Tag Archives: accessibility

“This is him here”: Laura Kuenssberg and the ethics of social linking

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This is him here

This week Twitter got angry.

Again.

It was angry because BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg identified the father of a sick baby who confronted the prime minister as a political activist, embedding one of his tweets in her own.

Then it was angry because people were attacking a journalist for doing her job.

Somewhere between the heated accusations and counter-accusations, however, there was an important lesson to be learned — and a reasonable discussion to be had.

It is a lesson about understanding very different online cultures, about new journalistic practices, and an emerging  dimension of journalistic ethics that few reporters have truly gotten to grips with. Continue reading →

Removing Nofollow on blog links and meta – and invisible comments

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A couple months ago I installed a plugin on the blog that meant search engines would index links in comments: by default WordPress uses ‘nofollow‘ on comments to stop spammers abusing them to boost search engine rankings, but that prevents genuine commenters getting credit for their contributions.

One problem: as one commenter pointed out, the blog as a whole was set to ‘noindex-nofollow’ “which equals a no trespasing sign for search engines for ALL of the site’s links. It’s Google suicide.” Continue reading →

Are your comments invisible? How about your website?

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If your news organisation uses javascript for its comments, or for any other part of the site, you may well be advised to start doing some testing.

Malcolm Coles, the Editor of Which.co.uk, has been highlighting some of the problems with the technology for search engine optimisation and accessibility (the two are often closely related) on his blog. Continue reading →

Listen to this blog’s posts

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So I signed up to automatic podcast generator Odiogo. The result: a podcast feed for all of my posts. Useful for accessibility – and recommended on that basis if nothing else. The automated reading of posts is surprisingly natural. But one big problem: because I use the <more> strip in WordPress to prevent my homepage being dominated by lengthy posts, this also truncates the feed, and so the audio only runs to that point.

UPDATE: Some tips were given below, plus an email from Odiogo themselves as follows:

“some WordPress plugins such as DualFeeds or CopyFeed  create a full RSS feed, including the text after the more tag.

“Please note that these plugins have not been tested by Odiogo – we don’t know if they are compatible with WordPress.com and cannot be held responsible if they cause any issue to your blog.“