I don’t have time to write about the level of attempted extortion and idiocy of Charles Preston and “Verified SEO” so I will tell my story in pictures. He’s my official douchebag of the week. I even included the obligatory hot chick as usual, but this time she’s really a dumb ass, as seen in the video below it.

If you’re wondering about the legitimacy of these goons, see the following:

Clearing The Air on VerifiedSEO.com
Peek a Boo I see you!
Verified SEO Open Challenge
Verified SEO FAIL
Verified SEO Service Is A Scam Run By Charles Preston

In honor of Streko and his Top 20 people who don’t suck a lot, I figured I’d do my own list, and it only has one person on it.

1. This Douchebag Fucktard

In fact, he’s such an enourmous cock waffle that I think I’ll run a contest. $50 Amazon gift certificate to the first person that can correctly identify this person and any one site he it owns. If he wants to play the outing game, then we’ll see how he like it.

And as customary, here is your random hot chick…but you can’t make her bigger, all because of Mr. SEOCallout bitch. Instead, the link goes to the ever cool Dave Snyder. His other site, which makes you wonder, so now you have to click it.

UPDATE: Twitter and Company apparently put the hammer down on this profile. Not sure how, but I’m guessing @Ev read this post and decided it was for the best.

Here is your one and most likely only chance to get the great Thesis theme at a discount. This applies to the first 150 people, so be sure to grab it ASAP! This chick on the left says do it now.

$69.60 for Thesis Personal

$131.20 for Thesis Developer

$61.60 for Developer Upgrade

You must use this code to get the discount - 20D03977D0 (don’t forget this!).

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Discount Thesis Wordpress Theme!

UPDATE: Rae has a great Thesis tutorial covering all the new features (hooks, etc). Check it out (after you go buy it).

Here we are for another year at Pubcon and as much debauchery as i can create. Here is a handy conference schedule. However, the much more important item is the freaking drinking schedule! I usually play it by ear, but I’ve got a couple things on the schedule that usually change anyway so don’t take my word for it, I’m a liar.

DK of Purposeinc and the Fight Club/Poker Tournament has his alcohol consumption schedule planned out to the minute. I’ll be hitting the Wynn and most likely losing again in the poker tournament. However, if the Mute Lion can explain SEO to Rhea and Carolyn again I’d try to stay around for that at least.

Dan Perry from cars.com is holding an In-House event which I’ll be in for the drinks portion (be on time, Jessica Bowman of SEOinhouse.com is buying the first round).

Friday is the original Pubcon portion, which always rocks and I’ll be in town until Saturday afternoon so we can party until the sun rises or you pass out from all the Jägermeister shots.

Everything else is still pretty much open for me so let me know if you want to hook up for some beers, or if you want Streko to buy you a shot. He won the lottery the other day and has all the money he needs.

PS: Whoever can tell me how to use twitter on a Blackberry with no trackball wins at least 3 shots from me.

This might have been the most annoying thing I’ve had to do in a while. As you’re probably well aware, the pesky “category” level that shows up in your category page URL’s was practically impossible to get the hell off. There were several plugins sitting out there and none of them worked quite right. All the ones I found worked to some degree, but there was always some problem that I didn’t like.

You’ve got the Category Base Killer plugin which seemed to work fine at first, but pagination wouldn’t work and apparently there is a problem with having a subcategory or a category with a parent.

There is the Top Level Category plugin, which worked only if you added an extension to your post names. You’d end up with funky looking URLs like /category/post.html/ and that would require redirecting all of your posts. And again pagination didn’t work.

There were a few more custom coding solutions I came across that blew up my blog.

Here is what I did and I’ve fooled around with mine enough to where I think it works right. First some caveats:

1) I’m using the Thesis Wordpress Theme (great theme by the way). I didn’t change any code inside the theme so this shouldn’t matter.

2) I don’t use subcategories or parent categories so I don’t know if that works or not. I also don’t use multiple categories, but I don’t think that matters. I believe it just uses the first one anyway.

3) My permalink structure is set at /%category%/%postname%/ - if yours is different, you’ll probably need to tweak it.

4) This isn’t a plugin (yet, I might get around to doing that but I have never written a plugin before and I wanted to get this out now). This means when you upgrade Wordpress, you have to insert the code again. (Tip: I comment in // $$$ Custom code // where I put in my own stuff so it’s easy to find and fix when Wordpress updates)

So, here is the solution:

1) In wp-includes/category-template.php search for the following line of code:

$catlink = get_option('home') . user_trailingslashit($catlink, 'category');

Just below that, insert the following:

$catlink = str_replace('/category', "", $catlink);

2) In wp-includes/classes.php search for the following block of code:

if ( isset($error) )
$this->query_vars['error'] = $error;

Just below that, insert the following:

if (@$this->query_vars["name"] == "page")
{
$tmp_ar = $this->query_vars;
$this->query_vars = array();
$this->query_vars["paged"] = str_replace("/", "", $tmp_ar["page"]);
$this->query_vars["category_name"] = $tmp_ar["category_name"];
}

3) Finally, in your .htacces file, add the following to redirect your old /category/ URLs to your new ones (if your blog doesn’t reside in the root, you’ll have to tweak it):

RewriteRule ^category/(.+)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

There you have it. I don’t guarantee this will work for you, and if it doesn’t, well bite me because I tried. And just to make this post more interesting, here is a random hot chick with Guitar Hero.