Aaron wall reports that DMoz has re-opened its add url or suggest a site feature.

So there you have it.

If you have a site and fancy hanging about chasing them up to see if your site has been accepted you know what to do. Hell, if you really want to, you can go over to their forum (assuming they re-open it) and get flamed by a bunch of arrogant rude feckers who will tell you that they are just volunteers, or tell you that DMoz doesn’t exist for the benefit of webmasters, or tell you that your site is an affiliate, or tell you that your site sucks etc etc blah blah blah.

There was a time when it paid to be in DMoz, maybe there still will be, who cares, I don’t. I don’t need them, they don’t need me. End of. I’ve done perfectly well without them. My life hasn’t been poorer for their not being around to add sites to. In fact its probably been a whole lot richer. I’m with the many other detractors out there who have had an uncomfortable experience or two with the odd self inflated wanker over there. Lord of the flies, power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely and all that stuff. That whole meta super status bollocks set up they have, ran like some 3rd world dictatorship of the proletariat.

I could be wrong of course. They may have had a clearout. Someone somewhere may have had an epithany and screamed jesus, look at what this has become.

See what I really don’t get is towards the end of its usefulness the message people were getting was DMoz doesn’t exist for the benefit of webmasters. Some of its meta editors were more or less saying, don’t submit, our editors will find sites worth adding, we really don’t need or want your submissions. There was this huge anti SEO mindset. People like me were viewed as some kind of sub human low life out to corrupt some jewelled piece of antiquity. If you dared actually question them, then they were on you like a rabid pack of attack wolves. It really wasn’t worth the bother, unless you were a glutton for punishment. You were viewed with suspicion, like you were some kind of virus out to infect the hive, at least, that was my experience.

So why has it re-opened? Why why why? Are things going to be different or something? Are they actually going to get hold of the concept of politeness there? Maybe they’ll make it all a whole lot more transparent. Maybe they’ll set up a system that shows you where you are in the queue. Maybe they’ll introduce proper management systems that get rid of that whole elitist set of bollocks they had there.

Sorry, but the whole thing was dead in the water in my book, its a shame it can’t stay that way. We have the Y! directory, we have a zillion and one other smaller niche directories I’d be happy for it to stay dead. Unless maybe, they were brave and decided to wikitize it, now that could be very interesting indeedy…
P.s Ok, so there are a whole bunch of people who edit there or edited who were perfectly nice good people, Im not saying that all volunteers there were wankers, far from it, just a vocal minority who shall remain nameless.

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I love wordpress, its a great product. I used it recently on a free subdomain of theirs and wrote a few posts. I wasn’t sure I was going to get into this blogging lark so thought it was a handy half way house. I didn’t want to go out and get a domain to put it on, upload the scripts and configure it unless I was really sure that I was going to get in to it.

10 days later I’m kinda hooked. I like spouting off and venting about stuff that pisses me off or interests me or just bemuses/amuses me.

So last night I bit the bullet. I exported all the old posts to the new WP setup here and went out and sourced the various plugins and themes I wanted to use.

I looked through the upgrade options in my robwatts.wordpress.com cp and didn’t see anything on redirection. Saw a little bit about url masking and all that, but nothing on what I wanted, which was a simple “301 this content has been moved permanantly” to where you are at now.

For the curious amongst you that would be

header(“HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”);
header(“Location: http://www.mywebsite.com/”);
exit();

I mailed support too,only to be told that currently, its not a feature they offer or support. I can see why they’d be averse to their users having the capacity to do it themselves. Free wordpress subdomains don’t allow you to insert PHP or javascript.They’d hardly want loads of little spammers running around abusing the trust score of the parent domain for starters.

The odd thing is I would have quite happily have paid for this. I didn’t expect them to do it for nothing. It would have saved me from having to go back over everything ive written and close commenting and put up a link to the new location. I could just delete it too, alas the seo in me just cringes at the resultant loss of link love. Not to mention my huge army of feedburner subscribers, a whole 3 in number oh, and search engine visitors looking for Dirk fuckin Benedict!Mustn’t forget those eh.

I was surprised at the trust and authority conveyed to the wordpress.com domain. I doubt whether any of what I write here will rank for anything for some time. Its a brand new domain, has little to nothing link love too…but, we shall see, of course, I’m not exactly bothered.

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