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….
Category: General Site Info
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Whoops!
I have a page that I’ve been working on that gives me direct links to the administration and stat pages for many sites including my own, but also those that I host. It also has links to various and sundry other tools (Googles adsense/adwords/analytics/sitemaps/etc.etc.etc.) as well as other links that I’ve found useful in managing/monitoring the various sites. I accidently uploaded it to the site a while ago (index.html supercedes index.php)… whoops – corrected around 10:30 – sorry about that. I forgot that at one point I had it hosted on the site in a password protected directory and recently chose to keep it on the local machine. I’m not quite sure I’m here this morning now.
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Google search results catching up…
Some time back I complained about the Google indexing of the site after the Big Daddy upgrade. For a good while before Big Daddy, there was usually about a week delay between me posting and there being a full crawl of the posted page which was fairly impressive. Post Big-Daddy the coverage of even previously indexed articles was lousy for a good while. As recent as a week or two ago there were only 900-1100 pages (including feeds which are of arguable value for google to index (maybe I should block those to googlebot?…hmm…) Anyway, I just noticed that they’re up to 1600 pages (still including those rss feeds.) It seems spotty still, but they’ve finally got a post-big daddy article. The inurl feature is still annoyingly buggy though.
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RSS feed to spread the word of software updates
The computer security landscape today is such that pretty much ALL software, whether it’s Operating System, Office Suite, Web browser or device driver is at any given time “the weakest link”. One of my dreams as someone that does IT is “what IF there were an easy way to keep track of updates for software?” In fact, I would LOVE to see some sort of open source, rss based way of distributing news of updates. The way I see it working is as follows… The software writer has an rss feed reserved for product updates (one feed per product possibly?) This isn’t cluttered up with anything else, only things like…. Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.6 – stability update – download link. Nice and simple, so that you could setup your feed reader to check the feeds of software that you use in your situation.
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New site domain www.computerrepairasheville.com
Just by way of information….. I’ve seperated out the www.computerrepairasheville.com and www.ashevillecomputerhelp.com domains now to point to a seperate web site with the main goal of simplifying and clarifying my computer services in the Asheville, NC area. I’ll keep the brief page on this site that gives an overview, but the new computerrepairasheville.com domain will act as the main point of information for those services. On there I’ve tried to put a list of all of the “things I do” although I’m sure I’ve forgotten something.
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Time to play catch up
I’ve been out of town for several days (about 4) and came back to a dying hard drive and a two day project, so…. I’ve not been able to get any updates here for a bit. So, hopefully I can start playing catchup this morning. Although, I likely won’t get through everything that I’ve saved to consider posting until tomorrow. (Updated Mozilla-Firefox will likely be a bit.)
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The Spam fight turns to blogs….
I’ve detailed some of the struggles I had for a bit with FLOODS of comment spam. Details of the issue and a fix which has been rock solid for WordPress can be found in the following posts (reverse chronological order): Update on comment spam storms, trackback spam countermeasures such as akismet and trackback validation, another trackback storm, botnets spreading trackback spam?, Initial trackback storm. To sum up though, I’ve found 2 plugins to make for a rock solid combination here in wordpress. Akismet (which caught 99% or so of trackback spam) and The trackback validator plugin which caught everything else. (99% sounds good, but when you’re getting thousands of attempts a day?)
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Product Reviews
From time to time I’ve done product reviews on this site and I’m getting ready to do a first impression review on something else. I’d like to take a step back though and give you my thoughts on product reviews in general and their value (or lack thereoff…) I usually take product reviews in a magazine with a grain of salt for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is who pays their advertising bills, maybe the editorial board of a publication is fond of a certain product for financial reasons…. also, they usually get the sample for free, so there’s a disconnect in the VALUE assessment of a product…
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Playing catchup..
Last week our Church held annual Vacation Bible School and I am just now catching up on some of the items I’ve been intending to post over that period, so…. today will likely be a fairly active posting day as I clear out some of these tabs I’ve opened over the last week. In many cases – I’m doing roundups – like the Google stories all in one article. Between the VBS and related preparations/trips to pick up last minute supplies, and the one or two issues that came up needing my firsthand presence…. there was simply no time for posting (unless I wanted to do away with those wasted “sleep” hours.)
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Remote tech support with anything – would I do it?
I’ve tried to ask myself if I’d trust someone enough to let them run a remote session on my own desktop to solve a problem. I think the answer is “it depends”. If you think about it, I do tech support for home users quite a bit and they let me come into their homes. If I were weighing someone coming into my house, or onto my computer desktop, I think I’d choose my desktop. …