Web Content Management Systems: Poor Choices That Will Cost You

When it comes to web content management system choices, I often see two extremes:

• one is using a "professional-grade" CMS for a mostly static site that has about a dozen pages and is often managed and edited by just one person,
• the other is trying to turn a CMS into a full-blown data management application.

Both are about as practical as:

• driving an armored personnel carrier to a neighborhood grocery store (unless, of course, you live in a war zone) or
• picking raspberries while wearing boxing gloves.

Another Blogger Bug: In order to select an item from your on-line storage, please sign in

In a comment on my previous Blogger-mess-related post, Blogger Error "You have logged out from another location...", Blogger user Miyaka reported another "curious behavior" of the world's most popular blogging platform operated by the world's largest Internet company. Less than two days later, I was experiencing the same problem myself.

I must say that these Blogger glitches are getting really annoying.

The Weakest Link

The other day, I heard this piece about social engineering How One Hack Got to Engineers with Security Clearances by Queena Kim on Marketplace.

There are no eye-opening revelations there, but it is quite interesting in that it shows how human weaknesses (or, rather, the weakness of being human) may be exploited on social networks (including the so-called professional social networks).

Blogger Error: You have logged out from another location...

A couple of hours ago, I was hit by the infamous "You have logged out from another location. Do you want to log in again?" error on Blogger, which, as it turned out, has been known since at least September 2012 (see this "known issue").

Describing Package Tours With Schema.org: Too Much Pain, Too Little Gain... If Any

Since I published some of my (mostly positive at that point) thoughts about structured data embedded in web pages in general and schema.org in particular (see Tour Shopping on the Web: the... Bad and the Ugly and Chicken Thighs, SEO, Structured Data... and More), I have been asked many times by quite a few tour industry professionals whether implementing schema.org mark-up on their sites is something they should consider.

If you want a short answer, it's in the title.

Below is a longer, minimally technical, answer. I may focus on the more technical aspects in another post when and if I have the time.

First, let me explain the following:

In order to test the benefits of schema.org markup for a web site of a small independent tour operator, a real web site was created. Real tours with very detailed itineraries and programs were developed.

The site was run without schema.org markup for about two months, i.e. long enough for it to be fully indexed and start showing consistently in search results.

After that, it was marked up with microdata using schema.org vocabulary and run that way for over five months (it takes a long time for Google to discover and "digest" embedded structured data).

Below are some of the results of the test described as "non-technically" as possible.