Google: No Crawl Stats for xidey.wordpress.com

Google Webmaster Tools shows the following results for “Crawl Stats” for my WordPress.com blog:

This seems to be a common problem. It probably has to do with the fact that the site is relatively new, but I’ve been posting for 3+ months now and have well over 100 posts already. We’ll see. In the meantime, I’ve followed this advice to submit my RSS feed as a GWT sitemap, which directly contradicts advice I saw on Internet Duct Tape. We need some Walt Whitman:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Verifying WordPress.com Sites with Google Webmaster Tools

You might recall that I found I had dropped off the Google Blog Search radar about a week ago.  This morning I used one of the common PageRank tools and found that my PageRank was -1!  That can’t be good. 🙂  So I went to the Google Webmaster Tools page and signed up, attempting to learn more information about my recent lack of mojo.  Unfortunately, they asked for a verification method that, at first glance, didn’t seem like it was possible with the hosted WordPress.com solution.  Your choices are to either (a) add a <META> tag to your home page; or (b) add a file — in a specific location — to your website.  Neither seemed possible at first glance with WP.

However, this post was invaluable to me in trying to figure out how to get my WordPress.com website verified with GWT.   Thank you mod_rewrite()!

WordPress.com <code> bug

It turns out that in the hosted WordPress.com solution, if you use the <code> tag you have to make sure that the body of that tag (the stuff between the start and end tag) doesn’t include any blank lines. Otherwise the WP WYSIWYG editor will “trim” the <code> tag to the end of the line immediately preceding the first blank line.

What if you want blank lines for sexy, good-looking code listings? Just add an &nbsp; in place of the blank line, as follows:

private void Foo() { // body of Foo }
 
private void Bar () { // body of Bar }


This will show up as:
private void Foo() { // body of Foo }

private void Bar () { // body of Bar }

Also, if you want to edit your custom CSS and add a border or background-color attribute to the <code> tag you’ll need to make sure to add the style:

display:block;

to your code {} class or else you’ll get those weird inline style effects that look so professional!

WordPress.com Tag Search is Broken

This is funny in a funny-sad way. You can search WordPress.com for tags that are single words, but not multiple words separated by spaces:

• http://wordpress.com/tag/spire returns results.
• http://wordpress.com/tag/viro returns results.
• http://wordpress.com/tag/spire+viro doesn’t return any results.
• http://wordpress.com/tag/spire%20viro doesn’t return any results.

I’m trying to think of a valid reason why. Identifiers can’t have spaces in the WordPress.com backend system? Hello, DOS!