Sorry for the vague title, but there are various thoughts floating around at the moment. The first is a big thanks to the support at Westhost for recovering my VPS over the last weekend. I had started an automatic upgrade of wordpress in one of the sites hosted in this vps, it hung… so I ssh’ed in and found the vps was essentially ruined – it managed to wipe out quite a bit. I’m not sure if it was a coincidence or if the wordpress upgrade was really the culprit, but it managed to destroy quite a bit. The support at westhost though had things back up within 24 hours. It wasn’t just a matter of the site and database getting deleted, but files in /etc were gone (mail configuration hostname resolution wasn’t working, scp wasn’t working…. it was trashed in a bad way.)

Anyway, I’ve still been tinkering with the free morse code mp3 ringtones. In particular I’ve been tinkering with the Text to morse code mp3 generator. I’ve been trying to add utf support. The backend generator does interpret morse for utf characters, I’ve managed to get a way to decode the url encoding if they’re placed in the text box, my big challange at the moment is the file name. I have to truncate the filename so that it’s not too long, but most everything I’ve tried to truncate counts bits instead of characters. Some, even if I tell it to count characters will assume that 1 character=1bit and I wind up with some of the utf characters cut short which gives unusual filename results. In the testing version of the script I’ve just decided to sanitize things by replacing an extended character with an x….

I may spend some time in the coming weeks here giving a peek behind the curtain at some of the scripts I’ve written for that site, or for some of those that I use myself to generate a morse code mp3 from an rss feed for instance. I’m a bit reluctant to get the code of the generator script out there though for concern that I haven’t dotted all the i’s so to speak.

I have noticed in the last few weeks that java updates on windows now clean up old versions of the java runtime. (At LAST.) Java traditionally left it’s old counterparts installed making you go through and manually remove the older version. Why remove the older version you ask? Well, the java runtime engine version can be specified by java code. The default is the most recent, but if someone wanted to do something mischievous, and take advantage of a vulnerability in an older release they could specify that release and if it was installed, then it doesn’t really matter that you’ve updated.

I did notice that it failed to remove something as old as, I think, update 5 of the latest version of the java runtime engine. (Current AFAIK is update 13.) So, it would be worth a check in your control panel/add remove programs to clean out the oldest ones and then in the future it should tidy up on it’s own. (THANK YOU SUN!)

I’ve got ideas for several fairly large pages here – collections of ideas in one place. For quite some time I was pretty fond of the blog post style of entries and for many things that makes sense, but…. there is also a place for collecting lot’s of information on a single topic on a single page so that you’re less likely to “lose anything…” Sometimes I feel like the blog posts are somewhat like a large and jumbled junk drawer and the pages are neat organized boxes with labels telling exactly what is inside.

I should also mention that this site will likely be on the move soon. My webhost provider is in the midst of transitioning away from their current vps model and it sounds as though things will be heading towards more of a shared hosting style setup. This (and many of my other sites) have become complex enough in their demands that I’m thinking I’ll be moving many to a Xen vps hosted environment. I’ve used the morse code ring tones site as a first experiment of my own hosting in that xen environment and among other things I’m blown away by the responsiveness. It will (hopefully) mean a performance boost if things work out right. I haven’t finalized plans yet, but I think that’s the direction I’ll be heading. It looks as though it’s going to be a cost increase for me though as much as 50% more for my overall hosting, so…. I’ll be looking for an overall improvement in speed/responsiveness if that’s the case to at least make it worth spending more.

It seems as though there are a few other notes I was going to write here, but at the moment I can’t recall what they would be….

When I first started building web sites I seemed to have very good “google luck”. I designed pages, published and then submitted to 4-5 search engines and a couple directories and the traffic started coming in. The search engines were altavista, google, hotbot and a couple others and the directories were yahoo and dmoz. Lot’s of things have changed though. Recently submissions have been down to Google, MSN (Live), Yahoo and the Yahoo directory and the DMOZ. The DMOZ has been more and more frustrating in recent years as it seems to take several years to get added. So is that all you can do to get traffic for your site?

NO! At one point in time I thought the idea of submitting to a few dozen obscure directories was pointless. I mean, it takes a half hour to submit to a few of them and you might get one or two visitors out of it. The big traffic comes from yahoo, google, and msn, so why bother with directories? Backlinks.. backlinks? Google indexes web pages everywhere. Yes your content is important, but also the links that POINT to your content. (And the pages they’re on.) So, if your page content is about antique tractors and you don’t have any links you are seen as been relevant to antique tractors, but not very relevant so you likely have a low page rank.

Now let’s say you have the same site and are listed in 20 directories focused on farm equipment, now google sees your site in a new context. It’s more popular and probably deserves a higher page rank. This translates into higher placement in search results.

There are services that charge to submit your site to directories. One that I’ve found that I really like charges just 14 cents per submission. Yes, you read that right 14 cents per submission. (Minimum of about $5 worth of directories.) You pick how many directories you want to be added to, pay and they do the rest. (These are human processed submissions not robot…)

Here’s a link…
to their submission service. The name is DirectoryMaximizer.com

So, that’s one more tool you can use to submit to more directories and hopefully improve your search rankings.

I found this link of plugins for wordpress to aid in multilingual site building. I’ve been experimenting with English/Spanish designs of one site I maintain using plain html (index.html.en index.html.es and the server gives the correct page depending on the browser localization. It seems as though there was an .htaccess change that I had to make as well although I don’t recall off the top of my head. (Maybe I can update if I read through it again.)

I’ve replaced bare email addresses on web page with either an encoded variation of the email or with a contact form to discourage spam scrapers and other automated tools from using it for a spam magnet. Well, it seems there are some tools that automatically submit forms – after all that’s what’s brought us the annoying captcha’s we see everywhere now. (You now those pictures with squiggly letters and numbers that you sometimes have to redo two or three times if you can’t read it correctly.) Well, Sans is talking about some interesting alternatives to the traditional captcha for protecting a form from automated spam bots.

Wordpress has a great plugin available to automatically keep your google sitemap updated, but I’ve done a few static websites in the last few days and just wanted a good, quick, web generated sitemap. http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ seems to do the job quite well, it generates a Google sitemap xml, compressed xml, and a ror sitemap (I hadn’t heard of that yet..) It also generates a text file url-list and a html sitemap.

I just re-visited sitemaps last night to take a look at some of the new tools they’ve rolled out. Google announced that they were adding a few features in the last couple days. Crawl statistics (and control over slow/normal/fast crawl speed) is one of the additions, also it’s possible to tag images for better searching and the number of URL’s read from a sitemap. Nice, I’d LOVE to see them add the pagerank (in google toolbar form) on the page that they show the report of the page with the highest pagerank for the month. By the way, the faster crawl rate is not available for all sites, only if google determines that crawl rate MAY be a factor in getting your pages indexed. The change to faster lasts for 3 months. (Faster crawl rate could put a higher load on your server.) I found that sites with less than 20 pages (give or take) didn’t have the faster crawl option, bigger sites (20+) did have the option. (Rough estimate.)

Meta tags are not as useful as they once were, but…. if you’re still trying to make sure that your description and keywords tags are done right (and match the consistency of the page) you might want to look at this metatag analyzer. It also looks at the text on the page to give you the frequency of keywords.

Yahoo has launched an update to their siteexplorer. Site Explorer is an interface for website operators/designers to log in to yahoo and authenticate their “ownership” over the site sot hat you can find more information over and control the ways the site is indexed. It’s fairly analogous to the Google Sitemaps feature that’s available in Google’s webmaster tools area. It’s good to see search companies letting users “peek behind the curtain” a bit, although I’m still wondering how effective these tools are.

I mean one of the problems int he google sitemaps groups were an impression that signing up with sitemaps and uploading a sitemap hurt the sites ranking in google. Now, this was denied as not possible, but some were convinced. It looks like these tools give more ways of controlling what’s indexed, however they’re not gaurantees of indexing, so…. how useful are they? The ability to see how the search engine sees your pages is interesting. In Google sitemaps they have summaries of words that are seen as keywords for your site. They also show approximately where you show up for certain search terms.

So far, I’ve gone through the authentication process for a number of domains hoping to try out Site Explorer and I’m still waiting for Yahoo to authenticate the sites, so…. maybe I’ll update here when I get a chance to see first hand what options there are in site explorer.

As I said, I mistakenly uploaded a page of links that I use for the main administration across many sites to this domain. Unfortunately, the server preferred using the index.html to the index.php that serves up the USUAL home page. So, for about an hour after my slipup…. the main page for this site showed a page full of links to admin logins/stat monitors, google utilities, etc. etc. (At least I’m not dumb enough to have put in password information.) Anyway…. I thought, how should I protect myself from doing that again? .htaccess is the answer….

Apache has a number of configuration options and many can be specified or over-ridden from your .htaccess file in the folder you want to affect. In this case, here’s what I added….

DirectoryIndex index.php index.html

(Because I ALWAYS want the index.php to take priority over the index.html)….

Now, if only I can make that USB hand that slaps you everytime you do something stupid I’ll be all set. (Seriously, 5v USB power might be enough to use one of those “wavy” hands you used to see in the back of car windows give a spasmic swat towards the hand at the mouse button…. maybe use some sort of motion sensor? or tie it in with the message bus to trigger…. oh nevermind…)

In what feels like a continuation of recent bad news related to major hacks and data losses…..George Ou reports on a BIG hack of GoDaddy hosting customers. There was also a big hack-athon by Turkish hackers over the last week that will be recorded as the biggest mass-web-site-defacement on record… There seems to be a lot of GoDaddy customers hacked by the very same method….

38,500 sites were defaced in a single day by hacker iSKORPiTX who used an automated mechanism to attack what appeared to be an exploit in a sloppy implementation of ASP code (more than 21,000 sites listed here). But when I dug a little deeper (and courtesy of reader Toadlife’s link), it appears that the exact same type of hack by the same hacker using the same exploit may have happened over a year ago to a GoDaddy ASP hosting customer in April of 2005. When I randomly sampled and inspected 40 of the defaced sites in the massive list, nearly everyone one of them were being hosted by GoDaddy hosting services.

It goes on…. he found a user in Lockergnomes forums that had a hacked site and has his correspondance which threw the blame to an unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft’s IIS….

Within one week of signing up for a $10 GoDaddy Deluxe Windows IIS hosting account I noticed a file in an “SSFM” subdirectory on my FTP / website. I did not create the directory or the file. The file itself read “HACKED BY iSKORPiTX” and had a Turkish flag and some other language on it. GoDaddy claimed that the SSFM subdirectory was required by their servers (so I couldn’t just delete it & be done with it) and, in regards to the hack itself, said:
Thank you for contacting Hosting Support.

This email is in regards to the issue that you escalated on xx xxxxx 2005. The ssfm hack is not something we can really defend against. It is a vulnerability in the Microsoft IIS webserving system. As Microsoft uses closed source software, we are dependant on them for a fix to this issue. They have not, as of yet, issued a patch for this vulnerability. Rest assured that your passwords have not been compromised. The attacker does not need these to insert his file into the account as it is done through a hole in the IIS system (and this is the only directory that they would have access to).
If you have any other questions or concerns please feel free to contact our customer support team.
Sincerely,
Advanced Support

A Google search did not reveal anything useful. Anybody know what SSFM is for, or have any more info that could help me shed a light on this? Other than this I have been happy with the company in the brief time I’ve used them.

The kicker is the forum post was from April of 2005 – so the identical hack (to this latest wave) has been in practice for over a year. George talked to GoDaddy and it sounds like he went in circles and is waiting to hear from Microsoft. He has now heard from Microsoft who says that it’s not an ASP flaw… it’ll be interesting to see if this is something in Godaddy’s hosting software, or just sloppy ASP programming as originally claimed….