Sweating to the...documentaries

After watching the season 3 finale of Primeval last week and realizing the series continues to have plot holes large enough to drive a whole... planet through, I decided I needed to exercise my brain a bit more. So this week during my morning workout routine I've been cleaning off the DVR and watching programs I've recorded over the past few years thinking "hmm that sounds like something I might want to watch some day." It's good to remember that TV can actually be a thought provoking medium - especially at a time when it seems like every good new fictional drama or comedy gets almost as soon as it airs.

Monday: Lakshmi and Me

I started off the week with an Independent Lens documentary looking at class differences in modern day India. The filmmaker turns on the maid that has been working in her house for the past 5 years and in the process discovers a lot about her employee and herself and gains a complicated friendship in the process.

Tuesday: Stolen Childhoods 

Filmmakers document the plight of child workers around the globe -- including underage workers on American farms. It's not just a third world problem.

Wendesday: Presumed Guilty 

Two lawyers take cameras into a Mexican prison and courtroom to follow the uphill battle of an inmate to prove his innocence in a murder case -- despite a complete lack of physical evidence. There's a happy ending to this story, if you count spending more than 2 years in prison before being freed happy, but it appears happy ending are the exception rather than the rule.

Thursday: Children of the Amazon


A filmmaker who visited villagers in the Amazon 15 years earlier returns and finds the land, the people, and the way of life largely changed. It's remarkable how quickly things can change. The repercussions of deforestation are many, but this story takes a look at the human toll.

Friday: Philadelphia: The Great Experiment 

Philadelphia businessman and occasional political candidate Sam Katz backed this series looking at Philadelphia's history. The pilot episode aired a while ago, looking at Philadelphia in the 1860s and 1870s. It has a Ken Burns-style documentary feel, but it feels a little disjointed, like the producers are trying to cram as much information as they can into each 25 minute episode rather than telling stories with complete narrative threads.

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 the rooftop than it would be on the ground. It's colder and windier on a roof three floors up than it is on the ground, so it takes a while for plants that normally like March weather to get started... and then when the spring hits the plants get blasted by bright sunlight without much shade. I'll try spinach again in the fall and see if I can do a better job, but it looks like bok choy is a little more tolerant of my rooftoop conditions.

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, the change is good news for honest web publishers and readers alike, since the stated goal of the project is to filter out paid links and "content farms" with high quantity, low quality articles.

Unfortunately a number of web sites got caught in the cross fire, despite publishing gobs of original content and staying away from paid links. It looks like there might be a relatively simple explanation for this: affiliate links.

There's a difference between a web site trying to game Google's search results by purchasing paid links on web sites and bloggers posting a little affiliate code when linking to a product on Amazon or another web site -- especially if it's a link they probably would have posted anyway. After all, why not earn a small commission when someone clicks your link to Amazon and makes a purchase if you were writing an article explaining that a new laptop is available or deeply discounted from the web store anyway?

The problem is that Google's algorithm isn't really able to tell the difference between these two types of links -- not without a little help. That's where the "nofollow" attribute comes in. Basically, by adding rel="nofollow" to a link, you're telling Google to ignore a link when making decisions regarding search results ranking.

In other words, one of the things Google looks for when determining which sites are the most trusted is the number of links to that web site from other web sites. If thousands of sites link to Amazon.com, then Amazon must be a relatively well trusted site. But if your web site is filled with links to Amazon and most of those links include affiliate code, Google might get the idea that you're being paid to promote Amazon and you're linking to the site for that reason, rather than because you trust it. Google might also decide that since you take money to post links, your site might not be all that trustworthy, and you can wave goodbye to traffic from Google.

By adding the nofollow attribute to any paid or affiliate links, you're telling Google to just go ahead and ignore those links, which means you're not being paid to goose anybody's search engine traffic.

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.

I have much higher hopes for the bok choy which is starting to come in nice and strong right now. The snow peas are also starting to flower so I should be able to start harvesting peas in the next week or two.

I've put out a few sweet pepper plants, even though the soil might still be a bit cold for them at night. Two plans are doing pretty well and one is struggling. I've got a few more plants indoors which I might put out after it gets a little warmer outside.

Last weekend we went out in search of strawberries to transplant, only to learn that it's actually quite late in the season to get strawberries started. Still, I did find two plants at the Home Depot which seemed reasonably healthy.They didn't come from an organic nursery, but I transplanted them into a container with pesticide-free soil and I'll be treating them as organic from here on out, so hopefully anything they went through early in life won't affect the crop too much. I just figured I'd like try to get some strawberries into the garden this year, although I might not harvest any fruit until next summer if the little guys look like they need more time to get settled. I might also add some new plants next spring.

Finally, today I started soaking some green beans in hopes of pre-sprouting them. I probably should have started that a little while ago, but I'm hopeful that I can get some sprouts quickly so I can direct seed a few plants outdoors in the same planters as the snow peas (so they should be coming up as the peas are starting to come down) and keep a few indoors in case the outdoor seedlings don't fare so well right away.