Drinking Fountain Feed
Wow, you know you spend to much time on the internet when you look at the drinking fountain drain and see an RSS feed there…
Some thoughts on TypePad
Being a fan of WordPress for it’s well written, and very active development community for code, plugins, and themes, and also because it is free and open source. I have always been a little mystified why anyone would want to use typepad, because it is missing many of those components listed above.
The big questions for me on Type Pad has always been:
1) Why pay for the right to use blogging software?
2) Why be pour your blogging to a domain you do not own? To me that feels like remodeling a rental house on your own dollar.
So here is the answer:
The major benefit of using a service like Type Pad is ironiclly the same reason as the reasons not to. It comes down to this, if someone is paying a fee to a service to run their blog, then the content is likely going to be higher. All you have to do is look at all the lousy blogs on blogger and blogspot, etc… You are not likely to find nearly the same ratio of quality blogs to spam blogs on a service like TypePad.
Any blog on typepad domain is likely going to get a natural boost for this reason.
WordPress Automatic Update with 1and1
How to make the automatic update work with your WordPress blogs that are hosted on 1and1 shared servers. These are blogs that you set up yourself, not the blog that 1and1 can install for you.
The problem I was having was the update would start, and then just stop after a few seconds.
Then in my wp-content folder I would see a bunch of failed downloads. They were the update zip files with a 0 byte size.
The Solution:
Add the following lines to your .htaccess file in the root directory of your blog.
AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
This will enable PHP version 5 + on your blog and then your update should take off.
The udpate to PHP 5 should also make your blog run a little faster and better.
Now that WP 3.0+ is out, it is a good time to test out the automatic upgrade!
Looking to host with 1and1? Affiliate link 
Musical Notes
How to display musical notes without images. (ASCII)
The quarter note: ♩ which is ♩
The eighth note: ♪ which is ♪
The single bar note: ♫ which is & #9835;
The double bar note: ♬ which is & #9836;
Black Friday Stats
Here is the stats for our e-commerce store that we run. The store just went live in April of this year, so this was the first experience of a “black Friday”, and all that goes with it.
I was very impressed by the traffic spike, and sales increase as well. The sales kept on coming strong starting on Thanksgiving and really all the way through “cyber Monday”. Very fun and exciting. We ended up selling out of many items and getting very low on others.
This shows the traffic traffic increase. Traffic was triple a normal day.
Thus our November sales were the best month yet this year. Sales did really dip in the summer time, but this is somewhat normal for the industry we are in.
Overall, I think it should be called maybe “Black Friday Weekend”, because while traffic was highest on that day, the sales came in consistent throughout the entire weekend. Good stuff.
Avoid Ghost Town Posts
How many times have you seen a post like this, you read the exciting description and get to the video, and hit play and then…
“We’re sorry, this video is no longer available.”
Argg.. frustrating right.
Here is how to avoid this problem on your own blog. Each time you embed a youtube video, open up “Any DVD Converter” (or any similar program), and save the You Tube video as a flash file, and then save it, or upload it into a special folder on your blog. This way if your embedded You Tube video is removed, you can place your own copy on the blog (assuming there are no copyright issues). (Any DVD Converter is a free program, make sure you download the freeware version)
Removing the Generator Tag from WordPress
Before making changes to your theme, always make sure you backup your files.
Within your themes directory is a file called functions.php. Simply add this line to that file between the php tags (ex: under the <?php tag )
remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator');
This will remove the “generator” tag from appearing in the meta head section of your wordpress website.
You will likely also find a generator tag within the theme header file, and it will look something like this:
<meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress <?php bloginfo(‘version’); ?>” /><!– leave this for stats please –>
You can also safely remove these lines also if you’d like.
Why would I want to do this? Well, there is a small security gain to be made, as some malicious scanners will scan accross the web looking for vulnerable or certain versions of WordPress, and it is in your best interest not to broadcast it out.
Get Addicted to Smush It
Smush_it update: Smush_it is now a Yahoo tool and can be found here: www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/
Smush_It will smush a few extra bytes out of your images to make them smaller. In my experience it shaves a little bit off each image, but if you add up a few “k” off each image, it could add up to 20k in size. This could increase your page download speed by just enough seconds to improve your site. The way I see it is that every little thing you can do to speed up your website will benefit the site.
The best way to use smush_it, is with the firefox plugin. This makes it a snap to use, simple go to your page, click the smush_it icon and it will bring up the smush_it page and start fixing up your images.
You can see the results from this site, shaved 13k off the download size without changing any image quality or removing anything from the site. It’s like getting something for free! Note that sometimes it will change your GIF files to PNG, so you might have to change a few file references in your html.
And yes, it’s very addicting!!
Smush_it is by
http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2008/09/30/new-tool-easy-image-optimization-with-smush-it/
and
http://www.phpied.com/smushit-is-a-smash-hit/
How to get your blog indexed in a flash.
So you have a brand new blog. How do you get your blog indexed quickly? One of the easiest steps to take is to submit it to some solid blog directories. One of the best lists is located at:
http://www.toprankblog.com/rss-blog-directories/
I’ve found that getting listed on blogville (blogville.us) will get you indexed very quickly, as you will show up on their “new” page for at least a few days or weeks. Blogville is a free blog directory, you can write a blog title, add a description , and add comma seperated keyword list to your blog listing. Not much is free these days, so be sure and take advantage of all the free listings you can get.
Monitor your Sites
Now that you have your websites up and running it’s time for some essential tasks. One of the most important tasks to do with your website is to monitor it.
How will you know if you website goes down? It could be hours, it could be days, but if you are not able to check it 24 hours a day? The anwser is with a website monitoring program. The program I use and recommend is a simply little application that runs on windows system. This program lets you load all your websites, then will give you either a tray notice, or an email if your site is down, or even if your site is running slow. Website Monitoring
Secure Contact Form to Prevent Spam
If you are looking for a secure and reliable contact form for your website. Please check out
www.dagondesign.com/articles/secure-php-form-mailer-script/
The emphases here is on secure, many times these scripts are terribly exploited by spammers, this one seems to be well done. I use this very form on many sites, and it works fabulously.
Here is a sample screen shot of the contact form.
You can use the “reCAPTCHA” tool, or the script has it’s on method using GD.
Prevent Hotlinking from Specific Sites Only
You want to prevent hot-linking.
But not ALL websites. Sometimes you don’t mind if someone hotlinks from a forum or a review about your product, etc. However there are those that you DO want to block.
You can use the code below and place it into your htaccess file.
I placed the code in the .htaccess file inside my images folder, to just protect that folder, and to keep things straight forward.
If you wish to send a differnt image to the offending website, change the last line to an image that is outside your domain, or in a folder a level above where your .htaccess file is located.
Example: If I placed the code in the .htaccess file inside http://example.com/images, then my “nohotlink.jpg” image should be located http://example.com/nohotlink.jpg (otherwise it will blocked by it’s own rule).
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?ebay\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?ebay\.ca/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?abc\.net/ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|gif|bmp|png)$ http://example.com/nohotlink.jpg [L]
Share your thoughts!