Over the past few months I’ve made a number of changes to Liliputing and Mobiputing in an effort to recover from a loss of Google search engine traffic following the company’s Panda update. Here are some of the things I’ve done. You can find more details and the back story below. Remove some web pages […]
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Spring harvest
After a very tiny spinach harvest, it was nice to be able to pick a few bok choy leaves and cook them up with dinner last night knowing that there would still be enough more for at least a few additional meals. I’m a little concerned that the growing season appears to be shorter on […]
How to add a “nofollow” attribute to all affiliate links on your WordPress blog
Google recently updates the algorithm it uses to rank web sites. One possible solution for this is to add the “nofollow” attribute to all paid or affiliate links on your web site. If you’re using WordPress there’s an easy way and a hard way to do this. I’ll show you both below. Background In theory, […]
First harvest
The spinach I planted in March never got quite as big as I would have hoped, and this week the plants started to flower so I went ahead and started snipping before things got too far. What you’re looking at is a very tiny bunch of baby spinach. It might be enough for one meal. […]
Snow peas are so clingy… who knew?
The weather is warming up and so are the plants on my rooftop. The snow peas are finally starting to show some spirit and I wandered out to pick up a couple of tomato cages last weekend to give them something to latch onto as they grow. They weren’t quite starting to fall over yet, […]
RIP Download Squad (2005 – 2011)
AOL has decided to shut down popular tech blog Download Squad. The site was launched by Weblogs Inc in 2005. It’s the second time an AOL web site I wrote for has been shuttered, although this time it happened after I left the fold. My first paid blogging gig was with PVR Wire, another Weblogs […]
It’s not easy being green
So it turns out that growing food on the roof of a Philadelphia rowhouse in March may be tougher than I thought. while all the experts agreed that it was time to put out the snow peas, spinach, and some other cold weather seeds and seedlings in March, things got off to a rough start […]
Groupon vs. LivingSocial
After spending the past 10+ years as a radio and online journalist, I’m about to have my work published in print for the first time. Laptop Magazine asked me to research and write an article comparing Groupon and LivingSocial, the two largest daily deals sites. The article will hit newsstands next month, but it’s already […]
Green roof
I was starting to get worried that my entire rooftop garden was going to end up living in a third floor windowsill. While there’s been an awful lot of greenery popping up in indoor seed trays over the past few weeks, up until this morning I hadn’t actually seen anything pop through the soil in […]
Good morning bok choy!
It’s only been a few days since I planted bok choy in a seed tray, but today I found my first three sprouts poking their way through the soil. Of course, when you zoom out, things aren’t quite as exciting. It’ll take a little while before these little guys end up in the stir fry […]
Peppers, spinach and bok choy… oh my!
It may not look like much now, but just you wait. I started a new seed tray with peppers and bok choy today, and seeded some spinach in two long window box style planters on the rooftop. So far I don’t see any movement in the planters with snow peas on the roof, but just […]
It’s been one week since you planted me…
It’s amazing how quickly some plants sprout. It’s been just over a week since I planted scallion and garlic chives in my seed tray, and the onion side is choc full of healthy green sprouts. The garlic chives side of the tray, on the other hand, is a bit of a wasteland. It’s a bit early […]
Traffic
Google changed its algorithm last month in an effort to provide search results that are more useful. Generally the move has been reported as an effort to reduce the number of so-called “content farm” posts that you’ll find in the first page of Google search results. Content farms are basically the sweat shops of the […]
Seedlings
It’s too early to start planning menus, but I have my first vegetable garden success stories today. After soaking my snow peas in water for two days and then sandwiching them between several damp paper towels for two more days, several seeds have started sprouting little tails. Later today I’ll probably take these sprouts up […]
Planting seeds
It’s been a busy day for my little rooftop garden. A friend and I stopped by GreensGrow, an urban farm in North Philadelphia today for a workshop on seed starting. We picked up some very large bags of soil with perlite and vermiculite mixed in, as well as some mushroom compost and then headed down […]
Setting up my rooftop container garden
Last year I grew a couple of sweet pepper plants on the roof. This year I plan to do better, bringing bok choy, snow peas, scallions, green beans and a few other goodies into the mix. It’s still a bit early to put any plants outside, but I’m already starting to prepare my workspace and […]