Computer Tips -Tech Info

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 started an automatic upgrade of wordpress in one of the sites hosted in this vps, it hung… so I […]

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 coming in. The search engines were altavista, google, hotbot and a couple others and the directories were yahoo and dmoz. Lot’s […]

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.es and the server gives the correct page depending on the browser localization. It seems as though there was an .htaccess change that I had to […]

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 magnet. Well, it seems there are some tools that automatically submit forms – after all that’s what’s brought us the […]

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. http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ seems to do the job quite well, it generates a Google sitemap xml, compressed xml, and a ror sitemap (I […]

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 control over slow/normal/fast crawl speed) is one of the additions, also it’s possible to tag images for better searching […]

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 want to look at this metatag analyzer. It also looks at the text on the page to give you […]

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 find more information over and control the ways the site is indexed. It’s fairly analogous to the Google Sitemaps feature that’s available in […]

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 […]

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 Turkish hackers over the last week that will be recorded as the biggest mass-web-site-defacement on record… There seems to be a […]