Updated: AskApache Search Engine Verify

Updated: AskApache Search Engine Verify

I just updated the AskApache Search Engine Verify Plugin for WordPress. Short and Sweet, it won’t slow down your blog at all, except for the additional crawling of your site by Slurp and Googlebot.

Nov 04, 2007 - Comment »

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The Song from the Ask.com commercial

Ask.com started going after Google with a TV commercial highlighting all the extra content-rich features available in the Ask.com search results.

The commercial is a very effective piece of marketing, and the song is pretty good too!

Nov 02, 2007 - 2 Comments »

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Pen-testing Security Tools

While testing the exploitability of your target and mapping out vulnerabilities it is important to gain access inside the targets defenses so that you can establish an internal foothold like a owned box or switch. This is so you can use a tool to discover the packet-filtering being used, and literally map out the firewall/IDS rules. Needless to say that really provides you with a lot more complete vulnerability assessment to help discover more weak spots in the system.

Nov 02, 2007 - 1 Comment »

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The Diary of An American Witchdoctor

Just wanted some bandwidth-free music for the home page~

Oct 30, 2007 - Comment »

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Updated: WordPress RewriteRules Viewer Plugin

Updated to now also show the type of permalink configured for your blog. Including what type of internal permalinking, pathinfo, mod_rewrite, etc.. Also shows contents of blogs current .htaccess file and provides a link to directly edit.

Oct 23, 2007 - 1 Comment »

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SEO with Robots.txt

Very nice tutorial dealing with the robots.txt file. Shows examples for google and other search engines. Wordpress robots.txt and phpBB robots.txt sample files.

Oct 20, 2007 - 13 Comments »

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Abbr and Acronym examples

Acronym and Abbr examples from the W3C Quality Assurance Site.

Oct 15, 2007 - Comment »

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Compete Search Analytics officially opened to the public! It rocks!

I just received an email (I’m a VIP) from the Compete Search Analytics Team announcing that they are officially open to the public! Normally this would have 0 effect on me, I’m not into SEO tools, but this online resource is incredible!

Oct 10, 2007 - Comment »

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Random Bits, the podcast that gives you an insiders view

I was over at Alex King’s blog today checking out his mobile web plugin for wordpress and I noticed some fresh podcasts from some of the industry’s finest. The feeds are .mp3 and are easy to find and browse on the search-this.com site. They have some pretty nice articles over there as well..

Oct 09, 2007 - 1 Comment »

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Website SEO Score Tool

Check out this free online SEO site-scoring tool. The SEO generated report is simple, neat, and helpful. The main thing I like about it is how it is a stand-alone website, a residual money making machine.

Oct 08, 2007 - 4 Comments »

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CSS Background Image Sprites

Using a CSS Background Image Sprite with the CSS background-position and background-image I can display all these icons: . I can even have them show up anywhere on the page!

Oct 08, 2007 - 2 Comments »

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Getting flash to show up in front of content

I used to have a problem of controlling flash elements on my sites.. On one site we have 6 different flash flv movies that are all the same size and are in the same position on the page. But only 1 is displayed at a time based on what the user wants to watch. So the selected flash movie needs to have the highest stacking order/zIndex.

Oct 07, 2007 - 7 Comments »

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Story by Author of PING for UNIX

Yes, it’s true! I’m the author of ping for UNIX. Ping is a little thousand-line hack that I wrote in an evening which practically everyone seems to know about. :-)

Oct 04, 2007 - Comment »

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Language/Country specific Google Search Engine’s

Google’s Search Engine Hosting Servers automatically provide Internet users all over the world with a “localized” version of the incredible Google Search Engine that we know and love.

Oct 03, 2007 - 3 Comments »

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The REAL Way to Optimize AdSense

Optimizing the position, color, and size of AdSense Ads is confusing. The REAL way to optimize AdSense for clicks and revenue is using variations and measuring the results.

Oct 01, 2007 - 2 Comments »

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If you can crash your daemon, you likely have a security problem

Tons of awesome tips and tricks using netcat. Port redirector, nessus wrapper, capture exploits being sent by vuln scanners, etc. This is very useful for doing stuff like redirecting traffic through your firewall out to other places like web servers and mail hubs, while posing no risk to the firewall machine itself.

Sep 23, 2007 - Comment »

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Apache HTTPD Google CSE

Apache Documentation Google Custom Search Engine is a great place to go looking for mod_rewrite, .htaccess, and other Apache HTTPD related topics.

Sep 22, 2007 - Comment »

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Login to Google AdSense using PHP

Demo php cURL code, that automatically logs into Google AdSense, using cookies and post fields with the POST method.

Sep 22, 2007 - 1 Comment »

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Freshen your Anti-virus, Anti-Rootkits, and Anti-Spyware

I’ve tried 100’s of Anti-virus, Anti-Rootkit, and Anti-Spyware tools over the last 10 years, but it’s always good to re-examine your system’s security every couple of months.

Sep 22, 2007 - Comment »

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WordPress RewriteRules Viewer

Often I am programming a plugin, or modifying my .htaccess rules, or editing a WordPress template file and I get stuck when it comes to how WordPress rewrites url’s internally. This simple plugin displays all the internal WordPress rewrites.

Sep 18, 2007 - 13 Comments »

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Speed Tips: Use Multiple SubDomains

To make your site even faster, serve certain content from different subdomains. The reason this works is amazingly cool!

Sep 17, 2007 - 20 Comments »

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Speed Up Google Analytics with urchin.js

Update: This article is a bit dated, to get the newest and latest Google Analytics Speed Tips, check out the 3 part update about Hosting, Cookie Domains, and JavaScript Loading and Failproofs

Ever notice that sometimes your sites take a while to load all the way because google’s urchin.js file is taking forever? You may recognize this problem when you see something similar to this in your browsers status bar “Transferring data from google-analytics.com…”

Time To Setup?
4 minutes I got tired of seeing that all the time and so I set up an automated cronjob that runs every 12 hours and downloads the latest version from google, and saves it to my website directory, then I reference /urchin.js instead of http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js.. and my site loads a lot faster!
Take a look at the source for this page if you want to see what is going on (look at the bottom)
There are 2 pretty major things that you accomplish by hosting urchin.js locally

You Enable persistant connections
You ensure that the correct 304 Not Modified header is sent back to your site visitors instead of reserving the entire file.

The urch.sh shell script
Create a shell script called urch.sh.. this will be executed every 1/day or 1/wk, whatever you want. The following script removes the local urchin.js, then it wgets the latests version into the local directory.
#!/bin/sh
rm /home/user/websites/askapache.com/z/j/urchin.js
cd /home/user/websites/askapache.com/z/j/
wget http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js
chmod 644 /home/user/websites/askapache.com/z/j/urchin.js
cd ${OLDPWD}
exit 0;
Improved shell script
I realized right away that a more modular shell script would be needed.. I admin like 50+ web-sites and it would be stupid to have to type the same block of code 50 times, wget the same file 50 times, etc.. So this version downloads the urchin.js file into a temporary directory, then it copies it OVER the old file for each directory. So 1 GET request…

Sep 14, 2007 - 11 Comments »

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Speed Tips: Remove Last-Modified Header

If you remove the Last-Modified and ETag header, you will totally eliminate If-Modified-Since and If-None-Match requests and their 304 Not Modified Responses.

Sep 10, 2007 - 6 Comments »

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Speed Tips: Turn Off ETags

By removing the ETag header, you disable caches and browsers from being able to validate files, so they are forced to rely on your Cache-Control and Expires header.

Sep 10, 2007 - 8 Comments »

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Speed Tips: Add Future Expires Headers

A first-time visitor to your page will make several HTTP requests to download all your sites files, but using the Expires header you make those files cacheable. This avoids unnecessary HTTP requests on subsequent page views.

Sep 10, 2007 - 7 Comments »

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Firefox, Firebug, and yslow are REQUIRED

A lot of the past and upcoming articles on AskApache are focused on speeding up a server or website, or just making things more efficient. I’m starting several speed tip articles that require the following 3 programs if you want to follow along, that is… if you can keep up! ;)

Sep 06, 2007 - 1 Comment »

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Wget Trick to Download from Restrictive Sites

Before

After trick
I am often logged in to my servers via SSH, and I need to download a file like a WordPress plugin. I’ve noticed many sites now employ a means of blocking robots like wget from accessing their files. Most of the time they use .htaccess to do this. So a permanent workaround has wget mimick a normal browser.

Sep 06, 2007 - 6 Comments »

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Speed Tips: Turn On Compression

Use the Apache module mod_deflate to compress your static .css and .js files, speeding your site up like crazy!

Sep 05, 2007 - 16 Comments »

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Downloading Multiple Files with Curl Simultaneously

Wouldn’t it be great if you could use php and curl to download multiple files simultaneously using built-in curl functions? You can!

Sep 05, 2007 - 11 Comments »

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AskApache Search Engine Verify

You may not think much about verifying your website with these search engines, but I am of the opinion it is extremely good for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In fact, I read the other day on Google that if you buy a domain with a checkered past that has been punished by the search engines and you want it to be reincluded in the index this is what they recommended. Verify your sites.

Aug 29, 2007 - 17 Comments »

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Alexa Toolbar Add-On for Firefox Works!

This is the 10th anniversary of the Alexa Toolbar, July 17, 1997. Do you remember what the Net looked like back then? Netscape was the most popular browser. AOL had released it’s first Instant Messenger program in Beta. Jodie Foster’s new movie Contact was number one at the box office.

Aug 20, 2007 - Comment »

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Troubleshooting Apache .htaccess Authentication

Apache Web Server users have problems getting Apache Authentication/password-protection in htaccess working, this is a troubleshooting guide to get Password Protection working!

Aug 18, 2007 - 1 Comment »

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Redirect index.php to root

WordPress blogs show the same duplicate content for http://www.askapache.com/index.php and http://www.askapache.com/. If you’ve read about using a robots.txt file for WordPress SEO, than you already understand this setup results in Duplicate Content penalties being levied against your Blog and Web Site by Search Engines.

Aug 09, 2007 - 8 Comments »

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Want to know how to really hack?

An interesting post by a computer hacker explaining how to really hack.

Jul 22, 2007 - 5 Comments »

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Custom Webmaster Shell Environment

Webmasters often use SSH to remotely admin web sites and servers, learn how to make your shell colorful and powerful using my sample .bash_profile and you can be up and running in 30 seconds!

Jul 04, 2007 - Comment »

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Rigging the DreamHost Site of the Month Contest

Since I was disqualified and accused of cheating, which is absolutely false, I decided to go ahead and do the crime I have been punished for. That’s right, I’m going to show YOU how I could have rigged the DHSOTM contest to hopefully make the statement that I absolutely did not cheat and I absolutely want to be re-instated as the winner.

Jul 03, 2007 - Comment »

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Allow AdSense Crawler Access

Google AdSense uses the robots.txt file to optimize Ads displayed on your site for the Mediapartners-Google robot

Jul 03, 2007 - Comment »

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DreamHost Site of The Month is AskApache!

AskApache.com won the contest for May! Thanks to all of you who voted for my site! Even though AskApache won the contest according to the rules, somehow they said I cheated by giving DreamHost too much free publicity and advertising. I love DreamHost!

Jul 02, 2007 - Comment »

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Advanced Google Analytics 404 Error Page

Advanced 404 Not Found Error page usage with Google Analytics. This makes it very easy to diagnose and keep track of 404 Error messages from within google analytics. Enjoy!

Jul 01, 2007 - 2 Comments »

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Multiply your DreamHost Referrals

Learn how to make YOUR DreamHost promo codes work much better for YOU! This is not about promo-codes, this is about a simple method you should implement.

Jul 01, 2007 - 5 Comments »

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