Cuil Shuts Down?

cuil is goneIt appears the one time rising search engine Cuil is offline and not coming back online.

The search engine was released on high hopes to overtake Google. But such an ambitious goal does not come by easily.

Cuil came across to many as overly arrogant immediately claiming they there were better than Google and would soon overtake them… a fool and his search engine are soon parted.

I remember checking them out after the “big” announcement, and maybe visited the site 2 more times since then, but never saw the value.

What are your thoughts on the end of Cuil?

Frugal/Catalyst Theme Review

No more wasting my time searching for the right theme to use. I have found the end-all theme that is now my go-to theme for whichever flavor site I am building.

I am sure many of you follow the same process I would follow when starting a new website.

1. Have an idea for a new site.
2. Install and configure WordPress and install plug-ins.
3. Search for the perfect theme.

Now number 3 would always take lots of web searching, downloading, installing, activating, removing, over and over, no theme ever seemed to be just right.

Frugal OptionsThen I found the Frugal Theme. I found I can really make this theme into any look and feel I want all from within WordPress. Just about every single detail can be changed with a few clicks. It also has SEO built right in (which eliminates the need for SEO).

I have discovered that the more I use and dig into the frugal theme the more powerful it becomes. You will find out that Frugal is actually much much more than just a WordPress theme.

Are you tired of searching for the right theme? Get the Frugal Theme, you will not regret it!

MySQL Query on timestamp using PHP

In this example I had to create a query only to display orders for the last 90 days.

standard timestamp field in MySQLThe orders table is using a standard MySQL timestamp field to store the date of the order. I made timestamp indexed since we will be doing this query against this field.

I figured the easiest way was to only query those 90 days, that way I didn’t have to worry about looking at each row and comparing a date during output. All I had to worry about was creating the right query.

The first line simply is the number of days to go back in the query, in this case the number of days is 90.
The next 2 lines are used to create and format our new date 90 days in the past.
In the query we simply select all records that are newer than our 90 day old date.

$daysback = 90;
$accessdate = strtotime(“-$daysback days”,time());
$mysqldate = date( ‘Y-m-d H:i:s’, $accessdate );

$myquery = “select id,ordernumber,timestamp from tblorders where (timestamp > ‘$mysqldate’);”;

Tasapspider/0.9

Just found this “bot” going crazy on a site that is on a dedicated server, took the entire server offline. This bot looks to be new and from China, so be on the lookout.

Other reports are saying it is ignoring the robots.txt file, so might not be good enough to deny it there.

It was coming from 218.28.29.236

Here are more details about that IP, and what ranges you might want to block.

http://whois.domaintools.com/218.28.29.236

I placed the following in my .htaccess file


order allow,deny
deny from 218.28.
deny from 218.29.
allow from all

Please post a comment if you this bot has hit your site.