Archive: Web Hosting

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 starte…

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…

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…

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 magn…

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…

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 …

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 wan…

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 f…

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 tha…

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 Turkis…

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 incorpora…

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 …

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 a…

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 lif…

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 vulnerabi…

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. …

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 importa…

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 o…

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 t…

Just noticed that for the last (hour?) the main adsense login site has been down with an interesting multi-language error message page. Ads seem to be served still, but the login is offline at the mo…

I see a couple changes mentioned over at the official adsense blog. It looks as though there are new ways to customize search boxes for google adsense. Also it looks like there's more assistance for …

Sendmail is not my favorite MTA. I really prefer Postfix, but... I have to use sendmail in a few situations. I've run a little script on the web server for a good while to monitor the mail queue. I w…

This may not be useful to many people, but I thought it was interesting. If you do web design and use css you'll probably like this... I found this post at leftjustified.net about a neat way to "rese…

In looking at my Google Analytics info.... I checked on the Northcarolinagenealogy.net site's stats and found that it's really dropped since about Friday or Saturday from decent traffic to next to no…

There is a good beginners guide to Search engine optimization up at this site.

How-to forge has what they describe as a copy and paste how-to up on the Perfect setup for Mandriva 2006 to meet the needs of ISP's and hosters. It's copy-paste because they suggest copying the comma…

It still looks like Google Analytics may be adding those that requested to be emailed when signups were available. I've noticed the last couple days the stats are MUCH more recent. It's currently 20:…

How can I say this.... this is one of the worst ideas I think I've heard this week from an ISP. (Maybe in a long time, but I'd have to think on that a few minutes.) An executive at Bellsouth thinks t…

This is part II, click here for part one of the saga... Okay, so I revisit to install Microsoft Office 2003 SP2 and hope that solves it. Somewhere along this time, I had also found a suggestion of re…

This will likely be a multi-part story because it turns out the solution was one of the more obscure things I think I've run into AND I thought it was worth "dumping" everything I found out in the pr…

I've spent some time this evening looking at Google Analytics. (Now the data is being collected.) And I've got to say I'm impressed with the scope of what I'm seeing. First, since last night, more st…

I've just logged back in at 1:11 AM EST, 11/16/05 and am seeing the stats from the 14th come in, some from the 15th. It looks like Google Analytics is starting to catch up. I suspect they've been wor…

Well, I mentioned the release of Google Analytics yesterday which really looks promising. At this hour I can still say it looks promising. I had a funny thought after trying several times yesterday t…

I've just looked and noticed that oswd.org (Open source web design). They currently boast 715 free templates. In their absense several other sites have sprung up to fill the void they had left... ope…

Just a note to mention that I've updated a page that I published a good while back. It's kind of a funny story. I skimmed through the logs and saw that someone got here on a search for how to create …

One of the things that I've really not looked at until lately is the use of open source web templates. I don't know why but I've never really paid much attention to the thought of templates outside o…

Recently I've had an experiment with the way Google crawls a site. I had a client site that had not been spidered in spite of being submitted to Google a good while back. I looked at the site and saw…

Good news on the Wordpress front. A new release has been, well, released. Version 1.5.2 is a bugfix/security fix release. On the heels of an August 10th security advisory. The release announcement is…

If you have a website, you likely will look at your logs from time to time to see just who or how many people are visiting your site. I've certainly looked at a lot of logfiles both for my site and f…

According to the entry for Wordpress 1.x at Secunia.com, there is a "Highly critical" Wordpress vulnerability announced August 10th that affects all 1.x versions including 1.5.1.3 The details are in …

Recently I've consolidated a few domain names that I've acquired to direct to this site, and a few others to direct to another site that I maintain. One of the things that I wondered about after I se…

In the past few days I've been working on an automated backup system for both my site databases and a few others. I thought I'd take a bit to go through what I've done. It's really simple, but I susp…

News.com (cnet) is reporting that Yahoo has surpassed Google in sheer numbers of items indexed in their search engine. Currently Yahoo has 20 billion documents and images, Google claims 11.3 billion.…

I've just read a great article by Eric Wolfram on Google Search optimization. Well, it's probably not a new article it's been around for a while. I saw it referenced at marketingtom.com from February…

According to the Newsforge article, Campsite 2.3 is "the most advanced open-source system for news publishing on the web." It's PHP based and more information can be found at the campware website.

Ok, so we've seen how to password protect directories to keep the web crawlers out, but I don't want to go through that. I want to keep the page open, but I don't want it spidered and indexed by the …

Ok, we've looked at controlling access to directories with .htaccess, but there are other neat tricks we can do that can add a bit of polish to your site. One that I've implemented lately is a custom…

Okay, in an earlier article I was looking at uses of Google that might reveal things you don't want revealed about your website. Maybe a test directory that you don't want to be spidered. I want to s…

One of my pet peeves is web sites that work with only one web browser. (Usually Internet Explorer) and break, sometimes badly with anything else. Recently I ran into this problem at a registrar. When…

Of course, there was a time when delivery of many things relied heavily on the US Postal Service and the blame of a delay could be passed along. I saw an article lately about people using technology …

This is one that comes in handy a lot. Like many things in computing there are a number of ways to accomplish this. My favorite though is one fo the simplest. But first, it's probably worth asking wh…

Google is a search tool which I use literally every day. Sometimes it's multiple times per day. Sometimes I can't imagine how I would function without being able to do a quick google search. There ar…

Ok. I have a bit of time that I can sit down and get a little more detailed on what specifically happened late last week that shut the site down for a couple days. At one point, I had updated the ezc…

I've got all traces of the old cms system off of the server now. (Well there might be a README here or there, but all php scripts from the old CMS are now gone.) At this point I can disclose a bit ab…