Computer Tips -Tech Info

Category: Web Hosting

  • The Google Problem, or why I’m starting to use MSN and Yahoo more.

    This weekend has been a bit of an introspective for me on why google is still the primary search engine I use. I know, I’ve been a big “fan(?)” of google for quite some time, I’ve obviously incorporated many of their products into my pages and used Google for 99% of my web searching. In recent months though, I’ve certainly had frustrations from the “site owner” side of the Google relationship. My North Carolina Genealogy site had traditionally been hosted as a subdirectory of averyjparker.com and had always enjoyed the lions share of traffic, so when I gave it it’s own domain, I did a 404 page not found for those following outdated links and I added an automatic 5 second redirect to the northcarolinagenealogy.net page. I soon learned that was a mistake, as the site vanished from Google around the first of December.

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  • A couple interesting online Advertising notes

    I’ve run across a couple of interesting things. The first was linked to from the second one I’ll mention. I know, some time back, I visited a publicly available Google Adsense tool a few months back and at that time found an interesting tool that gave you keyword suggestions based on a term or keyword that you supplied. Interesting and very likely it gave results that you might not have thought of without the tool. However, I don’t recall being able to get quite as much information as it appears they give now…

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  • Search rankings and “where you stand”

    Search engine rankings are one of the concepts that I think is vaguely understood. It’s amazing to me how a subtle change in a series of search terms (or quoting a pair of words) can so drastically alter the results. Let’s say you’re searching for discount shoes, there’s a difference between a search for discount shoes and “discount shoes”… Of course, if you’re hosting your own site…. it’s awfully nice to be able to get an idea of where you turn up in the search results for given terms. The biggest problem is…. most search engines give a chance for you to see if pages on your site are found with the terms, but that doesn’t tell where in the rankings you compare to other sites. The hard way of course, is to type in your search term and go from page to page until you finally encounter your site. This can be painfully tedious though.

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  • Using .htaccess to ALLOW directory browsing

    By default the apache install for most sites now restricts directory browsing. It’s a good idea, you don’t want just ANYTHING to be browsable on a web server, but there comes a time that it makes life easier for a directory (or tree of directories) to be browsable without having to write (copy and paste) links to a bunch of files. Fortunately, .htaccess files can be used for many things and this, of course, is one of them…

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  • WordPress trackback problem FINALLY SOLVED….

    For around 3-4 months now I’ve had a REALLY annoying problem with the wordpress install on this site. Trackbacks suddenly stopped working. Somewhere around my 800th post or so while the WMF vulnerability was circulating (between Christmas and New Years) and I was typing furiously – poof…. suddenly trackbacks stopped going out. (Incoming trackbacks seemed to work just fine…) What’s had me stumped for so long is that I host 2 (now three) other sites off the same domain and I haven’t had a problem with ANY of those sending pingbacks or trackbacks.

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  • Page banned from Google?

    So for the past month and a half I’ve been puzzling over northcarolinagenealogy.net and it’s mysterious sudden disappearance from google. I mean… let’s see, there are a couple hundred posts there. It uses the same template as this and the South Carolina genealogy site do. Nothing really different than the South Carolina Genealogy site (more posts…?) I don’t have any links to “bad neighborhoods” that I can tell over there, but doing a site:northcarolinagenealogy.net search at either google.com or blogsearch.google.com turns up NOTHING. (While similar searches for southcarolinagenealogy.org or averyjparker.com turn up scads of pages, and a November search would show the same for northcarolinagenealgy.net)

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  • Search Engines Submission

    This is what hopefully will be the begining of a series of threads on webhosting, web marketing, etc. The first topic up is search engines submission. (This may take several articles…) It’s important to get your web site up and mostly fleshed out before submitting to search engines. Why? Although many may take some time before they spider your site, it is best to make sure that there is a fair amount of content available for them to spider. Some may actually spider fairly quickly, within minutes initially.

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  • More on WordPress 2.0

    I’m finding a bit more about the upcoming WordPress 2.0 release. I haven’t had time to test the RC in the 5 minutes since the last post, but I have been able to read a few sites. It looks like most of the big changes are “under the hood”, which sounds promising. It sounds as though more interesting extensions might be more easily do-able…

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  • WordPress 2.0 getting close

    I see in the dashboard that the third and (last?) release candidate for WordPress 2.0 is officially out. There is word that the final may come Wednesday or Thursday of this week. I haven’t had much time to see what features may be new… but if possible I may try it out this week. I don’t know of any security related problems with the current version that would require an urgent move.

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