The last few days have been an interesting run. There have been many search engine hits to this blog. The hits are primarily from international visitors who have searched for the /advanced_comment_system/. For this search the blog is coming up in the number one position of the Google search results. If this were a more popular keyword there would be huge traffic to the site. As it is, I have seen around 50 visitors within the last 3 or 4 days.

It would be interesting to know what has triggered the interest. Interesting indeed, a web search shows that there is a published exploit for my comment system. Further investigation indicates that I have been compromised, although this appears to be primarily an act of vandalism. I had tried to install a comment system earlier and had problems. I now find that none of the comment boxes on the sites that I have checked are working. It appears that the software can not make connection with the database. I will have to investigate further.

This was not an act of vandalism, after all. In fact, I don’t have any idea what all of the visitors are doing. The database seems to be in good order. The problem was that I had inadvertently changed a password for the database, so the software could not access the database. I had run across an article script that used a database. I had reused a user name and given it a different password, which evidently overwrote the original password. So, It was me shooting myself in the foot, rather than Kurdish bad guys or their adherents.

Between my reading on the subject of SEO and some comments on a forum that I frequent, I came to the conclusion that using an h1 tag for the site name is a waste of a good semantic tag in most cases. The  dilemma being that the site name is too generic and will likely not apply equally and relevantly to all pages. In further reading I ran across an author that felt the same about the semantical use of the h1 tag. From a semantical standpoint it would seem that the h1 tag should more closely align with the page title than the site name.

I had considered dumping the site name into a ‘p’ tag and making some conditional styling statements for a paragraph in the header block. This is easy to implement and seems to work fine. The other author thought of putting the site name in a div with an innovative id like site_name, and applying the styling to the div. This may be a better approach as there is indication in the code as to the purpose of the content of the div.

I had written an article for Selling on Your Website about HTML Semantics, so I implemented the change to the site_name div first on that site. I will probably go through and change this on some other sites now. On some of my sites I will wait for the regular update cycle to make the change. Any new sites will probably follow the new program. I will be watching my traffic analytics to see if I can identify any change in the traffic pattern that could be attributed to the change in philosophy.