Optimize Your Web

After needing much documentation on both installation instructions, I need to reiterate the importance of documentation for both yourself or future readers.  I had a large project that I was completing with a colleague and after having to upgrade, reformat, and reconfigure many machines (around 20-30), I had many programs that had no documentation at all.

Reasons you may not realize why you should document:

-Just because you finally figure something out, does not mean that you will at a later time or that the next person will figure it out. If it’s not already written, write it down, even if it’s a temporary fix. It may turn into the only fix or help you find a permanent solution later with more information or further knowledge.
-Something that may seem simple to you at that time, may not be simple later or to the next person. So if it is not common sense, DOCUMENT!.

And documentation should extend to keep all licenses together and safe. It’s very hard to tell a customer that you cannot help them because they do not have their license with them. And for all types of documentation and licenses, do one thing and keep them protected. I would recommend buying something like a firesafe that they can keep those and extremely important records such as portable media backups of tax information, databases (if you do not have off site storage as well as on site for redundancy). While a fire may be devastating, it may be a breath of fresh air to know that you still have some things safe.

Ever wondered what the purpose of User Agent settings were for?  Well it has changed over the years, and was used to determine what type of browser or service was accessing your website.  Mainly it is used by people to determine what browser their main subscription base is using in order to tailor their website to that viewing.  One thing that I have seen is that some people use a spoofed user agent setting are trying to see things that they only want a website crawler such as Google’s GoogleBot to view.  This may be taking advantage of if they are showing the crawler special files that they may try to SEO optimize in order to get better ranking.

If you are looking to see whether or not the GoogleBot that has visited your site is legit, visit this list to check and see.  Also, if you are looking to tweak your user agent settings (that I mentioned in my “Top Firefox Pluggins (Addons)”) through your Mozilla Firefox, download it here.

Make sure that you use the correctly formatted user agent information, which you can get a huge list here.  For more information, please feel free to contact me with questions or tips.

For those that are constantly reviewing site visitors with Google Analytics (or any web site analyzer), there are a few things you should realize about their measurements.

Avg. Time on Site.
-This is calculated when they first request a page, and then when they request another.  This is not a true indication of the time.  Say if a person wants to read one of your posts (say a really lengthy and informative post, and it fulfills their needs) it doesn’t say actually how long they sat there and read it.  So it counts it as 0 time on your site if they do not click something else on your site.

Bounce Rate:
Many people don’t go to a website to find specific information and while they’re using that information for their intended purpose, do they continue to search your site unless either A) they’re returning to find out what else you wrote or B) complete finished whatever task they needed to accomplish at your site, and was curious about more.

So in conclusion, these are not great indicators of how your site helps people unless you have 20 articles written about similar subjects.  Because there is not a way for them to see (unless the person clicks something after reading the article, which many don’t).  If anyone has a good alternative or way to determine these and other measurements better, please feel free to share with all of us.

Recently, I had to work on some Quickbooks for a client.  One thing I noticed is that there are so many ways to botch a configuration or install if you are going off of someone else’s work.  Regardless, if you are running a database server with Quickbooks, and are installing the Single-Host client on machines, make sure that you have added your folders to the first tab in the Database Manager for Quickbooks, and allowed it to scan.  Once this is done, you should be good.

Another thing you may encounter is a program called Yardi.  If you do, make sure that wherever your files are located (I was lucky enough to have two sets of data for different purposes), write down what users have what access to those files.  In my case, the people trying to access both sets of data had to log into one, then open another database and change the location.  It was not giving them a choice for the data, so you must log on with whatever user has access to the first one you setup and then switch to the second.

If anyone has problems with either application, comment on this article or contact me via the Contact Me form and I’ll see if I have any insights.  Good luck, and make sure you always document.

Many users, such as myself, enjoy the great addons to customize and enhance their internet experience for Mozilla Firefox. Well there’s more than a few add-ons out there and most are housed here. Here is a good list of add-ons that may interest you, especially for web development and design, along with blogging and search engine optimization (SEO).

• Aging Tabs – Makes unused tabs fade with age and highlights the selected tab.
  • Great for people who bog down their system with their endless tabbing and want a quick reference to see where they can free up some memory by closing an old tab.
• Better Gmail - Enhances Gmail with a compilation of user scripts and styles.
  • If you use Gmail and Firefox then you must try this addon and get the most out of your Google mail.
• ColorZilla – Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies.
  • If you do any type of web design, photoshopping, or anything related, this addon will help you quickly grab any color from any picture or site.
• Delicious Bookmarks - Access your bookmarks whenever you go and keep them organized.
  • This is a great addon for anyone who uses delicious bookmarks, which if you bookmark on multiple computers or want to share bookmarks with peers or friends, this is a must.
• Download Statusbar - View and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar.
  • If you are tired of having the default status window, this one is easily customizable to allow small notifications of downloads.
• FireFTP – FTP client.
  • Enough said. Since Firefox does not render FTP connections correctly, this will do it for you.
• IE Tab – Enables you to use the embedded IE engine within Firefox.
  • Great for those sites that were not optimized for Firefox or that require IE. I don’t enjoy those sites, but have this as a little work around. (An example is the stattracker program for Yahoo! Fantasy Sports).
• SEO For Firefox – SEO Information inline with Google and Yahoo! search results.
  • Enabling this addon in the bottom right of your browser and do a search on google. This gives you all sorts of great information about the sites along with a Keyword analyzer.
• User Agent Switcher – Adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser.
  • Can be used to hide your User Agent information that can be see in website analyzers such as Google Analytics. Also, you can pretend to be an indexing bot like GoogleBot and see if you can view some things only GoogleBot is supposed to see!
• Web Developer – Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.
  • You can see more things than you probably want to with this addon, such as css, image properties and lots more.

For those of you who have read my Usenet article, I have a better solution for scouring groups instead of the previously mentioned website.  Try NZBMatrix.com.  I believe it’s a $10 lifetime “donation” which is well worth it.  The other site was like $2/month and now requires an invitation.  I like how quickly NZBMatrix.com’s site responds and the neatness of the entire thing. I have been trying it for the past week or two, and I must say it is very nice. Try it and let me know what you think.

Lately I have been reading Digg a lot. But I have noticed some abuse by some of the posters and really annoying “coincidences” with news. I am a little annoyed with the clicks that seem to be apparent with submitting news on Digg. Why am I annoyed? Because I feel that this does not allow others to share posts and have corrupted what the site’s original purpose. Here are some irregularities and suggestions on how to fix:

• People digg anything their friends shout to them or tell them to digg.
  • This ruins the purpose to digg something you actually think is worthy. I don’t have a problem with people digging their friends posts or shouts, but not strong.
  • Solution: Have algorithms that restrict the number of diggs you can digg a day. Maybe limit diggs when they are shouted, as in only allow 50 diggs even if someone shouts to 2000 friends.
• People digg everything so that people friend/fan them and allow them to shout at them. An example is seen in this post: showing 80 soome-odd digs in 3 minutes which may be from using the script described in this post: About a Digg Script.
  • Solution: Same as in the above post, and also limiting the number of stories someone can digg per day. Maybe restrict this to those that are their friends or however Digg sees fit.
• Stories seem to duplicate with slightly different titles. I have seen several posts recently about the “Rapping of the Atom Machine” or whatever everyone is calling it. This post continually hits the front page. It makes it so front page stories are continually recycled.
  • Have people monitor Digg. Easy as that. Have a moderator, or a few to look at stories, look at abuse from people, and take corrective action.
• The top “X” number of posters control the front page…. Why and how? Is it abuse or legitimate?
  • If you have algorithms in place and moderators in action to limit these, then people won’t have the ability to do abuse the system and get paid for it.  Another option is to make all articles Anonymous until it either hits the front page or is “x” hours/days old.

I assume with the Ads on the site that Digg and it’s creators are getting a good money stream. Why not pay someone to sit at home and monitor Digg? Is it because any story regardless it making Digg money? Well you will soon see a decline in users once they notice these problems.

I for one will continue to read Digg as long as people are noticing the same mistakes and abuse that I notice. A public outcry has already been seen as we can see here calling for the ban of what seems to be an abusive user.

I certainly hope Digg follow the suggestions of the many of users out there, and maybe take my ideas and others and turn Digg back into the Democracy that it was intended to be, otherwise your user base may just shrink while you ignore the public calling for justice.

One main reason that you should require authorization for every comment and trackback/pingback for your blog is this:  If you don’t, spam will get through and that will negatively rank your blog/website.  It even has the possibility to show up your search results on search engines.  I have seen this first hand, and it makes your site look very unprofessional and very spammish.  I would take the extra 2 minutes and look through your comments and approve or mark as spam.  This is minimal effort with great benefits and should be undertaken by any serious blogger or website administrator.  Setup your options so it notifies you of any comment awaiting authorization and keep your blog looking great and appearing professional.

Trying to get the most out of your blog?  Want to inform a lot of XML-RPC site update services of your latest posts?  Well you need to enable a few things in your WordPress wp-admin and then use a long list of sites that have been compiled for your convenience.  But first, you need to have the following updated in your Settings.  Go into Settings -> Writing and look for the following:

To post to WordPress from a desktop blogging client or remote website that uses the Atom Publishing Protocol or one of the XML-RPC publishing interfaces you must enable them below.

Remote Publishing

To post to WordPress from a desktop blogging client or remote website that uses the Atom Publishing Protocol or one of the XML-RPC publishing interfaces you must enable them below.

Then you need to add the list of update sites for XML-RPC to this part further below in the same section.

Update Services

When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services. For more about this, see Update Services on the Codex. Separate multiple service URLs with line breaks.

Here is the list:

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I always check my Askimet Spam on my blog just in case something accidentally get’s marked as spam.  I was checking it a few days ago and ran across a comment that seemed to be pretty decent, the only thing was that the website it was promoting was a spam site full of text-link-ads that obviously is just there for spammers.  This wasn’t what actually made me think twice about it actually being spam.  In the actual text of the coment, there was no links to give it away, but the fact that in the word “I’m” there was a backslash which was probably a mistype in their html code for the spamming of comments.  Anyhow, I learned my lesson and will believe Askimet when I do not know who the commentor is that their filter is probably correct.  Just wanted to give you a little first hand experience with the great work that Askimet does as a spam filter.