The beans of summer

There's still a fair bit of greenery on the rooftop, but the snow peas, bok choy, and spinach are done for the season, and the green beans, peppers, and pai-tsai are starting to come in... but not as quickly as I would like. I think that's going to be a recurring theme on the rooftop garden until I figure out how to provide a little more protection from the sun and a better watering method.

I may also need to find pots with better drainage -- I realized after watching green bean leaves shrivel up and turn yellow/brown and pepper leaves fold up at the edges that I may have been overwatering. 

Anyway, I got enough snow peas to make 2-3 meals. Hopefully I'll get a better yield when I try again this fall. The few peas that we did get were absolutely delicious though so it was worth the time and effort to grow them, I guess. Oh yeah, and it was also a learning experience. 

In late May I pre-sprouted some green bean seeds and then stuck them in the soil. They shot up like nobody's business within just a few days. 

Kicking the Panda: Steps I've taken to try to deal with Google's latest algorithm update

Over the past few months I've made a number of changes to Liliputing and Mobiputing in an effort to recover from a loss of Google search engine traffic following the company's Panda update. Here are some of the things I've done. You can find more details and the back story below.

1. Remove some web pages from Google's search results and cache.
2. Switch from a full text RSS feed to a partial feed to reduce the number of sites automatically posting every article from my web site on another web page.
3. Send DMCA takedown notices to sites that have been scraping my content. 
4. Add "nofollow" attributes to all affiliate links on my web sites.
5. Remove all broken links and fix links that redirect to another page.
6. Use an SEO plugin to block certain web pages from Google.
7. Change image galleries so that instead of opening a new web page with a new URL and very little content, you can now view large images on the same page.
8. Remove the Liliputing Product Database (at least temporarily).