grasshopper, a sitemap or “site index” is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers (that’s the search engine) or users (that’s you!). What this does is allow search engines to know which pages of your website you want included in search results, the URLs to those pages, and how often they’re updated. More than likely, your website will still be crawled and indexed without the use of a sitemap, but it is an industry standard to have one created for each website as it not only provides a mechanism for search engines to discover more of the content on your site, but also acts as a navigation aid by providing an overview of your website’s content at a single glance.

Websites built in Flash…

Sitemaps are a useful tool for making sites built in Adobe Flash and other non-html languages more searchable. If a website’s navigation is built with Flash, the initial homepage of a site developed in this way will probably be found by search engines. However, the subsequent pages are unlikely to be found without the use of a sitemap.

How can I generate a sitemap?

If you are using WordPress, I suggest using the Google XML Sitemaps plugin by Arne Brachhold. This plugin will generate a sitemap for you to better index your blog. It also supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

If you’re not using WordPress, I suggest using the Sitemap Generator at xml-sitemaps.com. This will crawl through all the pages of your website and create a sitemap that you can upload to your website.

What are the next steps?

I like to use Google Webmaster Tools at google.com. You have to have a Google Account (which is free), submit your website and verify it by including a meta tag in the homepage’s source code. However, once you have been verified as the owner, you can specify the URL of your sitemap and Google will keep it on file to help with their indexing. Additionally, Google Webmaster Tools also displays your top search queries, links to your website, keywords and more.

With the release of WordPress 3.0, some of you may have been excited to hear that you’ll be able to specify your own admin username. I didn’t install a fresh copy of WordPress 3.0, but instead chose to upgrade my current version using the built-in upgrade method. I was also under the assumption that I would be able to go into the settings panel and change my username from “admin” to something more familiar to me. “Admin” is just so.. blah. *insert tongue sticking out motion with wrists unrolling hands toward you* I wanted something interesting like McLovin.. or SexPanther1972.. anything other than “admin”, really.

Alas, I was let down. Boo to you, WordPress. I thought that this would make 3.0 for sure (and it’s such an easy query to run!). No, seriously, look:

UPDATE `wp_users` SET `user_login` = 'new_username' WHERE `user_login` = 'admin';

So, how do I do it?!

• Log into phpMyAdmin (or something similar) to manage your MySQL database.
• Locate and browse the “wp_users” table (this will show the records).
• Locate the entry titled “admin” and click edit.
• In the “user_login” column, change “admin” to your preferred username.

That’s it! After changing my default admin username, I immediately felt better and you probably will too.

As many of you are probably aware, those crazies over at Blizzard update the snot out of the World of Warcraft, a popular online video game for super nerds. Yes, I play this game occasionally. However, today I am going to talk less about me being a nerd and more about cryptic and often misleading error messages, which are being seen more often lately.

As you can probably tell from the above screenshot, there are two things happening. 1) There is breaking news stating that there will be extended maintenance on Thursday and that there will be a period of downtime (a period in which you will not be able to play the game) and 2) We are unable to connect. This message says, and I quote, “Unable to connect. Please try again later. If the problem persists, please contact technical support.” … But why?

I believe that the above-stated error message is simply too vague. Granted, anyone with half a brain can put two and two together and come to the realization that you are probably unable to connect because Blizzard is performing “extended maintenance”. However, this message never appears when they are performing maintenance. Usually, the person is able to log in and view the realm list (that’s sort of like choosing which “world” you want to play in). Long story short, a lot of people are probably wondering wtf is going on, why they can’t connect, is their internet broken, do they need to open firewall ports, etc.

What they didn’t tell you is that they’re temporarily taking their servers offline.

Just then, a very basic, easy-to-implement solution popped into my head. Why didn’t Blizzard just tell everyone that this would probably happen? And what better way to do that than by utilizing the news section of the game launcher? Something like, “Oh, hey guys. Just so you know we’re taking our servers offline and moving them so the game will run better. By the way, you’re probably going to get a connection error. Please don’t freak out and do anything rash like throw your firewall through a window.” If you look at this screenshot, you’ll notice a section titled News. It’s big, it’s orange and you can’t miss it. My guess is that anyone looking for news pertinent to the game would probably look at this screen first, considering it’s displayed every time you launch the game.

But no.. Instead of using this space for actual news, they use this space to try and sell things like mounts, posters, mouse pads and tankards (yes, the kind you drink out of).

Why has Blizzard done this? I don’t know. They do a lot of weird, unexplained things. They make really fun, visually-stunning games. I just don’t think they do a good job of letting everyone know what the hell is going on. :) But hey, that’s what happens when you’re making billions of dollars per year. You come up with vague error messages to confuse your customers.

I’m not usually one to bash products or services but Clear Mobile Internet (“4G Wireless Internet Service with WiMAX“) is the most-frustrating service I’ve ever used in my life, which is saying a lot because I’m constantly being bombarded with new technologies on a daily basis. Our relationship started out really well: A rep contacted me and let me borrow a device to see how it worked and to be perfectly honest… I absolutely loved it. I could use it anywhere. My house, the park, my car, downtown… the bathroom. Anywhere! I canceled my current service and got my own CLEAR wireless modem. But after using it for a while, I’m not having any luck with this thing.

The service worked great for a little over a month. I’d get home, click connect and be blazing all over the internet at lightning fast, 4G speeds. I could download full-length DVD-quality (700MB+) movies in a little under half an hour. Sometimes less than twenty minutes. Which was awesome. I could play World of Warcraft without any lag at all. What did this mean? This meant that I could nerd it up on the train. I could nerd it up in the park. I could nerd it up anywhere I wanted with a really, really good mobile internet connection.

So, what’s the problem?

The wireless modem stopped connecting to the 4G WiMAX network. At first I was like, “You know what, this is probably expected of a company that’s just starting out on a 4G WiMAX.” But it didn’t get any better. After a week (I actually put up with this for seven entire days), I decided to contact someone about it. I called CLEAR and they said everything was working fine on their end, which I know every company says regardless of whether or not there is a problem so naturally I didn’t believe them.

I reinstalled the drivers, I disconnected/reconnected the modem, I went to different locations to figure out if my walls were causing the problem. No dice. Then, out of nowhere, I get a connection. I’m like, “Sweet!! Time to get online!” Wrong. It dropped the connection almost ten seconds after I started surfing. So I just kept clicking the connect button. I mean, I had ten little bubbles and the program said Perfect Signal. Why shouldn’t I be able to connect?

Why I think I couldn’t connect.

I think that CLEAR has over-sold their service. I think that CLEAR promised a lightning fast, 4G network and that there are too many connections in the Chicago area for their technology to handle. Once I’m on the network, I can usually go a little while before being disconnected. However, 95% of the time, I can’t even connect. It goes: 1) Searching for network… 2) Ready to connect! 3) I press connect. 4) Connecting… 5) Searching for network… Over. And over. And over again.

I’m going to give CLEAR another month before I give up on them for good and decide to switch to another internet service provider. I chose them for two reasons: They’re new (I like new technologies) and they’re cheaper than Comcast. The only frustrating thing is that I went from being able to get online any time I wanted (most of the time.. I mean, I did have Comcast and we know how that goes) to never being able to get on. And when I do get on, the latency is so high I want nothing more than to get off my computer!

Boo to you, CLEAR. If you’ve had (or someone you know has had) a horrible CLEAR Mobile Internet experience (or even regular CLEAR Internet), I’d love to hear about it.