Archive for June, 2005

Always tell people you are a professional killer

By
Andy
 – June 16, 2005Posted in: Uncategorized

It´s my whole new strategy for getting out of doing people favours. Once people find out that you know about websites, the interweb and computers then they will ring you or email you all the time asking all sorts of questions. This is ok if you don´t mind helping your mates etc, but when it gets to people you don´t know that well or friends of friends then it starts to get annoying.

 
The other thing is that they assume you know EVERYTHING about websites, the internet and computers and if you don´t you have to go and find out for them. SO annoying. Oh, and downloading stuff. I´ve got 4meg broadband and a bunch of PCs so the actual downloading doesn´t bother me but I´m not made of blank CDrs people!
 
So, new plan. I´m going to start telling people I´m a professional killer.
 
This way people just assume you´re joking and laugh. You then just quietly squint at them for a uncomfortable few seconds and hopefully they will never mention work again! Sorted!

1and1 doesn’t like Porsches

By
Andy
 – June 13, 2005Posted in: Domains

I´ve been trying to register a domain name thats part of a series and for some reason when I go in and enter it in the 1and1 control panel it just comes up that the domain is not available. I´ve checked the various whois databases and it is available and has been for the last three months that I´ve been trying. I´ve also gone to a few other registrar´s sites and they are quite happy to let me register it but since 1and1´s firewall blocks mysql traffic then I can´t host anywhere else.

 
I tried playing around with the domain name and using different combinations, missing letters out and such, and finally determined that the control panel won´t let me register anything with "porsche" in it. Strange. I´ve also tried it in a number of contracts and accounts but can´t get it to work. So onto the next stage, contact technical support. The general phone line is useless as it seems to be one of those Asian based call centers where the staff don´t actually seeem to know whats going on. The premium support line is better but they refuse to admit that there is a problem! Emailing them just causes the same kind of replies but in an easy to read text form.
 
I´m gonna harrass tech support again to keep me occupied for a bit then gloomily sit here all afternoon thinking up complecated dns senarios to get around someone elses problem.

If anyone needs me…

By
Andy
 – June 13, 2005Posted in: Web Development

… I´ll be in the cupboard having a nervous breakdown.

There´s two main reasons for this. First we launched a new project last week and it seems that some people are having problems with a javascript function or two in the registration process. And of course I´m the only tech support for the moment so I´m getting all the emails and trying to figure out whats going on. I know, this should of been fixed in the testing phase but we´re only small and there´s only so much I can do, so I´m going to have to fix the bits that people seem to be having trouble with and hope the emails stop coming in.

 
The other thing thats causing me stress is Firefox. I think it´s a great browser and there´s my problem. Other people are starting to use it as well, so over the last year the usage stats have shifted from 95% IE to about 70% ish with Firefox taking up nearly 30%. This is fine with me but unfortunately some of our designers didn´t check the layouts of some projects in Firefox and they are a bit ´off´. So I´m slowly going through them and making changes and browser hacks all over the place. Learning a hell of a lot about CSS though.
 
I can´t wait for the weekend and it´s only Monday morning

iPod Shuffle my arse

By
Andy
 – June 10, 2005Posted in: Hardware

I was sitting on the bus this morning for about two hours listening to my iPod Shuffle and after a while I started to notice something. I´ve got about 5 albums on it at the moment and had it on random mode yet it just seemed to be playing a mixture of tracks from only two of the albums. There were other tracks cropping up but it was manly just The Killers and Jem.
 
Considering this is a product whose whole marketing strategy is based on it being a music player that plays the music in a random order, it doesn´t seem to do it very well. Winamp is the same. Its random play mode is a bit iffy. Seriously, how difficult is it to write a bit of software that generates a random playlist. Especially since the iPod logs the amount of times a certain track is played, it shouldn´t be too hard!
 
End of rant…

How Google calculates PR metaphor

By
Andy
 – June 8, 2005Posted in: Web Development

I was trying to explain to my boss how Google calculates its results for certain search engines. Now before everyone starts emailing me saying "Its a secret, you don´t know!", I know that but you can get a good idea of how it works with some research and testing for a few months.
 
Anyway, I came up with quite a good analogy that might help other people trying to get a better idea of how it works. So here goes. Think of a single webpage as an individual person. The most important part of the page from a Google point of view is the page title and the H1 text. Now think of these at that persons opinion of themselves.
 
With me so far? Next. Now think of Google´s results as what the general population thinks about certain search terms. It can be thought that a single person´s opinion doesn´t carry much weight with the general population and this is why you can´t create a single webpage and expect it to get to the top of Google. Bur what about other peoples opinions? If everyone agrees with your opinion and expresses it then the general population will believe that this is the case. This is where other webpages come in.

 
You can think of every other webpage as an individual person as well. Now their opinion of another person can be thought of as the text that makes up a link to another webpage (link text). So to get at the top of Google for a certain search phrase you need a lot of opinions that match your own. In essence, match your H1 and title tags and then get links on as many websites as possible with the same term in the text. Simple!
 
Well, it´s not exactly that simple since you have to take in to account Google´s PR of the pages in question as well as a host of other variables, but it gives you a place to start from…

Finally stopped Apache redirecting to similar file names

By
Andy
 – June 7, 2005Posted in: Linux

I´ve got this membership section for one of the sites that I´ve done. It allows you create a profile along with an image. It also gets displayed on another site on another server that shares the database. Instead of creating two copies of the image on both web servers I just went and linked one to the other.
 
As usual I named the images based on the ID number of the profile in the database. I then noticed a problem with a few of the profiles. Since the images are optional some of them didn´t have one on the server. The problem was that when the profile on the second server checked to see if a profile image existed on the first server, if there wasn´t one but there was a profile ID number that was similar then this image was getting displayed instead.
 
Very strange problem that needs sorting out pronto… I did some checking and by firing a request for the non-existant image with Wget at the server I found out it was giving me a "301 Moved Permenantly" response. I tried looking through some of the server logs and Apache httpd.conf files but couldn´t find out much more.

 
Next step, load up Google and go into research mode. After a couple of hours I found out that it was the Apache module mod_speling which very helpfully (although not in this case) rewrites misspelled URLs. After finding this the solution was simple: just create a .htaccess file in the image directory that contains the line "CheckSpelling off". Sorted.

Reducing the amount of spam I get

By
Andy
 – June 6, 2005Posted in: Email & Spam

I´ve decided I´m going to try and get rid of some more spam before it gets to my inbox. Considering what I do for a living I don´t really get that much spam coming in since one of my two main email addresses is filtered on the mail server. The Outlook spam filter handles a fair amount of other stuff but I still get about 30% of my inbox consisting of junk.
 
Most of the spam is coming in to a catch all address on a domain I´ve had for the longest but since it´s mine and pointed at my server which I have full root access. This means I can do whatever I want with it as far as spam tools go. The server is a good old Linux box with Sendmail and Postfix installed to handle my email requirements so I think I´m gonna start by shoving Spamassassin on it as well. This should hopefully kill a few more junk mails and if not, keep a load of them from my desktop machine anyway.

 
I´m also going to blacklist a range of IP addresses that belong to some foreign countries since I don´t need to communicate with them and they are known to be sources of spam. All I need to do then is convince everyone in the world to install an Antivirus program so their PCs don´t become zombies and start sending me loads of junk.

Awstats killed my server

By
Andy
 – June 6, 2005Posted in: Linux, Web Development

Well I´ve given up on trying to get Awstats working on 1and1 since the bloody thing went and killed my server. I got in on Monday morning and all the sites were down with the old "CGI limits reached, please try again later", which usually means something is gobbling up all the memory.

 
Since I couldn´t do anything as even ssh access was just throwing up errors, I got on to 1and1 support and asked them to find out what the hell was going on. After a couple of minutes on hold the tech guy managed to find out that it was Awstats that wasn´t terminating its threads and so eating up the memory.
 
The tech guy killed all the processes for me and I could then get in and remove Awstats. Since it wasn´t doing what I needed anyway I couldn´t be bothered to go in and try and fix it so getting rid was the best option. That just leaves job number 4,698 for this week: write my own weblog software.

Awstats on 1and1.co.uk is so not worth it

By
Andy
 – June 1, 2005Posted in: Linux

The bog standard logs and the webpages it gets displayed on with 1and1 hosting is pretty crap. Especially when we have up to 1500 domains in one package which all get bundled into the same set of stats. Most of these are just holding pages and I?m not interetsed in them but they do screw up the logs enough.

Couple this with the fact that the domains I am interested in are generally php and mysql driven beasts which don?t actually get included in the access logs. This is because they use the Apache ErrorDocument 404 trick to turn nasty variable ridden urls into nice user-friendly ones, and as such get treated as errors by apache and not logged. Any user agent get told they’re ok by the php script but this doesn?t help with logging.

So I decided to install Awstats which I have used on a single site on my own server and think is quite excellent. I decided to get it up and running before I tried it with the error logs as well. This in itself can be a bit of a pain on 1and1 servers but Ravi?s awstats and 1and1.com tutorial is a good place to start. It?s still not working properly but I?m gonna wait till next week till I have another crack.

I?ll post more when I either get it figured out or give up…

Google reads form elements

By
Andy
 – June 1, 2005Posted in: Web Development

I was just googling myself in the office and came accross a page that I wouldn´t have thought would be in the the SERPs for what I had searched for. Turns out one of the keywords was actually in a select box on a search form.
 
I knew that Google didn´t follow forms to the page they submit to but I thought that it would ignore form elements as well. Turns out they do factor into the algorithym. Guessing just not as high as actual text.

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